Did most Biden voters really not see it coming?
Are people this naive, this stupid, this gullible, this ignorant, or are they just pretending to be?
I want Biden to succeed. I voted for him. I want Republicans to moderate. I want to lower the temperature. But none of that can or will happen if the president fuels the culture war this aggressively, this crudely, and this soon.https://t.co/N0SlKd4j8g
— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) January 22, 2021
One twitter response:
What part of what he is doing is a surprise to you?
He telegraphed this throughout his campaign.
He is delivering what he promised.
And this will come on a daily basis. Some of it will be noticed, and some will slip under the radar. Nothing Biden (or those in his administration – I’m not going to nitpick right now about who is actually the principal agent here) has done so far has surprised me, and that’s not because I’m some sort of brilliant mind-reader. In fact, it was all obvious. Joe Biden was an unprincipled and mendacious mediocrity in his best days, and his best days are long behind him. The press will support him no matter what, and he knows it. Promises? Schmomises.
Then there are those $2,000 checks that Biden promised the voters of Georgia in order to win the Senate. Sweet. Now that the checks have been discounted to $1400 (after all, Biden doesn’t do math), some people are angry.
I can understand that someone who had been propagandized into hating Trump and thinking he was practically the devil incarnate might have voted for Joe Biden (or just about anyone) instead. What I cannot understand is why such a person would trust anything Biden has said.
Andrew Sullivan is either the worst liar or hopelessly naïve. That can be said of many largely apolitical voters who were successfully propagandized into supporting China Joe. “Trump is evil; Trump is evil, Evil, EVIL!! CNN said so!!! NY Times said so!! We must vote against him!!”
What are you voting for? No idea.
Many of them truly seemed to believe once Trump left we could go back to those halcyon days of about 2009, when America was an idyllic, happy paradise under the benevolent wisdom of light-bearer Obama. Only, of course, it wasn’t, he wasn’t and, in any case, the Democrat party of 2021 would condemn and eschew the Obama of 2009 (or, what he presented himself as, in any case) as an unwoke, right-wing reactionary.
Democrats and their fellow travelers have been very explicit about their plans if they attained power. Xiden and Giggles only offered the thinnest of veneer of ‘moderation’, which should have convinced no one of even average intelligence and awareness. And now, they are putting deeds to their words.
One of my closest friends is openly celebrating all this bullshit. I think it’s becuz he was raised in a conservative Christian home and tried “living right” but his ex-wife completely screwed him over, so he decided his whole life was a lie up to that point and has now gone the complete opposite direction for everything. He’s a very smart man IQ-wise, but he does tend to let his emotions run away with him at times, so… that lack of emotional moderation ability is probably also be a part of it too.
Andrew Sullivan is part of the fake opposition, and has been since at least 2004. He says this stuff to try to convince others. It doesn’t work anymore.
You can’t expect rationality from irrational people. Andrew Sullivan didn’t support Joe Biden because of principles, policies, or even politics. It was class prejudice/anxiety and like most kinds of naked bigotry and fear, it made people like Sullivan simply stop thinking.
Some people voted against Trump because they were gaslighted into doing so. People like Andrew Sullivan gaslighted themselves.
Mike
I’ve been reading some commentary by conservative Christians who are shocked, shocked by Biden’s pro-abortion and transgender EOs. What did they expect? These positions were not secret.
And no conservative, religious or otherwise, should be shocked by Biden’s pushing blatantly racist “diversity” efforts throughout the government. Democrat support for the BLM ideology was open and obvious.
Sully clutches his pearls yet again. Colour me surprised.
This guy’s preferred version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears would be R-Rated and Twisted, so why do we take any account of his political scribblings?
Disingenuous? Brain addled from surfeit of poppers? Just naturally orthogonal to common sense and humanity whenever it really counts? Who knows? Who cares?
When a society becomes too ‘tolerant’, cognitive overload becomes a problem. We simply don’t have time to untangle the utterances of out and proud deviants from first principles every time they, well, deviate.
This is a fellow who once wrote a column in a major publication on how his taking up Testosterone Replacement Therapy upped his Bear Orgy Game.
Sullivan was one of my regular neocon reads in the early 2000s. I never really understood why he switched sides.
After the Iraq War hit some setbacks and the liberal/gay opposition to it solidified, he turned against Bush and the GOP. He clothed his decision in moral language, but his arguments for the Iraq War had been moral too. I got the impression, perhaps mistaken, that it was too painful for him to be at odds with the gay community.
Likewise Sullivan’s enthusiasm for Obama as a Christian, which made little sense beyond Sullivan’s need to believe in Obama.
Sullivan is an intelligent and articulate man, but he seems to use those gifts to reach the conclusions he emotionally desires. He is not alone.
zapped. Wish I hadn’t read that last sentence.
I had a friend from college who was pushing all the anti-Trump crap. Didn’t matter how often he was called on the facts. Never wavered.
Trump was “pure evil”. Based on what????? More bogus anti-Trump crap. Never figured out which came first, pure evil or the TDS talking points.
But from where? The guy I mentioned is educated, traveled, successful small businessman. Where did he run into….whatever…? As far as I can see, there’s nothing Out There to start with.
Now he’s looking at all kinds of crap and having to justify it. I hope he’s not happy with it.
Was it here someone mentioned that the fastest 400 meters in women’s track can be beaten by 300 high school boys? So, from number one to nobody.. How many people think letting trans guys into women’s sports is a good deal for women and girls? Really? You do?
Will we see justification or rationalization after the fact? The benefit to women and girls is….
But YOU VOTED FOR IT.
Does it make me a bad person that I look forward to such opportunities?
Standard disclaimers about some of my best friends being gay, etc.
As far as I could make out, Sullivan flipped around the time that Gay Marriage was the Most Pressing Issue of Our Time.
Happy to be proven wrong, but really that was when I recall thinking “I thought you were a Conservative, or something”. Had long been aware of his orientation before that — it’s not like he ever shuts up about it.
To some degree the ‘Conservativism’ (Honk Honk. The term itself today is to laugh anyway) may have been just his affectation / schtick. But I think another possibility is simply that everyone tends to have some fundamental innate loyalty (-ies) and when push comes to shove, they *will* defect to their *real* side.
^^^ Needless to say that this ‘divided loyalties’ way of looking at individuals and groups has been censored out of the Public Square (again, it is to laugh, O CivNats) these last decades for reasons I couldn’t possibly speculate upon.
Rationalization is a heck of a drug.
I read these articles and things, such as Andrew’s latest, with their descriptions of Trump and I think, “who is this crazy, malevolent person they are describing when they talk about President Trump?”. The anger and disgust they have for him is so profound, bizarre, and out of touch with the reality I experienced over the past four years.
As Scott Adams said, one screen, two movies.
As far as I could make out, Sullivan flipped around the time that Gay Marriage was the Most Pressing Issue of Our Time.
Zaphod:
That’s right, now that you mention it. I didn’t think much about Gay Marriage back then. To the extent I did, I figured it was an unlikely possibility in the short-term.
Got that one wrong.
I am not surprised, either. Except for the quickness. That has surprised me. A very close friend for 55 years was telegraphing to me every month when we got together for dinner that Biden was going to win. I did not believe him as he is a Democrat mover and shaker in this area and a friend of the Newsom family (yes, that Newsom.) He always said, “You’re not seeing what I’m seeing.” When it was all over I realized he was telling me that The Biden was already selected to be President. It wasn’t just idle boasting ‘my guy is can beat up your guy.” He meant, ‘Listen to me, Joe Biden is already the president right now in August.” He saw me on the street where a Trump truck rally was going on. I was there to see an artist friend at his gallery. I haven’t heard from the Democrat friend since that day in August. They say all politics is local. I would add, all local politics is personal.
Does Mr Sullivan write his own stuff anymore?
I don’t follow him but I seem to recall there was a controversy due to interns writing stuff on his behalf.
Another case of Conservative Gays Gone Wild: Matt Drudge. Remember him?
It’s occurred to me that for my sins I’ll likely be reincarnated as an over the top Fruitarian Exhibitionist. If so, hope I’ll have the good sense to stay out of politics and inscribe my name upon the waters of history with a rug gun:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_matYB5rdZA
How about that? There’s such a thing as Rug Guns! Learned this this very morning.
Biden voters fall into several categories:
1. Those who won’t notice
2. Those who pretend it isn’t happening.
3. Those who make excuses
4. Those who rather enjoy the Democratic Party abusing other people.
Sullivan was one of my regular neocon reads in the early 2000s. I never really understood why he switched sides.
It’s a reasonable wager he’s never been on any side. His life is a performance.
Back in 2006 Hugh Hewitt interviewed Sullivan about a book he was publicizing and Sullivan was aggressively defensive to the point of being funny. Sullivan treated every question Hewitt asked as a nefarious, legalistic attack. Sullivan responded by getting angry and going meta.
Later that day Hewitt interviewed James Lileks and they decided to do a parody of the Sullivan interview with Lileks taking Sullivan’s part. It started like this:
_____________________________________________
Hewitt: James, how’s the weather?
Lileks: What kind of a question is that?
Hewitt: Well, you’re in Minnesota; it’s getting cold.
Lileks: This is entirely typical of you, Hugh. I wrote on my blog yesterday that it was cold and you want to turn this into an inquisition about the prevailing meteorological conditions in Minnesota.
Hewitt: But, but … you wrote about it on your blog.
Lileks: How about … let me talk about the weather where you are.
Hewitt: I’m in California, it’s nice. People don’t care about the weather in California. Minnesota weather matters.
Lileks: I think people very much care about the weather. Let me ask you, Are you a meteorologist?
Hewitt: No. Look, you wrote on your blog…
(Behind a pay wall — I made a copy in 2006.)
https://www.hughniverse.com/2006/10/25/jameslileks/
Bauxite @ 9:29 – “Rationalization is a heck of a drug.
Heinlein wrote in his book “Tunnel in the Sky”. “Man is not a rational animal. He is a rationalizing animal”. For some reason that always stuck with me.
https://pangeaprogress.blogspot.com/2014/02/man-is-not-rational-animal-he-is.html
“Reason is poor propaganda.”- Robert Heinlein
Maybe this is why you can’t get past a person’s emotion. They like to think that they are reasonable people but everyone has an ideological blind spot. For many of the elites or elite wanna be’s it was Trump’s personal manner particularly contrasted with the cool urbane Obama. No matter what you do you can not change their mind. As I always say. Change is a process and not a moment.
But as mentioned previously, when they bitch and moan you can say. “YOU voted for it.” And depending on the circumstance you can call them a dummy. I have with a friend of mine who was “shocked” that at a stroke of a pen, men can compete against her daughter for sports scholarships. I didn’t rub it in just stated that was part of the Democratic platform and your personal prejudices got in the way. Now her daughter may have to take out student loans.
I didn’t enjoy doing that but I told her before the election that she was wrong about Trump and needed to look at his record and not his tweets.
Like Carter in 1980 by 2024 you are going to find many people not owning up to their vote for Biden. Too bad we have to suffer along side of them.
They are pretending not to know what they know because it pays them personally, for now; however that parses out.
They are not naive; they are calculating.
If they are stupid, they are nonetheless, cunning.
They are only gullible in the sense that they imagine in their cynical and self-aggrandizing conceit, that their allegiance to “the cause” will inoculate them from ever getting a “bullet to the back of the skull” themselves, when the revolution starts eating its own.
They will sell anyone out – their own parents, siblings, relatives and neighbors – in order to be included in with those who they imagine are slated to everlastingly reap the spoils which supposedly come with being “on the right side of ‘history’ ” as they imagine it to be.
And in that, they are ignorant.
Perhaps the most important thing that you forgot to mention is that they are opportunistic morally labile cowards. They are the people we read about in novels as informers, and quislings, and sycophants having no moral center. The only place they have had in the American consciousness in the recent past was in Hollywood depictions of criminal society.
That was because the character of individual Americans has not really been put to the test distributively since the Civil War, and before that the Revolution.
No child can understand why half the pew sitters in a given congregation are said to be likely to wind up and deserve to be in Hell; if that is, there actually is a God of righteousness and truth.
But, by the time you are middle aged, it has become self-evident, even if you have not yourself darkened the door of a church for 30 years.
^^^ What this man said.
And triply so in a dysfunctional society which rewards defection.
Are people this naive, this stupid, this gullible, this ignorant, or are they just pretending to be? –neo
My take, as I’ve said before in various ways, is that most people are mostly trying to get by, however brave a face they may put on how live their lives. Fitting in with the people around one is only slightly less important than one’s health.
It’s that necessary and it’s largely unconscious. I don’t see it as a matter of being stupid, gullible or pretending.
I had no idea of the damage I was doing to my social life, when I switched from liberal to conservative.
“But none of that can or will happen if the president fuels the culture war this aggressively, this crudely, and this soon.”
So if I read this correctly, it’s OK to fuel a culture war, just not this particular way, on this timetable.
It doesn’t look like anybody’s surprised or particularly displeased, to me, even if the Commentariat is going off on a tangent regarding ‘Buyer’s Remorse’. It looks like Sullivan et. al. are approving of what they voted for, still like the destination, and just wish the driver would go a little slower and smoother.
Every Democrat President, or candidate for President, gets the same fawning treatment until it becomes politically necessary to throw him under the bus. Most, like Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy, remain icons even after the truth gets out. Others, like Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter, end up as nonpersons.
If I were Jill Biden, I’d be keeping an eye on the media’s treatment of VP Harris.
Most people have heard of Stockholm Syndrome, in which hostages come to identify with their captors.
The more general term is “capture bonding.” Throughout human evolution people have been captured by other groups — not just in hostage situations. If the captives were to survive, they had to learn to fit in with their new group quickly.
I say, we are hard-wired to do so. It’s an obvious evolutionary adaptation.
Likewise, it’s important for infants and children to adapt and bond to their families, even if that family is as flat insane as the Manson family.
We can rise above capture bonding with reason, but it’s an uphill battle.
Richard Aubrey,
Quite a few years ago I was watching the Olympics with my kids and there was a particularly exciting women’s 400 meter final. My whole family was excited as was I. After I explained some of the intricacies and difficulties the runner’s were facing during the replay my oldest son asked, “How close would you have been to the winner, Dad?” I replied, “Oh, my best time would have won that race.” He laughed and said, “That’s funny, Dad. No, seriously.” I told him, “I am serious. Most decent sized High Schools have one or two boys that can run that time, but that takes nothing away from what these women have done. They are truly the best in the world and that was an incredible race!”
It is a tragedy that men are taking opportunity, rewards and joy from women athletes.
huxley, zaphod,
When the gay marriage debate reared its head people were always shocked by my reply when asked. “Homosexual marriage?! The government shouldn’t even be involved with heterosexual marriage. Whatever consenting adults do when the lights dim is their own business.”
But, for the 10,000th time, the Republicans threw the Democrats in the Briar Patch and ended up losing yet another cultural battle.
Neo “…this will come on a daily basis. Some of it will be noticed, and some will slip under the radar.”
This has not escaped Tucker Carlson.
He spends 11 minutes on Bidet’s daily transformation of fundamental institutions in the US, from a nearly nuclear armed Iran, hidden US troops to Syria from Day 1, thousands and unknown total numbers of National Guard troops STILL arriving in DC, apparently to support SPLC-Federal led persecution and prosecution of dissent from citizens to freshmen Congresswomen, statehood for DC…. There is so much news that Tucker Carlson in “Democrats mobilize US military to suppress domestic opinions” cannot cover it all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKtwaytU4IE
And then so much news is not being covered by the so-called media….daily.
Buyer’s remorse.. I am reminded of a Venezuelan blogger who, courtesy of getting a STEM doctorate from a US university, often commented on US politics and always in support of Democrats.
Yet, he got upset at certain aspects of Obama’s policies towards Venezuela. He got what he paid for. Anyone who had investigated Obama knew that Obama was not going to line up in opposition to lefty Latin despots. Instead of being angry at Obama, the Venezuelan blogger should have been angry at himself for letting Obama fool him.
neo asks, “Are people this naive, this stupid, this gullible, this ignorant, or are they just pretending to be?”
None of the above. They are willfully blind to it because to face it would place their world view in profound doubt.
“What I cannot understand is why such a person would trust anything Biden has said.”
They don’t trust him but do trust the democrat party because again, to face up to the deceit leads to profound doubt about their world view. No one wants to accept that they’ve been a fool.
A scene from the movie “The Wild Bunch” perfectly encapsulates it;
“Pike: There was a man named Harrigan. Used to have a way of doin’ things. I made him change his ways. A hell of a lot of people, Dutch, just can’t stand to be wrong.
Dutch: Pride.
Pike: And they can’t forget it… that pride… being wrong. Or learn by it”
Re: gay marriage…
Rufus T. Firefly:
In principle I agree that the government shouldn’t be involved in marriage at all.
However, where I turned my corner on gay marriage was realizing that historically marriage is not about L-O-V-E, but children and the interests of the parents and society to make sure children are produced, cared for and grow into responsible adults.
If the majority of gays were getting married to have children and raise them, I’d consider it more favorably. But I’ve lived in San Francisco. Gays are not getting married to have kids. A few, but that’s it. They are not even getting married to be true to each other for the most part.
Of course, heterosexuals aren’t doing a great job at marriage and children these days either.
I’m not saying the government should be involved, but marriage is a bigger deal than two people feeling a special way about each other.
Point & laugh.
And stock up on ammo, ‘cos it isn’t going to get pretty before it gets pretty ugly.
DNW,
You’re painting with far too broad a brush. Patrticularly when you state, “They will sell anyone out – their own parents, siblings, relatives and neighbors – in order to be included in with those who they imagine are slated to everlastingly reap the spoils which supposedly come with being “on the right side of ‘history’ ” as they imagine it to be.”
Since you don’t qualify who ‘they’ are, it’s a categorical statement. Most leftists will throw anyone under the bus who directly or indirectly threatens the agenda, even if inadvertantly.
But most liberals will not sell out anyone for ideological reasons. Perhaps out of human weakness as St. Peter demonstrated when he denied Christ three times. But that is an entirely different motivation than is the ideologically committed leftist.
Rufus T. Firefly,
Re: “Homosexual marriage?! The government shouldn’t even be involved with heterosexual marriage. Whatever consenting adults do when the lights dim is their own business.”
Also too broad a brush. The State has a limited but legitimate interest in marriage. Mainly in regard to children, inheritance and taxation. Nor does what consenting adults do in private have anything to do with moving the institution of marriage from an objective standard (only a man and a woman can naturally produce offspring) to an arbitrary standard.
As I argued back then, the Supreme Court through a deeply flawed ‘interpretation’ of the 14th amendment, saw fit to impose same-sex marriage on America. In doing so, it removed the line of demarcation in whom may marry from the objective to the subjectively arbitrary.
In that, if it is unlawfully discriminatory to ban marriage between two persons of the same-sex, then all other restrictions save that of consent are equally discriminatory.
As, upon what basis can the State now ban a marriage between 3 men and 5 women? How is banning that not also discriminatory under the 14th amendment? As, limiting marriage to any two consenting adults is now also an arbitrary choice, given that procreation is no longer the determining factor?
Thus it legally opened the door to all forms of plural marriage and incestuous marriage between consenting adults. Restrictions upon offspring are arguable but otherwise no objective objection remains.
I also argued and continue to assert that a same-sex marriage cannot by definition provide an opposite sex parental role model for children. And yes, that does posit that there are immutable psychological differences between men and women. Supported by feminists when they assert that men cannot know what its like to live as a woman.
As, upon what basis can the State now ban a marriage between 3 men and 5 women? How is banning that not also discriminatory under the 14th amendment? As, limiting marriage to any two consenting adults is now also an arbitrary choice, given that procreation is no longer the determining factor?
Geoffrey Britain:
Yes! But why stop there?
A friend and I used to joke that the government should have no say in the marriage of a man and his trout.
I’ve already read about a single woman marrying herself and a man marrying his sex doll. Presumably, not legal marriages.
But the night is young.
huxley,
That’s the reply I received nearly all the time. Look where it got you.
Good nutrition is also in the interest of society. Should the government also control what you eat? How about sleep. Sufficient rest makes for a good society. Should the government certify our bed times?
Rufus T. Firefly:
I don’t really have an answer except that it’s complicated. It does seem to me that marriage is a different category from nutrition and sleep.
As to where it got me, I have a nice house and it’s warm.
“Then there are those $2,000 checks that Biden promised the voters of Georgia in order to win the Senate. ” – Neo
In re the Bloomberg post MBunge linked on the Kamala thread:
I think it is amusing that those two “aides” are fighting over whether or not the administration can fulfill “Biden’s” pledge, since he almost certainly was not the one making it.
Apparently, The Aides in Charge of What Biden Says are not quite sure which of them are actually In Charge.
huxley, maybe not for long.
“It looks like Sullivan et. al. are approving of what they voted for, still like the destination, and just wish the driver would go a little slower and smoother.” – Aggie
Obama knew that it wasn’t a good idea to scare the proletariat too soon.
We all remember that he was against same-sex marriage before he was for it, and a host of other things. Lying about his preferences was his standard operating procedure, because he knew he couldn’t get elected in 2008 by being open about his real agenda.
He was a little more open in 2016 (especially on hot mics with Russian officials), but he still dissimulates when necessary, and has tried to nudge the New Democrat Leftists into following the slower, smoother route.
https://nypost.com/2020/12/02/the-squad-fires-at-obama-over-defund-the-police-critique/
https://www.thenewneo.com/2008/06/20/on-campaign-financing-pledge-obama-throws-his-former-self-under-the-bus/
https://libertyunyielding.com/2020/11/28/now-that-he-has-nothing-to-lose-obama-shares-real-opinion-of-jeremiah-wright/
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16808/obama-otherness-collectivist
Amir Taheri
https://www.thenewneo.com/2020/12/03/it-was-always-obvious-that-any-first-term-of-biden-would-be-obamas-third/
Which policies is he controlling, if any?
Do the Biden aides kvetching about the $2000 checks represent Obama, or some other faction?
https://libertyunyielding.com/2020/12/16/obama-discusses-being-behind-the-scenes-string-puller-on-late-show-with-colbert/
Dyer
“No child can understand why half the pew sitters in a given congregation are said to be likely to wind up and deserve to be in Hell; if that is, there actually is a God of righteousness and truth.
But, by the time you are middle aged, it has become self-evident, even if you have not yourself darkened the door of a church for 30 years.” – DNW
If there actually is a God (which I believe to be true), one might argue that the people most likely to end up in hell are the ones sitting in church on Sunday and violating His commandments Monday through Saturday.
A lot of the unchurched can argue they didn’t know what they did was wrong (that works up to a certain point, though I think the line is lower than most of us want to think about), because “where there is no law, there is no transgression.” Romans 4:15
On the other hand, C. S. Lewis observed that there are probably a number of people in those pews who are much better than their neighbors can even imagine.
https://www.cslewis.com/be-careful/
He said this too:
“Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”
“I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell; and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.”
And lots of other things it is well to ponder from time to time.
“I am not surprised, either. Except for the quickness. That has surprised me.” -Indigo Red
I think it is desperation, likely due to several factors, that they may only have a very small window in which to fully operate, and they had better make hay while the sun shines (or, make omelets while they have the eggs, if you prefer).
Sullivan’s tweet says he wants Republicans to moderate, and he wants the temperature to be lowered. Sounds almost reasonable.
So you follow the link to his commentary for more context, and immediately encounter the most vile anti Trump rhetoric that can be imagined. A couple of Art Deco’s Biden voter categories are (1) those who won’t notice and (2) those who pretend it [the horror] isn’t happening. It strikes me that the not noticing and pretending are taking place within people’s psyches about themselves.
Andrew Sullivan has within him a reasonable side and a Luciferian side. These will eventually reconcile, but not necessarily in this life. Pride and a lack of self-reflection make it almost certain he will not get there in this time around. He should hope that he has more lives to work with.
During the “debates” on same-sex marriage, one of the frequent refrains from supporters was “if you don’t want a gay marriage, don’t get one.”
I thought that was rather fatuous at the time, as it glossed over a number of important points, which have been raised again in this thread.
However, I point out that conservatives never use that kind of argument against leftist policies; or, at least not effectively.
“If you don’t want a scary gun, don’t get one.”
“If you don’t like my Tweets, don’t read them.”
“If you don’t like the nativity at the courthouse, don’t look at it.”
“If you don’t like The Pledge, don’t say it.”
Another case of double standards: “I don’t like your same-sex marriage, so you can’t have one” is not okay; but “I don’t like your gun, so you can’t have one” is just fine.
Bonus points for spotting the rhetorical flaw in my argument.
“In principle I agree that the government shouldn’t be involved in marriage at all.
However, where I turned my corner on gay marriage was realizing that historically marriage is not about L-O-V-E, but children and the interests of the parents and society to make sure children are produced, cared for and grow into responsible adults.” – huxley
I was asked to give a talk in church yesterday (Sunday) about that very topic.
My primary reference was “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.”
It’s kind of long, but it covers far more than just the temporal aspects of marriage — because it really is a much bigger deal “than two people feeling a special way about each other,” and explains why the LDS Church is not going to yield on the doctrine of marriage: it has too much eternal significance for us.
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/the-family-a-proclamation-to-the-world/the-family-a-proclamation-to-the-world?lang=eng
Andrew “Obsessed with Palin’s Uterus” Sullivan? No one should take anything he writes seriously. He’s been a clown for years.
” Joe Biden was an unprincipled and mendacious mediocrity in his best days, and his best days are long behind him.”
That is a brilliant line. Thank you.
Most people did not believe it. That’s why Joe Biden LOST.
The fact that he cheated is a different topic.
Businesses never had to plywood their windows and spray paint “Deplorable Lives Matter” for fear of getting the torch from Trump Supporters. Proud Boys never burned down the local Bed, Bath, & Beyond.
When you don’t need actual voters to get elected you don’t need to worry about what actual voters think
Unexpectedly of course
Why do so many buy into the Orange Man Bad narrative?
They have been led to believe that Nice People don’t govern with the anger and mocking – in nearly all cases, a righteous anger that justified the mocking, the way Elijah mocked the 400 prophets of Baal in I Kings 18 – Trump extended towards the self-righteous busybodies who oppose him.
They have been led to believe that one must always conduct themselves as a “statesman”, even as other Nice People were/are leading this nation off a cliff while hiding behind the “statesmen” perception … for such as these, a facade for their own self-righteous desire to impose their will upon us, coercively if necessary.
Those who internalized the Orange Man Bad narrative thought that supporting Trump reflected badly on their character … that they wouldn’t be seen as Nice People themselves. And they saw that as more of a threat, than the trampling upon our liberty and prosperity perpetrated by the Nice People.
Bad judgment, on their part … potentially fatal to this nation.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE? Short of secession, what is needed is a wide-ranging nullification movement!
Not just of “federal” actions but of “judicial” actions, too. The Left has long practiced this.
We can too, and more justly and with greater depth, given our geographic and numerical dominance.
Discussion here at American Thinker, by Selwyn Duke
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/02/the_fight_that_lies_between_status_quo_and_secession.html
Sadly, we see the vast corruption through all local, state and federal governments thanks to unions and civil service rules. Schools not likely to open soon. No free speech. No rule of law. War on religions. Massive purging society of any and all conservatives because the leftists do not agree with them.
A government by politicians and only for politicians working hard to destroy America.
There is rationalization. The folks I know who bought this stuff were probably not unaware of some of the dem platform but thought MEAN TWEETS was the most important issue of our time. Why were they that stupid? I have no idea.
So, now we are rid of BadOrangeman–officially, at least–and sliming him won’t affect his actions as president and so…less urgency.
What about oil field jobs? ENVIRONMENT! They were rotten people, anyway, fouling Mother Gaia or something.
I have no idea directly, but it was said that the Kapos in the German camps were particularly brutal. Maybe to demonstrate their usefulness to the masters. Maybe to survive. Maybe because they were jerks to start with. Maybe because hate was how they emoted away their guilt and shame.
What will the gullible do about the victims of their votes? “They deserve it….”, whatever “it” is and who “they” are. Does anybody envision any amount of sympathy from Biden voters for the victims of Biden’s policies which Biden’s voters voted for?
What I don’t understand – and never have – is why anyone on the right ever took Andrew Sullivan seriously…. Oh, he was something of a ‘clever’ lad with an RP accent who mouthed some ‘neocon’ thoughts, but having had experience with clever Brits over the years, I was skeptical. Whenever I heard him or saw him, even in his conservative phase, I was reminded of nothing so much as Gilbert and Sullivan’s character ‘Bunthorne’ in Patience, who was a caricature of Oscar Wilde. Sullivan’s hyper-masculinity always struck me as a modern version of the aesthete Wilde: the former the antithesis of the pigeon-chested men of modern Britain where the latter was the antithesis of public school ‘Playing Fields of Eton’ / Tom Brown’s School Days’ masculinity of the 19th century.
Andrew is getting barebacked by Biden.
Now, now… it’s my job to lurk and judiciously lower the tone as the spirit moves me
You’ve done gone set the bar so low I don’t think I can limbo dance under it now.
I had a friend from college who was pushing all the anti-Trump crap. Didn’t matter how often he was called on the facts. Never wavered.
Trump was “pure evil”. Based on what????? More bogus anti-Trump crap. Never figured out which came first, pure evil or the TDS talking points.
But from where? The guy I mentioned is educated, traveled, successful small businessman. Where did he run into….whatever…? As far as I can see, there’s nothing Out There to start with.
Now he’s looking at all kinds of crap and having to justify it. I hope he’s not happy with it.
******************
I had a friend from high school in the same leaky boat. HATED Trump before he was elected. Granted, Trump had shady business practices, but what New York/New Jersey real estate developer doesn’t? My statement was to the effect that the Clintons were far worse than a brash non-politician could ever be.
Left Facebook in 2016 or 2017 so I’ve lost touch with him, but I hope his TDS is biting him good and hard in the @ss right now.
AesopFan,
Thanks for the C.S. Lewis analogy. I had not heard that and it has given me something to think about.
Regarding your suggestion for a form of argument with those who want to restrict rights; I use that all the time. It’s a fundamental quality I don’t understand about those who wish to restrict rights. I know they don’t want me picking and choosing what things they can do, and not do, own or not own. Yet they are intent on restricting others.
Don’t believe any of this matters until the whole enactment of these EO’s have settled in. I know where this is headed. Just waiting to see how they spin the resulting disaster …
Geoffrey Britain, huxley, AesopFan, et alia…
Sure heterosexual marriage is the backbone of all society because only heterosexual couples can produce offspring and no offspring = no society. But our society has plenty of laws and structures around protecting children, inheritance, powers of attorney and other “civil union” stuff.
It’s impossible to govern marriage without governing love, and the government has no place there. If your argument is that the government should promote heterosexual, and only heterosexual relationships because only they can result in children and the government needs children (to grow into tax paying adults), well…
Does that mean the government can force childless heterosexual couples to have children? To attempt to conceive? Should we have couples report to government bureaucrats who quiz them on how and how often they attempt to reproduce? Should we have them all make an oath (as my wife and I did in our Catholic service) that they will all welcome children freely? Should marriages between heterosexual couples who do not want children be forbidden?
I can do this for a long time, it’s such a slippery slope. The reason I can cite ridiculous scenario upon ridiculous scenario is because government has no place in romance in a society of free men and women.
Marriage for my wife and I meant a ceremony sanctioned by a Catholic Priest. We are married “’til death do us part.” LDS couples are sealed even beyond the grave. I know wonderful couples who had no religious component to their marriages. And I know a homosexual couple married in a Christian church who are a more loving couple, and better assets to society, than many heterosexual couples I know. C’est la amour.
When you try to shoehorn a role for government that shouldn’t exist; a restriction on natural rights, you start down a path that leads to government sanctioned homosexual marriage, trans marriage, polygamy… Keep government out of it. There are laws that protect children, no matter who their parents are. There are laws that deal with jointly held possessions and legal decisions when a partner in a contract is incapacitated. There are laws that protect adults who are being abused by a romantic partner. There should not be laws governing how many adults of whatever genders can cohabitate.
In other words, according to that theory, much of humanity is bred by nature (or their ancestors’ choices) to be slavish, acquiesent, petty, unscrupulous, unprincipled, and basically unfree. Canadians, basically.
Yeah, that might just about cover it. LOL Hell of a population to try and maintain a constitutional polity with.
I used to say that a progressive has as much use for freedom as a dog has for a fiddle. I stopped saying it because I thought it was cruel and repetitive, not because I thought that it was untrue.
Whether it is the result of an environmental filtration process resulting in swaths of humanity being descended from generations of war losers and the conquered, or some other phenomenon, the swarm seeking trait seems strong in many. Some even proudly declare their allegiance to it after a fashion. How far they actually imagine themselves as members of the social “swarms” they refer to, is anyone’s guess. But the core notion analogizing human moral action to insect life does not seem embarassing or off-putting to them.
@DNW:
If you can stand to lose all comforting happy thoughts about Humanity and plunge yourself into the Black-pilled worlds of Evolutionary Biology and Psychology.. Well there’s this Ed Dutton gentleman on YouTube:)
Precisely zero people alive today are not descended from hundreds of generations of women who did not immediately and without too much regret cleave to the men from next valley over tribe who had just slaughtered said women’s children and menfolk in the preceding half hour.
Vastly more generations of this mode of sexual selection imprinting upon our genome than the blink of an eye that is 10K years of ‘Civilization’.
Has Andrew Sullivan solved the mystery of Bristol Palin’s uterus yet?
He thought it was bad before. Wait til he stumbles across my latest.
The institution of marriage in our culture comes in the form of a justiciable contract. The reason the contract is public and rises to the level of social notice – and thus the theoretical obligation of social peers to witness and judge – is that the natural couplings of male and female produce offspring which must be dealt with by somebody. The problem of feral bastard children for whom no one seems responsible is notionally dealt with by tying them to the parents. The surrounding society is also put on notice that the parties to the marriage now have a sexual exclusivity contract. It matters … unless you live in trees and eat fruit that just hangs for the taking, amd it never grows cold.
In other words, marriage does not exist to celebrate some moronic pair’s love, but is in a real sense imposed from without and upon those who pair bond, in order to regularize the relationship; and, by assiging responsibility for the fallout to the parties directly involved, lessens the burden on everyone else having to deal with them.
On tthe other hand, who could possibly give a shit, or be expected to take a juror’s [citizen”s] interest what a queen and catamite do to or with each other as long as it is out of sight and mind. Or to concern themselves with who gets the “couple’s” pets when they split up, or which dies under a bridge or with splinters or disease in its bowels.
Of course, in a society composed of nihilists, this simple purpose will be lost sight of for various reasons having to do with the outside parties’ interests in gaining for themselves what appear to be the social recognition, affirmations, privileges, and status advantages that build up over time and accrue to real pairs having such a contract.
Hetersexual unions produce consequences that are worthy of the protection of contract, social recognition, and regularization. Buggers buggering buggers? No.
Jack:
“If I were Jill Biden, I’d be keeping an eye on the media’s treatment of VP Harris.”
That’s DOCTOR Jill Biden. Jeez…
This was obvious to any sane human. The dems are organized and all in on the destruction ot the Republic. The gop is also in on it. As for biden voters, computers don’t care.
“the American people are stupid and will support anything that sounds good.” – Joe Biden (Biden evidently “bellowed” this at Union lobbyist Stephen Silbiger back in 1987)
@ Zaphod,
I do not know Dutton. But I was pretty familiar with Cosmides and Tooby.
As you stipulate that you are excluding the last 10 thousand years of human culture, there is probably no point in taking issue with what seems to be casually hyperbolic language anyway.
But when it comes to those eras in which there are at least protohistorical or good archeological and recoverable genetic evidence, assumptions concerning the behavioral fungibility of our various ancsstors seems to be less justified.
Changes, profound and life altering evolutionary and probably behavioral changes have taken place in human populations relatively recently. You know this. You can drink milk I presume …
As far as the taking of female captives goes, while Iceland may have a Celtic mother and a Scandanavian father, the fate of some of the first farmer immigrant populations in Europe when encountering the supposed hunter gatherers seems to have resulted in complete genocide in some regions. Whoever slaughtered the farmer villagers, was not taking the females captive … or so it provisionally appears.
But the extent to which neolithic WHG or the midfle eastern farmer lineages survive in modern Europe is so far as I know, not completely settled. Europe after the last ice ahe but before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans is a particularly fascinating subject.
And then, there is this:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/127/text?format=xml
I don’t suppose the above can pass without substantial modification, or escape eventual overturn if passed (unless SCOTUS gets packed, which I still believe quite possible).
However, if it gets close to passage in present form, or if some insufficiently defanged version is passed, I fear that’s the last straw. The whole of the law-abiding firearm-owner community sees things like this as the prelude to Kristallnacht.
I love how Sullivan thinks that government healthcare and pandering to the “climate change” insanity is “sensible, center-left” policy, but the rest is just a bridge too far!
I hadn’t been aware of that $2000 promise with respect to the Georgia election. If it got cut down afterward to $1400, does that mean that essentially, the Marionette bought a pliant Senate for $600 a vote? Wow, that sounds like a pretty good deal. Maybe he’s a better used-car salesman than I thought. How many hopes and dreams have been born on a dealership parking lot, then been cruelly slaughtered in the manager’s office later that day….
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AesopFan
Your presentation is exactly why government has no business in the business of approving of and licensing any marriage of any sort.
For religionists it’s a matter of _your_ belief and should be regulated by and as your religion dictates. For all others it should be a contractual arrangement that can be registered with government as a binding contract and nothing else.
As to government has a vital interest in marriage, cod swallop. Government has no vital interest in anything just as it has no rights. Government has the powers we grant it which should never extend into trampling individuals rights.
Everyone has the right to go to hell in their own way or be saved by their own lights so long as they are not trampling on anyone else.
And please save me from the, “society will break down and burn to the ground”. If you really feel that society cannot survive without a powerful government to control individuals then may your chains rest lightly upon you.
Ah, I see R.T. Firefly is another one who has fallen prey to the clever deception the gay marriage movement pulled on society. I became aware of this a few years back reading another blog’s comments discussion about gay marriage. One of the commenters was a devout Christian and was giving a detailed defense of traditional marriage. Another commenter responded with something to the effect of “How you would like it if society got to vote on whether your marriage was legitimate or not?” The Christian’s response was (again, probably not exact quote, but the gist is correct) “Society has no power to make my marriage illegitimate. Only God can do that.”
It hit me at that point what the trick that had been played was. Even beyond the question, contra Firefly, of whether government can practically regulate love, the fact is, that’s not what was happening. I’m not sure gay marriage was ever illegal (there have been fairly public examples of it going back at least to the 1920’s), and it certainly hasn’t been since Lawrence vs. Texas. If two gay folks wanted to get up in front of a whole bunch of people and express their intent to remain committed to one another for the rest of their lives, there was nothing illegal about it; it may not have been socially acceptable in all places, but you weren’t going to get busted for it. Nor was the issue really the right and privileges that the law gives marriage; of course, some states had civil unions, which gave all the same privileges, and even in the ones that didn’t, you could reach a reasonable facsimile of those privileges with a little work. However, polls at the time showed that even in those states that had civil unions, gays did not find them to be an acceptable substitute. So the real point of gay marriage was not love, nor the legal conveniences: it was getting society to recognize that in its eyes, gay relationships were just as legitimate as straight ones were. The conflation of the spiritual-emotional aspects of marriage with the legal-societal ones, and the idea that gay marriage was “illegal,” as opposed to not recognized by society, were the devices they used to push this. I don’t think at this point that I want homosexuality to be illegal, if only because the kind of power I would have to give the government to do that would inevitably be misused against straight people eventually. However, I see no reason why government or society is required to consider homosexual relationships as just as good as heterosexual ones, or why it can’t favor certain relationships over others.
I would also say that while children and their rearing is an important reason for society to promote heterosexual, monogamous marriage, it isn’t the only one. Controlling the human sexual instinct and the jealousies and rivalries it can cause is another important issue. For example, one of the big reasons polygamous societies tend to be screwed up is because given the mating instincts both men and women tend to operate under, what ends up happening is that a relatively small number of rich, powerful men get much more than their share of women both in quantity and quality, and the rest of the men end up single or with mates they perceive as inferior. Similarly, the prohibition against incest is not just about genetic problems with inbreeding (which are arguably overrated anyway); it’s also about preventing sexual conflict within families. In fairness, one could argue that gay marriage is also a way of controlling sexual instincts, particularly with gay men, who are notoriously promiscuous; however, I think the cost of legitimizing their relationships is not worth it, particularly since they make up such a small portion of the population and since they tend not to be as serious about it anyway (it is already pretty clear that divorce rates are much higher with gay couples than straight.)
I will say in conclusion that I used to be a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian, and I still think that libertarian values have a lot of usefulness in society. However, one great problem with libertarians is that they tend to think that we can all let our freak flags fly without consequence to society. I tend to agree that in many cases, government is not the correct instrument to use in enforcing social order. However, if libertarians aren’t willing to use the government for that purpose, they’d better start setting an example for others in their own conduct and use the other tools society has for enforcing order, because there is only so much deviation society can tolerate before it starts to fall apart, which, ironically, then undermines libertarian principles. For instance, there is no question that the growth of single motherhood has a lot to do with the growth of the welfare state and the corresponding increase in government power. The price of allowing a few free spirits is that the rest of us have to be bourgeois and ‘boring” (assuming you find a peaceful, stable life to be a bad thing, anyway.)
Most, like Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy, remain icons even after the truth gets out. Others, like Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter, end up as nonpersons.
1. Carter isn’t a nonperson. His time in office is not viscerally important to either side (and liberals were not enamored of him when he was in office).
2. Johnson had been rejected by a large fraction of the Democratic Party by 1968 and he’s never been remembered nostalgically except in re the blacks.
3. The Roosevelt Administration and the Democratic Congress of the time made an array of poor policy decisions as well as some good policy decisions. The era is commonly mis-interpreted by partisan Democrats, but there’s a reason he’s remembered fondly. BTW, he was devious in his professional life, too much the career politician, and a serial adulterer (with some excuses for that).
4. The Kennedy regime was a triumph of public relations over substance. Kennedy himself had had some p/t and seasonal employments as a student, some years in the military, and seven months as a wire service reporter; the degree to which his work life was dominated by politics well-exceeded that of Roosevelt. As for his domestic life, it was an order of magnitude worse than Roosevelt’s.
When the gay marriage debate reared its head people were always shocked by my reply when asked. “Homosexual marriage?! The government shouldn’t even be involved with heterosexual marriage. Whatever consenting adults do when the lights dim is their own business.”
That’s a silly response to them.
Precisely zero people alive today are not descended from hundreds of generations of women who did not immediately and without too much regret cleave to the men from next valley over tribe who had just slaughtered said women’s children and menfolk in the preceding half hour.
Thanks for the anthropological fabulism. Been an education.
“And please save me from the, “society will break down and burn to the ground”. If you really feel that society cannot survive without a powerful government to control individuals then may your chains rest lightly upon you.”
Good luck saving yourself from the mob; anarchy is just an idea after all.
May the six feet of soil rest lightly on your bones, if you get interred. Feral dogs and ravens have their uses.
They knew and they saw it coming, but they didn’t care. All that mattered to them was their Trump hate.
Trump hate and power for the Stalinist democrats
Joe Smith, that was a useful summary – thanks for it. I don’t want to pile on the SSM subject, though it is of considerable interest to me, but I always like to see good explanations of the real issues within it. (How did we get onto this tack, anyway? Oh, Sullivan, yes.)
I’ve been on a number of blogs relating to various topics (i.e. politics, fashion, education) for a few years. When social issues are brought up, without fail, it tends to be the less conservative ones, especially socially, that lose their lid and appear to be frothing at the mouth if met with relatively calm responses of social conservatism. If they aren’t frothing they deflect if they cannot meet the responses with equal maturity.
Concerning kids, as someone who works with kids and their parents, I will say that a two parent household who are invested with their child’s needs are the most easiest to deal and work with. Single mothers are a hit and miss; rarely have I met a single father that had custody. Of the few that were same-sex couples they were lawyers or academics. They were pleasant and fine to work with.
R.T.’s quasi-libertarian response to the “gay marriage” issue as it was and still is commonly broached, is an understandable first-take response to the particular framing in which the question was often mooted, i.e., something along the lines of: ” Should same sex attracted persons be discriminatorily denied the state bestowed rights and privileges and advantages afforded to heterosexual couples through their special status as married persons?”
There are any number of reactions possible to this framing, including rejecting it wholesale. But one reasonable seeming approach was to distinguish between civil and ecclesiastical institutions, and to then conclude that the aim of non discrimination and equal rights under law for the sexually perverted could be easily accomplished by cutting the state that supposedly bestows in a discriminatory fashion, out of the bestowal of privileges business altogether.
And I personally think that there is some logic to this insofar as one can concede that ” the state” has, as pointed out, no legitimate interests of its own, but only echoes the desires of certain interest groups in the polity: usually under the guise of a disinterested pursuit of some greater good. “Pay for my kids because the state needs an army ” or something.
But these attempts to ensure the liberty of the deviant to revel in its deviancy as part of a theory of individual right, never seem to take into sufficient account the burden imposed on other individuals who are expected to attend and wait upon the annoyance as it basks in either 1, its state mandated social acceptance and affirmatons, or 2, the practical and informal impositions placed upon others under a neutral tolerance theory.
It’s the “positive liberty” displaced-burden , or non-reciprocal benefit problem, in a somewhat attenuated, but still recognizable form.
And yes to acknowledge Smith’s surmise, the real aim was across the board social validation and legimization of homosexual life, not inheritance rights and other matters that could be dealt with by other forms of contract.
The gays need the rest of society as nesting material they can poach for their own purposes. ” Mere tolerance is not enough” as the organisms of the left are fond of saying.
Love the strawman “We must have tyranny or anarchy will reign!!!”
And why are you guys going over the whole gay marriage thing again in this much detail. Ain’t nothing gonna change about it right now, and ain’t no amount of jawin’ by anyone is gonna solve any of it right now.
zenman:
Antifa and anarchy are just ideas as is libertarianism. Thanks for sharin’, one scarecrow to another, “If I only had a brain …” Do come back y’all.
To answer the question: Did most Biden voters really not see it coming?
The majority still don’t have any idea what happened, they are still thrilled that the Donald has left the building and they see a bright new future with great accomplishments on the horizon. It will take a year or two for the shine to wear off and then we shall see. As stated by other above, lot of folks were taken in and still happy and blissful.
Joe Smith,
“… If two gay folks wanted to get up in front of a whole bunch of people and express their intent to remain committed to one another for the rest of their lives, there was nothing illegal about it…”
You actually believe that? A quick internet search turns up 16 states that still have sodomy laws. That number was almost certainly 80% – 98% of all states no more than half a century ago.
Before his first day wanted him gone to pasture by July 1st, mostly because I want the few who thought they were voting for him to see they were played. In reality it doesn’t matter which Leftist is in charge or it’s run behind the scenes, they all have group think and will do the same.
Snidley Whiplash @ 11:58am,
Much better and succinctly written than my attempt. I run into this constantly. Very well educated conservative thinkers with well thought out ethics and principles who completely lose their common sense when it comes to this subject.
If one believes a government has the right to oversee (in any form) whom I choose to have sexual relationships with, one must believe individuals have no rights, for what right is more fundamental? Perhaps the right to worship as one pleases? If worship is #1, mating has to be a close second.
As someone touched on above, marriage to the lovely Mrs. Firefly and I meant standing before a Priest and swearing an oath to one another before God as witnessed by our family and close friends. No matter what future laws Congress writes my wife and I correctly believe no man can undo that bond.
And I have ABSOLUTELY no qualms with couples who do not believe a Priest can marry, or do not believe there is a God to bless a union.
But we’ve ceded some of this ground to the government and Conservatives (of all people?!) are shocked to see more and more ground being lost?
Conservatives who complain about the Congress’ and the Court’s abuse of the general welfare clause, and complain about Courts finding penumbras of meaning in the fourth amendment suddenly change all their principles when it comes to love. “We can’t have Congress subsidizing Iowa corn farmers just because they sell grain across state lines, but who I sleep and spend my life with? Hell Yeah, Uncle Sam should dictate that!”
(I should add: All the above applies to consenting adults. Minors, or adults under duress, absolutely warrant and deserve government protection.)
Joe Smith: “…it was getting society to recognize that in its eyes, gay relationships were just as legitimate as straight ones were.”
No. Marriage to my wife and I means a ceremony performed by a Priest after her and I received our church’s approval by performing a series of meetings, classes (even a 150 question, computer scored test). Our church only recognizes marriages between adult men and women, and only in pairs. Our church does not recognize gay relationships as legitimate as straight ones. It does not bother me that other churches do. Just as I don’t want those other churches (OR GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES WITH KEYS TO PRISON CELLS AND GUNS) bothered that my church does not.
Your logic is upside down. Ceding rights to society/government does not limit what society/government can recognize as legitimate. It gives society/government authority to determine what is legitimate.
Sometimes Andrew Sullivan puts his noggin to good use and benefits us all. This time, his hopes vastly outreached his sense of reality. And he’s had decades to watch Joe Biden in action. Did he naively take the savagely biased media at face value all these years?
Otay:
Trans folks in what ever bathroom they desire. Trans folks (males) competing with females in sports. Sodomy laws rarely enforced? Public restrooms as meet up spots for consenting “adults.” Public schools that decide what “your” children can receive to alter their biology? Object to any of that and you are in favor of the all powerful state? Otay, all strawmen.
Funny how penumbras and emanations lead to unintended outcomes. Inconceivable, how things have worded out for freedom and individual autonomy, say in what you say or what you bake or what you arrange and sell (flowers for instance).
But hey, why would the left use “freedom” to erode a society and then repress traditional morality. Who knows, it’s too complicated.
DNW @ 10:25am,
In my bachelor, oat sowing days, I was warned by a friend that the duration to determine a common law marriage in the state of Oklahoma was 24 hours. If I read your comment correctly, your lobbying for that as as federal law.
The only thing the vast majority of Biden voters wanted was someone—anyone—who *wasn’t* anything like Donald Trump the person.
And they got exactly what they wanted.
Policy was a distant second in consideration.
om,
In my youth, when I and my female partners were either much more randy from the passions of youth, or less moral from a lack of years and experience, (or maybe both) almost any place; public or private, where we had a chance to avoid view for more than a few minutes was at least considered as a location for a liaison. The public places had laws against such things, and when caught (happened once or twice) we rather red-facedly threw ourselves on the mercy of the authority involved. Good luck stopping that behavior (whether hetero or homo) among the youth.
It has been stated that atheists sit on the couch of the society that Christian and Jewish faiths created and then complain about the color of the upholstery. They didn’t create it, don’t maintain it, but sure can complain about it.
It’s one thing to stop behavior that is ill advised, immoral, and illegal and another thing to normalize and celebrate such behavior.
Youth, hormones, and foolishness often lead to bad outcomes. Some have said rarely do good things happen after 01:00 AM or after someone says “hold my beer.”
Cue the “God of Copybook Headings.”
Tell me again, how old is that dude in the news from the Lincoln Project? Just a youthful indiscretion.
No, of course not. But I am in favor of Mr. and Miss Slobbo being held personally and financially accountable for the human messes they may create whilst Adam delves and Eve spans. If they are going to come crying to unrelated others for justice, help, or security, this usually involves another contract framework which we call government, and presumes they have met certain criteria and obligations in order to assume the availability of this recourse.
And although I don’t have access to controlling Oklahoma case law of that period, I would bet that 24 hours of fornication, much less mere cohabitation for that period, never constituted a marriage at common law in OK. All the descriptions I have ever read of common law marriage entailed that the couple presented themselves as married to the world at large through their behavior. People essentially perform the marriage themselves anyway. Someone may officiate at the sealing of the contract, witnesses, witness, an ecclesiatical personage offer a blessing or some other rigmarole, but the contract is based on a promise made between the two parties themselves.
It is in the interest of the other individuals who have to associate with the couple, that the agreement made between them is publicly formalized and their responsibilities detailed. That way the community, so-called, has some moral recourse against the parties should their abandoned whelps begin sleeping under our porches.
Gay “marriage” does not rise to that level of social significance or distributive interest.
Why do you object? People go over old battles hoping to gain insights all the time. I think that we have established that those who were arguing against gay “marriage” were doing so on the basis of widely divergent rationales, as well as assumed premisses.
And you never know. Maybe a comet will strike New York and a meteor San Francisco, and we will have a whole new ballgame. Though maybe not, from what my sister tells me of the flood of goddamned unreconstructed New York refugees swarming into Charlotte.
@Rufus T. Firefly and @Snidley Whiplash (on the one hand)
and
@DNW, @Joe Smith, and maybe @om and @Old Texan (on the other; sorry if I’m missing someone):
The topic (same-sex civil unions and/or “marriages”) you guys are discussing has a lot of sub-topics that cut across the various positions:
1. The distinction between “evils one may justly repel forcibly” and “evils one may only opine/exhort against, without using any degree of force, because forcible opposition to a non-forcible evil is disproportionate and/or unjust”;
2. The distinction between “evils one may justly repel forcibly, which the government has been delegated authority to act against” and “evils one may hypothetically justly repel forcibly in some alternate society, but which the government here has never received delegated authority to legislate about, and which it therefore has no legitimate authority to address”;
3. The distinction between Natural Rights and Civil Rights. The former (Natural Rights) is from God and corresponds exactly to the His Eternal Moral Law and (because it’s the same thing) also to Natural Law Ethics deducible by right reasoning from observed phaenomena. Consequently there’s never a Natural Right to commit any evil (including anti-rational/disordered) act. BUT, the latter (Civil Rights) is a consequence of the (practical, authorized, and prudential) limits of the scope of government. Sodomy isn’t a Natural Right of any human, but arguably is a Civil Right inasmuch as government isn’t (and perhaps prudentially shouldn’t be, and maybe couldn’t possibly be, even in principle) delegated any authority to deter/punish it;
4. The distinction between Shacking Up and Adopting Children, inasmuch as two same-sex persons who contract with one another for a shared domicile (and mutual masturbation of whatever variety) don’t thereby deprive their neighbors of any civil or natural right (unless they frighten the horses), BUT, if they adopt a child they are (likely? possibly? arguably?) thereby committing a human rights violation against that child by unnecessarily denying that child either proper Fathering or proper Mothering;
5. The reality that a government always has a Legitimate Interest in raising a sane and healthy next generation of taxpayers, and some ways of doing so are more effective (in the aggregate, admitting of small and rare individual exceptions) than others;
6. The reality that inheritance rights, power-of-attorney, and status as next-of-kin must be addressed and enforced by government, and must therefore be associated with “marriage” (however defined) and/or with pregnancy; or else, easily obtainable “a la carte” by those who are getting married or having children; and,
7. …maybe some other stuff I haven’t thought of.
I don’t think that some statements frequently heard in discussions of the topic (e.g. the claim that Russ and Steve’s proclivities don’t affect anyone else, and therefore have no governmental implications either way) bear up when evaluated with the above-listed distinctions in mind.
As an example, one might hold that the U.S. government had no authority (because it was never delegated any) to mess with consensual sex acts or marriage laws either way, except to ensure that states honored one anothers’ documents, but that the U.S. government was obliged to recognize and protect the human rights of minors to be fathered and mothered (or, in the event of the death of one parent, to not be denied the possibility of an appropriate-sex replacement), and thus by logical extension outlaw adoptions by same-sex couples. Or, states might be obligated to allow an easy process for making a person next-of-kin, which wasn’t coupled by default to marriages as such, but could be contracted with one’s law partner, tennis partner, or sex partner equally easily.
Such considerations must be accounted for, I think.
Let’s also consider the amazement and growing consternation among the media that Biden’s press secretary appears to incompetent. And this is the mainstream media, not conservatives.
These people spent almost the entire campaign refusing to subject the Biden folks to even the most minimal of legitimate questioning…and now they’re surprised to find out the Biden team has no idea how to handle it.
Mike
Well they were competent during the BHO regime? What happened? They will just have to circle back? 🙂
R.C.,
Regarding your Russ and Steve example; you’ve never met heterosexual parents who, while not violating any civil laws, are yet abysmal parents whose children suffer from having been saddled with them? There are almost certainly some homosexual couples who would do a better job “parenting” than some, actual biological parents. Are we to permit society, or government, or you, to determine who are proper parents doing the job properly?
If a woman’s husband dies is the state to take her children and place them in a home with two parents? If a woman’s husband dies and a female friend moves into her home to help her parent is that to be forbidden? Are we to allow it if they submit to regular checks from a state appointed physician to ensure there is no physical contact between the two women when the children are asleep?
It literally astounds me how people don’t see how slippery these slopes are.
And it astounds me that people want the government to be involved in their marriages. My wife and I don’t give a d*m what anyone in the government thinks of our union, or whether it’s valid. In our case it is sanctified through our church. We were married by God, not some county clerk pressing a stamp into an inkpad. And it doesn’t bother me that others think pressing a stamp into an inkpad does sanctify their marriage. I sincerely wish them well.
The day I decide I am the ideal husband and have marriage completely figured out I’ll start telling other folks how to do it. I’m 30 years in and it doesn’t seem that day is on the near horizon.
MBunge,
I am encouraged by some of the pushback I see Psaki getting. It seems obvious Obama was given a wide berth due to the racism of so many in the Press. “The soft bigotry of low expectations.” What did Biden say? He was “clean and articulate?”
Some in the Press must know they did an inadequate job in that eight year period. And, others learned from Trump that they can get attention from pushing against an Administration. See Jim Acosta as a prime example of this phenomenon. And, during Trump’s reign the Press made a BIG deal about “The Truth (TM).”
I think we’re seeing a promising combination of the above resulting in some genuine pushback against Biden and his administration. Even more significantly, we have minions of wide awake keyboard, podcast and video warriors very aware of what is going on and pointing at the Emperor’s nakedness from more fronts than can be put down.
Rufus T. Firefly:
You are blessed in your marriage.
Exceptions and rules. Bad cases make bad laws.
Funny but those evil conservatives or religious zealots haven’t enacted such laws in our history IIRC. Maybe in Atwood land (Handmaid’s Tale).
But of course the left is quite happy to gender modify minor children without both parent’s permission through a school system, but lets focus on the threat from the “right.”
Slippery slopes on the way to the summit of Mt. Hyperbole? It’s always the ones you don’t see, then, whoops, you’re done?
@ RC and Rufe,
RC, I`m not intending to argue any of the issues you mention with regard to gay “marriage” apart from #6.
And that, I am arguing from a primitivist perspective: which assumes nothing about the reality of society or government as entities somehow imbued with their own independent interests. If I use the terms “society” or “government” at this point, it is merely as a shorthand to represent some number of persons associating in some kind of non-hostile and mildly formalized exchange relationship, and I am implying nothing about the good of some “community”, or any natural law obligations to the youg’uns , nor anything about human relations based on norms involving sentiment or “caring” for others.
I’m just trying to get down to the fundamental reason why any individual might be immediately compelled to take cognizance of the conjugal relationship of two other people of no particular interest to him, and to subsequently grant that relationship some kind of formal, active, and ongoing recognition. And from that point of view, love aint got nothing to do with it: nor does the perpetuation of the society or the state as an abstract and superveniently developed good from these individuals; natural or otherwise.
Therefore the only “justice ” claim I am entertaining, is the justice involved in forcing people who pretend to, or desire a continuing associative or geographical relationship with you, to pledge to pick up after themselves and clean their own household messes up and to trouble others as little as possible. Therefore, the duty of giving public notice that they are committed to doing so where offspring are the likely natural product of such a relationship, seems very little to require of those who will be traipsing around the boundaries of your own household, or peregrinating about the common paths and byways. I mean, assumimg we don’t want to just go straight to the hatchet and knife.
In the case of buggers, there is no reason to trouble one’s self to take notice of their activities, or to grant them as such the same recognition heterosexual pairs get. This, because the operative conditions do not obtain in the first place. Apart from a certain annoyance factor, they are, and their relationships are, basically irrelevant and not worth notice.
Traditional Civil and Religious strictures on heterosexual marriage are necessary in order to rein in female hypergamy and ensure that less dominant men have some chance of acquiring and KEEPING a mate. This is obviously all for the good as the natural state of mankind where ~70% of males don’t get to reproduce is hardly conducive to stable civilization.
Anything which impinges upon the above function is promoting entropy and barbarism and requires a violent response.
This is not to say that homosexuals cannot live quietly together and be as they will. They should be tolerated to the extent that they do not publicly offend the pieties. In no way are they to be *celebrated*.
Militant Feminists should be hanged per Atwood’s fever dreams because they do offend against the very necessary strictures which guard against societal entropy.
TJ– thanks for the Selwyn Duke link!
Let’s also consider the amazement and growing consternation among the media that Biden’s press secretary appears to incompetent.
She used to be the spox for the State Department. It’s a reasonable wager she’s a competent as anyone they’re likely to employ. Satisfactory visuals too.
Art+Deco – “Satisfactory visuals too.”
Women in a position should be judged by their ability, not their looks, but Kayleigh McEnany was ten times as clever, always prepared (never had to circle back), and speaking of looks…
Sullivan: “I want Republicans to moderate. I want to lower the temperature.”
Oh, it is the Republicans that need to “moderate”? Such a stupid statement is why I stopped reading Sullivan years ago.
Women in a position should be judged by their ability, not their looks,
So sue me.
Sure Oliver T.
I’m surprised that the topic of nullification has not found more interest, here.
Perhaps another time.
But WE neeed a Nullification Movement!
Weighing in again with my personal opinion (having given the official ecclesiastical one that I live by a long way above).
I agree with Rufus (if I understand him correctly) that there are two superimposed states of “marriedness” – one ink-stamped by the state, with legal obligations and privileges, and one blessed by the “church” (in quotes to cover all possible religious denominations, because I don’t know of any which do not have some type of marriage rites).
The two have been conflated throughout history for rational, and easily discernable, reasons.
It is only in the last century that they have come unmoored from each other.
I do not personally care one whit if a same-sex marriage is ink-stamped by the “state” and performed (or not) by some church-equivalent organization.
I DO care, quite passionately, about the way in which goal-posts have been continuously moved by the SSM proponents — in my lifetime, and with judicial collusion (and I use that word deliberately for some of the controlling cases).
LG communities (before the BT etc. extensions):
“All we want is for you to stop beating us up and throwing us in jail for loving each other.”
That is reasonable and fair and does no harm to anyone else.
We did that.
“All we want is for you to let us make legally recognized contracts for property rights, hospital visitation, childcare and other normal things that cohabiting partners deal with.”
That is reasonable and fair and does no harm to anyone else.
We did that.
“All we want is for you to let us use the word “married” to refer to our legal partnership, because our feelings are mortally wounded by not doing so.”
That is reasonable and fair and does no physical harm to anyone else, even though it requires the redefinition of a word for certain social and ecclesiastical rites that are as old as humanity.
We did that.
“All we want is for you to harass and prosecute anyone that doesn’t acquiesce in affirming that our redefinition of “marriage” is fine and good and supersedes all other civil rights that we used to profess to believe in, and to hell with YOUR feelings.”
Seems like we have gone a long way from “if you don’t want a gay marriage, don’t get one” to “if you don’t want to make a wedding cake for a gay marriage, rot in jail.”
HB 127 “To provide for the licensing of firearm and ammunition possession and the registration of firearms, and to prohibit the possession of certain ammunition.” – from RC
It’s not like the Democrats never told us they were going to do this.
I guess they have forgotten how many politicos were recalled or denied re-election when they tried it in the various states.
DNW,
I had to look superveniently up. Not the first time your incredible vocabulary was beyond my reach.
annnnd while we’re talking about Voter Remorse —
https://notthebee.com/article/dem-voters-are-ticked-that-biden-reneged-on-his-2000-stimulus-check-promise
“A few users also broke out the memes, providing that extra dimension of hilarity we all appreciate while watching a train wreck like this:”
The second one was my favorite, because it instantly reminded me of another NTB post today:
https://notthebee.com/article/next-level-clown-world-this-sf-teacher-says-bernies-mittens-manifest-white-privilege-male-privilege-and-class-privilege
Is this generating any supervenient schadenfreude around here?
annnd while we’re talking about Gun Grabbers Inc. (h/t R C)
HB 127 “To provide for the licensing of firearm and ammunition possession and the registration of firearms, and to prohibit the possession of certain ammunition.”
That was the “placeholder” summary; NTB cites the actual language.
https://notthebee.com/article/take-a-gander-at-this-gun-bill-that-would-nuke-the-2nd-amendment
Did I mention that the bill was sponsored by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX)?
Sad to say, not everyone residing in the Lone Star State is a Texian.
It’s impossible to govern marriage without governing love, and the government has no place there.
Rufus T. Firefly:
So you say. How do you know?
I say, it’s impossible to govern — period — without governing liberty, which surely includes love. The government can take your money, enforce laws about how you use your property and then send your body off to die in a war. More serious IMO than restrictions on marriage.
We put up with it because we must by law and at some level we know that we must. We live within the constraints of our biology and limitations in a dangerous world. We constantly compromise our liberty in order to survive.
Of course, there are, and should be, ongoing discussions about those constraints and our responses to them — where on the inevitable slippery slopes we choose to land. But the presence of a slippery slope doesn’t invalidate the problem.
The gay marriage question isn’t really an argument. The answer pops out before the argument. The answer depends on how one defines marriage and the values/priorities/compromises necessary for society to function.
My emotional preference is for gay marriage. However, my deeper consideration is that the question is deeply fraught and depends on those definitions and terms. I don’t believe there is one correct position. I sure don’t claim to know it.
I am dissatisfied with those who argue for gay marriage by ignoring the history of marriage, covertly redefining the terms and then claiming they won the argument.
Re: SSM …
AesopFan:
Your “We did that” refrain certainly sums up much of my reaction to the gay marriage history.
I recall gay family/friends going on about how Republican leaders like Reagan/Bush/Trump would be sending gays off to camps. Deep down they believed that.
Tom Wolfe had a great quote, justly well-known:
_______________________________________________
The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
_______________________________________________
IMO “friendly fascism” has already landed in Europe and is mopping up in the United States. If anyone gets sent to camps here, it won’t be gays or Democrats.
I thought Dennis Prager put it best when it was an actual debate in the political arena. To insist on the word “marriage” instead of “civil unions” opened up the door to asking pre-schoolers and kindergarteners if they were going to marry a boy or a girl when they grew up. If you don’t think that changes the entire dynamic of thousands of years of social culture then I don’t know what to say to you. If you think it is an unrelated issue that we have a breakout of “gender dysphoria” amongst the young (and old) then again we just agree to disagree. For me, the embrace of homosexuality in terms of celebrating it (“Gay Pride Month?), abortion on demand up to the time of delivery and now poisoning young formative minds with regard to sexual genetics (science?!) is what has brought us to this point of the entire breakdown of the rule of law. But that is because I do believe our inalienable rights emanate from a Creator. The one who gave us the Ten Commandments.
Hell, I have to look things up I knew 35 years ago.
The fourth paragraph in this link is a useful definition. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/supervenience/
In the illustration that precedes it about the El Greco original and fakes identical in every way, the author seems to have let the thought problem example run away with her in a rather pointless and elaborate fashion that just confuses matters, as far as I am concerned.
Section 2.2 is good, as its description of the emergentist origins of the term places the vector in its proper direction – upward from the concrete individuals to an objective quality or phenomenon (not epiphenomenon) dependent on the material bases. (Thus, I was nodding toward R.C. and his probable Thomism informed image of an objective social good being entailed by the nature of the individual beings considered. I was trying to just deal with the pre-philosophical level below, and was trying to stipulate as much.)
I think that I have seen Ed Feser, a favorite of many here, use the term in connection with his theory of mind work. But I probably got it many years ago, in the late 70’s early 80’s reading R.M. Hare, A.J. Ayer and all that that crew for class.
@Rufus T. Firefly:
Certainly I have; but, there’s nothing about that reality (so far as I’m aware) that serves to undermine the importance of any of the distinctions I listed in my earlier post.
You begin with, “Regarding your Russ and Steve example…” but keep in mind that I wasn’t directly asserting something bad about the hypothetical Russ and Steve. Rather, I was denying a claim that other people often make about “Russ and Steve”; namely, that Russ and Steve’s proclivities don’t affect anyone else, and therefore have no governmental implications either way.
I was asserting that the distinctions I’d listed previously all had necessary bearing on government policy, in such a way that policy vis-a-vis Russ and Steve might be either this, or that, according to how you answered the questions raised. And that disproves the notion that Russ and Steve’s proclivities have no governmental implications.
To be more precise, Distinctions #1, #2, and #3 deal with the kinds of things the government may legitimately prohibit, protect, declare, or incentivize. (For of course, all such actions — in fact, all government actions of any kind — constitute a use-of-force, or the threat thereof, either directly or indirectly. But not every use of force, even in opposition to evil, is morally licit; and even if it were licit in principle, it might be permitted only to persons authorized to exercise force, and not permitted to other persons lacking in authority.)
So if, for example, Russ and Steve together perform an evil act (not mutual masturbation but some other unspecified thing), and if that evil act happens to be forcible in some way, then punishing/deterring that evil by force might be obligatory, or at least permissible-and-prudent, for a group of officers deputized by a legitimate authority to do so. But, if the person who “deputized” them had no legitimate authority to depute, or if they had authority-to-deputize but never in fact deputized the officers, or if the act was non-forcible and couldn’t justly be opposed forcibly, or if forcible opposition was permissible but not prudent…well! In all of those cases, Russ and Steve ought to have no fear of policemen, even if whatever they did was evil, giving them reason to fear God.
Now, Distinctions #4, #5, and #6 bear more directly on the example of Russ and Steve as a hypothetical “gay couple.” They deal with things that really are a legitimate state interest, or even a state obligation. The government can’t not take a stand, one way or another, on such matters; and “if [they] choose not to decide, [they] still have made a choice.”
I’m guessing you probably don’t disagree with me on #5 and #6.
I’m guessing that, of these, you most disagree with a claim I implied in Distinction #4: The claim that every child has a Natural Right (or, a “human right” in the “my aunt works with an NGO lobbying foreign governments for policies that safeguard human rights” sense of the term) to be Mothered by “their” mother and Fathered by “their” father. This right is Natural, as previously asserted; and it is indeed the natural, commonplace state-of-affairs when not interrupted by natural tragedies, or by neglectful or depraved decisions of others. (The term “their” is in quotemarks, not to suggest unseriousness, but to imply the flexibility of allowing for adoptive parents in the event of the deaths or incapacity of natural parents.)
When a father dies in a scuba-diving accident, or a mother of cancer, that’s a natural tragedy or “misadventure,” not a violation of the child’s human rights. But when the mother abandons the father to shack up with someone new; or when the father gets drunk and gives his children abuse instead of fathering, or when a mother substitutes for a father someone who (whatever their other virtues) can’t father the child (or, a father brings in someone incapable of mothering, either way), then that’s a willful violation of the child’s rights. It ought at least to be the subject of a lawsuit (if only the child had a practical capacity to bring suit, and the court, capacity to render wise judgment without causing more harm).
Now it should be readily apparent that an example of bad parenting by heterosexuals, or even otherwise-good “parenting” by a same-sex couple, does not contradict the above principle at all. A mother abuses her child by having a female lover; another mother abuses her child by beating the child; a third mother abuses her child by simply leaving for good: These are all violations of the child’s rights. (The first in the list might be the least of them!) Most children may be resilient enough to overcome such mistreatment. Some children of abusive heterosexual parents may be harmed even worse. None of these change the fact that the parent did X when they owed the child Y.
Now if you agree with all of that, but say that it’ll cause more harm than good for the government to be involved, you’re still allowing for my Distinction #4 to have “governmental implications” vis-a-vis Russ and Steve. (Inactivity for prudential reasons is described under #3.)
And if you disagree with all of #4, but still allow that my #5 and #6 are important to consider, then, again, Russ and Steve have “governmental implications.”
And even if there’s nothing of merit in any of #4, #5, or #6 (which I doubt you think, but I’ll consider it for the sake of argument), then I still think that distinctions #1, #2, and #3 merit consideration when determining what, if anything, governments should do if Steve gets fired because his employer found out that he declared Russ his next-of-kin.
So, I think my list remains standing as well-worth considering. The existence of bad biological parents doesn’t undermine that.
Fair ’nuff?
@DNW:
You mention “R.C. and his probable Thomism”: Well, I answer to some form of that label, perhaps only as an admirer or camp-follower of those who know more about it.
But what I wrote was not meant to be specifically Thomistic, or even necessarily specifically Aristotelian. I think someone might find their way to similar analyses in a Platonic tradition, or if they were a fan of Maimonides, or in other ways.
I was more interested in arguing from any tradition which assumed what the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation, and MLK’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail all assumed. I wanted to make distinctions which could only be denied by denying important assertions in one or more of those documents.
That way, I imagine that I can persuade anybody who finds these bits of Americana congenial…or, at least, communicate with him well enough to get him thinking.
And as for anybody who despises those four texts, I suppose I have nothing to say to them, or they to me.
@DNW (part 2; sorry, I had missed your first reply to me):
You say…
Gotcha. In reply, let me point out that I described my six items as “Distinctions.” That means each of them has (at least) two sides to it; one distinguishes between this and that.
Regarding #6, which was…
…I guess I would state that if my hypothetical Russ and Steve wished to declare one another their “next-of-kin” for the purposes of inheritance or power-of-attorney in medical decisions, then the government would either honor and enforce that wish, or not. If they did, then government force would be applied when Russ’s estranged second cousin came forward after Russ’s death, claiming to be Russ’s only heir. If they didn’t, then a government that’s normally willing to enforce such things would have to explain why they didn’t, in this case.
And that’s all before adoptions are contemplated. Or the promoting or shutting-down of adoption agencies that either do, or don’t, allow same-sex couples to adopt. Or the certifying or decertifying of various schools on the basis of how they handle certain topics in their curricula.
So I think that, no matter how much you or I might protest our utter disinterest in whatever Russ and Steve were up to, certain circumstances or situations will still compel us “to take cognizance.”
As Erick Erickson once put it: “You will be made to care.”
And that’s a shame, because it really is tiresome. I can’t tell you how bored-to-tears my kids are with all the ponderous, heavy-handed, pro-same-sex-mutual-masturbation propaganda they encounter daily. They’re homeschooled! …and yet can scarcely escape the constant drumbeat.
One more thing…
Re: “It’s impossible to govern marriage without governing love, and the government has no place [governing love]”:
I don’t see any reason why the first part of that sentence should be true. And determining whether the second part is true, false, or meaningless would probably require clarifying its terms.
Let’s set aside for a moment that “love” in English is what OOP developers would call an “overloaded” term, being used for eros, agape, charitas, xenia, philia, storge, and probably some other stuff. Focus it down to nothing other than eros. Even so, if one guy murders another guy because they both experienced erotic attraction to the same woman, that action might plausibly be described an act of “love.” Yet, I think the government has some “place” legislating against it!
Additionally, the fact that I’m erotically attracted to a particular woman is neither a necessary reason, nor a sufficient reason, for me to marry her. It sure doesn’t hurt! …unless it distracts me from the “neither necessary, nor sufficient” part, in which case it can hurt me, and quite a lot. But whether my unruly feelings get me into trouble or not, the feelings are not strictly necessary nor sufficient for marriage; and certainly, merely experiencing the feelings does not make one married.
The usual pattern in the post-18th-century West is: First you have the feelings, then you commit the public action of marrying someone. The state of being married to someone is a public status; this is why “banns” were published, complex covenantal relationships of whole families were established and commenced with feasts, etc., in all of recorded human history. Perhaps the government ought not legislate about feelings. But surely no-one argues the government can’t legislate about public actions.
The only reason marriage exists as a notion in any human society is because men and women produce babies, which grow into adult men and women; and the system of symbiotic relationships and self-reinforcing feedbacks between a man, a woman, and their biological offspring is, on any informed analysis, a vital part of the survival and thriving of the human species. Any hypothetical alien biologist or zoologist would figure that out, if they took the time to study us. They would also discover that the system is fragile in certain ways; that certain stresses can disable or destroy the symbiosis.
All other things being equal, societies thrive more when more individual instances of this symbiotic system succeed. So, societies that have any laws at all naturally attempt to reinforce that system with their laws. Doing so is often the most critical step to their preservation. If they don’t do it, they usually find themselves civilizationally overwhelmed by adjacent societies that do…which is why the few outlier societies that seem like exceptions to the rule are always on isolated Micronesian islands, or living in huts so deep in the jungle that they had no detectible competition.
The network of laws and customs in a particular society which prop up or regulate sexual fidelity between men and women, encourage shared domiciles, establish obligations of parenting and default inheritance rights, etc., collectively constitute the civic institution of marriage. But the species feature of marriage predates any society, being a mere biological fact-of-life. So the civic institution (the laws and customs) is just the way that a particular society protects and encourages something good that was already present, even before the government got involved.
Why should it do so? Well, for more than one reason, but not least because it has a vested interest in having its next generation of taxpayers not be emotionally crippled, prone to criminality, or just plain dirt-poor.
Does it always do so well/effectively? Certainly not; sometimes it can be counter-productive. That’s true for all realms of policy. Contrary to popular leftist thinking, there’s a difference between what you meant to achieve by your policy and what the actual consequences were.
Does it follow that government ought to forcibly prohibit consensual acts of same-sex mutual masturbation? No, I don’t think it does. That would seem to be rather distantly connected to protecting the kind of families that produce new taxpayers…and very distant connections to harms are not sufficient justification to go pointing guns at other persons.
But, presuming for the sake of argument that I’m correct in that judgment, does it follow from that judgement that we should incentivize and solemnize sexually-gratifying acts that don’t produce new taxpayers? I don’t see why. Acts of the government are forcible actions, however indirectly. And I just don’t see why anyone should go pointing guns at other people to get them to treat acts of mutual masturbation (either between same-sex persons, or opposite-sex persons) as if they were not only helpful to society overall, but vitally important to defend and encourage. In fact the whole exercise of trying to push for SSM, and to pretend it makes sense after-the-fact, seems masturbatory at a sociological level: A colossal waste-of-time, throwing everyone’s energies into something utterly unfruitful.
Yeah … well, I was not thinking of anything specific you had said with regard to an A-T position, but rather that the general thrust of your natural rights stance could probably be elaborated in a Thomistic manner so as to entail extrapolations about the place of government in that natural law scheme, as seen in Aquinas.
Thus, knowing a bit about your general outlook, and noting your interest in considering points two and three as intrinsically germane – probably by way of a Thomistic take on the “necessity” of government as a natural concomitant or outgrowth of man’s nature – I wanted to head those issues off (or sidestep them) by specifically narrowing or reducing the question to a simple matter of an exchange relationship that in itself entailed no implicit interpersonal obligations: merely self-interested persons squaring off and deciding what they must yield in the way of mutual support, recognition, or affirmation if anything; and if so, then on what basis.
The production of children and their potential spill-over costs to unrelated others impacted by their potential ferality was my answer.
I am therefore treating neither the “interests” of the waif per se, nor the “society” themselves. I am looking at it solely with regard to what a person who is of no demonstrable intrinsic value to me, may nonetheless reasonably demand of me based on the thinnest and most tenuous of exchange relationships.
And my answer is that they owe me a pledge to keep the likely natural product of their union under control, and in return I pledge to respect the union and to do my part as a “juror” to provide an injured party recourse insofar as is reasonable.
Contrarily, the interests of sodomitic couples as “couples” never then arises to a level wherein a valid claim to “participate” as a peer couple to heterosexual couples, obtains. Their “union” does not produce the context for social obligations nor for claims by means of which they as a “couple” may then draw upon the attention and solicitude of other persons in the exchange system, such as it is. If heterosexual couples were by nature categorically incapable of producing offspring that would impact those who lived nearby, then their unions would not be rightly entitled to any more justiciable or moral notice than homosexual ones.
Of course if homosexuals wish to keep dangerous animals, they then become liable for the acts of these animals. But there is no good reason to validate their relationship on that basis.
If this is unclear then I’ll try again tomorrow. But I wanted to make what I said as plain as possible as soon as possible, despite the late hour and my tiredness.
We seem to have gotten involved with a subtopic that needs its own post.
ANYHOO, down the rabbit hole of the internet, at a blog Zaphod linked on another thread, I checked the “about” page and found this comment:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/about/#comment-77348
“Your writings on homosexuality are fascinating. The possibility that it may be the result of a bacterial infection is intruiging, but is that testable?”
The site search results were interesting, and suitably scientific-ish, so I am going to look into it further on another day.
So much internet, so little time.
* * *
The blog hosts say this about themselves: (links in the original at the obvious places)
This is the weblog of Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. …
Harpending is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah: see this homepage.
Cochran is an adjunct Professor at the University of Utah but he lives in Albuquerque, NM. His formal academic background is in optical physics but he spends as much time as possible working on evolutionary biology, especially of humans. His work with Paul Ewald on pathogens and chronic disease is well known.
Several years ago we wrote a popular book titled The Ten Thousand Year Explosion in which we discuss aspects of human evolution over the last few tens of thousands of years. If you enjoy the book, you might like further snippets that our editors cut out available on the book website.
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