Posted on 08/18/2015 9:50:47 AM PDT by Kaslin
A searing sentiment driving debate in the presidential race is that ordinary Americans are losing control of their lives -- watching the right to moral decision-making wrested away from them. Wrested away by whom? By those who "know better."
The know-better crowd -- heavily represented at the opinion-making level -- tighten their grips every second, it seems.
Last week, Connecticut's supreme court tossed out the death penalty on grounds that it "no longer comports with contemporary standards of decency and no longer serves any legitimate penological purpose." The decision to absolve from capital punishment 11 death row denizens had about it certain complexities. The legislature, in abolishing the death penalty three years ago, had allowed it to stand for those previously sentenced, including the murderers of a woman and her two daughters, one 17 years old, the other only 11. That signaled to the court's one-vote majority that maybe chronology alone was standing in the way of mercy according to the newly discovered standards.
The citizenry of death row, irrespective of their deeds, got off en masse. Never mind: kill a couple of innocent young girls, and the state will feed you for life. Have a nice day. Changed standards, you know. What we might have performed 50 years ago, in the retributive justice line, is, um ... off now.
Who says so? We say so. Who's we? Well, your judges -- your arbiters of rightful opinion, and of other such bilge and bunkum.
We see this kind of thing all the time, often at a more general level, as when Justice Anthony Kennedy regaled us last June, in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, with the knowledge that "changed understandings of marriage are characteristic of a Nation where new dimensions of freedom become apparent to new generations."
In the folds of the Constitution, 42 years earlier, the court found a never previously suspected constitutional right to an abortion. We are getting used to this: Judges tell us that we, the people, don't know what we're talking about. Oh, but their honors know, and are pleased to share with us their insight into how community standards managed to evolve without the community necessarily noticing.
The media, including the Huffington Post and all the Jon Stewart types, the "progressive" intellects embedded in academic pastimes, who write op-ed essays and give oracular interviews -- these people notice, too, and are pleased to pass on their insights. The delicious sense of cutting-edge endeavors that expose Old Follies and overcome Injustice is a pretty part of the package. It isn't frequently enough remarked that defenders of ancient beliefs (e.g., the justice of proportional punishment by the state) can get sleepy at their posts, can lose sight of the duty to guard against attackers swarming the walls. Such as pundits and judges.
The Trump phenomenon (which I had originally hoped to escape the duty of mentioning in print) is not a pretty thing: Blowhard blows hard and hundreds of thousands eat it up. You have to back off for a second. Why do they eat it up? Because of his not-too-gentle touch on an open sore?
Among the sorest of sores in 21st century America is the one I mentioned earlier -- the sense of losing control to people whose authority to preach at you seems to proceed chiefly from their delight at preaching. The present U.S. president is conspicuous in that category. Whenever he talks, you know who's right. He's right; just ask him.
The apparatus of beliefs that more or less supported an older America -- religious faith, inherited wisdom, localized attachments, devotion (imperfectly expressed and executed at times) to freedom -- is disintegrating slowly. Those aforementioned know-better folks apparently find this out in law school, or in the television studio, and assuming they are molded of brass and a reforming disposition, they know what to do. Into the moral vacuum they go, scattering reproofs, trampling on the habits and procedures that most offend them. And pretending that the cheers and pompoms for Brother Trump are just fodder in today's news cycle.
Retread?!
I like that.
Cheers my child.
Retread?!
I like that.
Cheers my child.
Did pointing out the spelling error get you off? What a dick!
Save your condescension.
How ‘bout answering the question?
(Or were you lying when you made that statement to Kaslin?)
No lying here.
And you don’t deserve an answer.
Cheers my child.
No lying here.
And you don’t deserve an answer.
Cheers my child.
45 posted on 8/18/2015, 10:31:50 PM by ForYourChildren (Christian Education [ RomanRoadsMedia.com - Classical Christian Approach to Homeschool ])
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 44 | View Replies | Report Abuse]
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Point of information. Is retreading still a Zottable offense?
“I was here long before you.”
What name were you using then?
“I was here long before you..”
Kaslin
Since Apr 26, 2000
ForYourChildren
Since Mar 13, 2014
Explain it, smartmouth.
“And you don’t deserve an answer.”
How Christian of you.
Almighty and Most Merciful MOD, out of his own mouth cometh Thy judgement.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3326042/posts?page=13#13
He sounds a little bit goose steppy in that post.
I find myself giving people directions by saying where things “used to be”. Like, “it’s behind where the Howard Johnson’s used to be” or “Turn at the light where the diner used to be”.
I had not saved my password for my original name so I or FR was unable to retrieve it. I then made up Kaslin as my Freeper name which are the last three letters in my maiden name and the last three letters of my my married name.
Hmmm... more like a missing /sarc tag, how I read it.
Doesn’t excuse the retread, though...
*shrugs*
Not the point Kas.
The other dude was being a smartmouth to you and everyone else.
His signup is 2014.
Yours says 2000, and he claims to have been here looooooong before that.
*snort*
(Besides, we know you. This guy....)
“Cheers my child.”
I feel sorry for any child with a liar like you as a father.
And what do you have against Mother Goose?
(Is it all your parent's fault?)
That will be Three-Fiddy.
Rather than Custer’s Last Stand, I would rather see this situation considered as today’s Battle of the Bulge. Let’s just call it Bastogne and take as our key word to everything the libs and Establishment says, the reply “NUTS!”
I blame the tale “Bob and the hungry bunnies” for the trauma.
Poor Bob, the bunnies ate everything and everyone...
And then there was the Øbamacare ruling, in which they came right out and admitted “The law clearly says ‘this’, but we don’t like ‘this’, so now, per our decree, the law says ‘that’”.
They actually did do exactly that, it was literally the end of any attempt to pretend that we still have a constitution.
They may as well have made an official announcement that we now live under a judicial oligarchy and any law or rewording of any law that pleases the supreme court is good regardless of any past interpretations that may be in conflict. That is why I am still amazed that some think the answer is a “convention of states” to propose new amendments for the courts to disregard.
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