Posted on 08/21/2011 12:06:12 PM PDT by jfd1776
News reports on August 20, 2011 A.D. said that country singer Chely Wright was married to her girlfriend, Lauren Blitzer, at the bride’s – well, one of the brides’ – aunt’s house, because Connecticut allows gay marriage.
So, if your source for the news is a marriage license duly issued by a government bureaucrat, or a People Magazine article online, then you can be forgiven for believing the story. It’s certainly likely that many of the two hundred guests believe it. But that doesn’t make it so.
Now, I’m a huge fan of Chely Wright, as are most country music fans. She’s a terrific singer and a talented songwriter, with such hits as “Shut Up and Drive,” “Single White Female,” “It Was,” and “The Fire”… not to mention having written plenty of good songs for other performers.
Born into a patriotic military family, Wright has been a terrific supporter of the troops her entire life. From playing taps at military funerals as a child to visiting military hospitals, and war zone encampments as an adult, she ties or surpasses even such better-known performers as Toby Keith and Bob Hope, and her anthem of support for our heroes, “Bumper of My SUV,” has made her a special hero in her own right, to hundreds of thousands of military families.
So it would be a pleasure to silently tip one’s hat and wish her well in her new marriage, as fans always do when they hear of their favorite stars’ nuptials. When Tim and Faith got married, and Brad and Kimberly, and Blake and Miranda… though we may never have met them, we fans all cheered them, patted our radios or TV remotes, and hoped that they’d be the exception – that they’d stay happily married, ‘til death do they part.
Unfortunately, the Chely Wright story has a wrinkle those other star marriages lack – this was one of these “gay marriages,” apparently so popular nowadays. We can still wish her a happy life, and we certainly do (she’s still a great patriot and a great singer, after all!), but we can’t wish her a great marriage, because it isn’t one.
What’s that? But two clerics, one Christian and one Jewish, married them before a crowd of 200! Okay, so what? Clerics have been wrong before. Besides, a cleric doesn’t marry the spouses; they marry themselves. A cleric can say some prayers and blessings, but a marriage is a set of vows between the people at hand. It’s all about them, not about the officiator, the witnesses, the wedding party or the guests. And two women just can’t get married.
But the law says they can! Again, so what? The law is wrong. An unsuspecting public has been so severely browbeaten on the subject for the past decade that this manufactured “civil rights” issue – which didn’t even exist as an issue a generation ago – has been allowed to pass a legislature or two, and has been forced on some states by judicial overreach. It’s wrong nevertheless. Because a legally prepared government document doesn’t cause people to be married; only the vows said by a free man and woman, of their own free will, can marry them.
Honestly, it’s not like this is the first time the law has gotten something wrong, is it? The law is written by fallible humans (some more fallible than others), so it contains mistakes sometimes – sometimes very big ones. For nearly our first century as a nation, the law said that one human could own another one… and even today, the law in dozens of foreign countries still does. For nearly forty years, federal law has said that it’s illegal for a state to completely forbid abortion before a child can be born, and some politicians (including our current president) have voted to allow an “abortion” even during or after the moment of birth.
In country after country, throughout world history and including the present, the law has said that Jews are less than human, that blacks are less than human, that women may not own property, that no one but property-owning males has a right to vote (hmmm… there’s something to be said for that one…). While the law certainly OUGHT to be correct, there are far too many examples of times when it has not been, for us to make the mistake of believing that the laws of worldly governments are somehow infallible.
In the 19th century, the Mormons practiced polygamy, as have muslims ever since their founding in the seventh century. Ancient Egyptians required incest in their royal family. Ancient Hindus accepted polyandry. As in so many other ways, the United States was founded to be an improvement upon the errant governments and errant societies of the past. We were not to make their mistakes; we were to try our best to do things right.
And a part of that, just a small part, but still a part, is to honor the definition of marriage: that it is a bond, intended to be lifelong, between one man and one woman.
From our very founding, the American public valued good, solid marriages like those of Washington and Adams, and worried about people who appeared to lack such great marriages or even to deviate from them, like Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton.
Not that they didn’t respect the good these others accomplished, not that the American people became prejudiced against the philosopher who wrote the Declaration of Independence or the great diplomat who managed the critical support of France throughout our Revolution or the economic genius who built a framework for prosperity out of a bankrupt land… just that the American people, from their very start, knew that a person could be a role model in some ways and not in others, that a person could be heroic in one aspect of his life, while still having other aspects of his life that were unworthy of such respect.
The gay rights debate today is based on a lie: that the American people are no longer capable, or never were, of such good judgment.
The left wins the votes of gay Americans by telling them that conservatives are anti-gay, that conservatives are bigoted against them. And whole lobbies have grown up around this claim. But where is the proof?
It’s Nazis and islamists who call for gays to be rounded up and arrested; those groups are on the left, not the right.
Who lets criminals out of jail to burglarize the homes of law-abiding straights and gays alike, to mug them in the alleys, to steal their cars? The left, not the right. The right wants safe streets for everybody.
Who calls for massive tax increases to cripple small businesses and throw people out of work? The left, not the right. The right wants to lower taxes on America’s businesses, both small and large, so that everybody can prosper, gay or straight, urban or rural.
The right doesn’t discriminate in wanting the private sector to thrive. It’s the left that devalues our currency, drives up unemployment, drives down profits, destroys entrepreneurship. Gay Americans aren’t from outside that world; gay Americans are part of it, whether as managers, as executives, as clerks, as entrepreneurs. The same Democrat policies that attack straight Americans attack gay Americans as well.
So the Democrats invented a wedge issue out of whole cloth: the left would support opening up marriage to gay couples, knowing the right would balk, so that they could use that issue to tie the gay community tighter to their side of the aisle, with no moral compunction about fraudulently blasting Republicans as intolerant without justification.
Republicans know that marriage is between a man and a woman. Republicans also know, however, that there are certain societal goods that can be furthered through marriage: home ownership, the raising of children to be good productive citizens, developing intact families to invest in their communities and to donate to charities, and many more. So Republicans favor certain special government benefits that only go to married couples – things like joint filing of income taxes, joint application of the right to freedom from self-incrimination, presumption of joint custody of children within the marriage, automatic visitation rights in hospitals. These and some others are logical for government to provide to married couples because of the huge benefit to society of intact heterosexual marriage. Yes, everyone knows that there are marriages without children, and that single people can raise children alone, or that a gay couple can be generous to charities and their communities. Of course.
But tax policy and similar government exceptions – all these benefits that married couples have are exceptions to the standard rule of society treating every citizen as an individual – should only be altered for very good reasons. It makes sense to make these exceptions for marriage – real marriage – but some alternate arrangement, such as polyandry, polygamy, or other groupings – may not logically qualify for such benefits. The farther the arrangement goes from a real marriage between a man and a woman, the harder it is to justify the exceptions.
So the left has created gay marriage in the hope that the gay community, and perhaps some segment of liberal and independent voters as well, might take the bait and miss the forest for the trees. They hoped that they could get people to think that an opposition to illogically extending special marriage benefits to some unprecedented definition of marriage must be due to anti-gay prejudice… rather than a simple recognition that special privileges, by definition, cannot be extended indefinitely.
Now, perhaps a case can be made for granting some of these exceptions to gay couples, or even to dropping some of these exceptions entirely. It is certainly conceivable that a tax reform project might result in an elimination of the mortgage deduction, or that government might legislate that a patient might designate any friend – spouse, sibling, life partner, or buddy – as being the person with the same full rights that a spouse would have been granted automatically.
If the Democratic Party were truly interested in the legitimate gripes of the gay community, they might bring up these issues on their own. They might support a law or two or three – where the government does indeed have a right to intervene, of course – calling for some of these changes. It’s fair to say that rules like the presumption that a wife should not be called upon to testify against her husband might be a bit dated, for example. Perhaps eliminating that right from among the rights of married people might be justifiable.
And if a gay couple, living together for twenty years, thinks it’s unfair that a married couple should be able to get the tax breaks of joint filing, while the gay couple cannot, perhaps they could make a case for a review of such a benefit. There are certainly plenty of conservatives who would be open to an honest and fresh look at our tax structure; it could hardly be made worse!
But no, the Democratic Party chose to throw in a red herring – to redefine marriage itself. This leaves the bounds of normal political discourse behind, interfering in society itself, setting the government up in opposition to all legitimate religions and to western civilization. Unnecessarily yet – just to be able to create a wedge issue so they can fundraise better in the gay community and make themselves look more “tolerant.” Or maybe, just maybe, with a little truly intentional malice in the mix as well – a conscious effort to undermine western civilization, to truly meddle with the societal fabric of this nation, so that it may fall ever further from its promise to be the City on a Hill, the role model on earth of liberty and honorable governance.
So no, Chely Wright did not get married in Connecticut, even though the document says she did.
Marriage is between a man and a woman, and no state supreme court or activist secretary of state or crackpot theologian can change that.
As a country fan, I wish her well, and hope she returns to the charts with more hits. I know that her military fans continue to love her and to thank her for her courage in visiting their bases under the most dangerous and miserable of conditions. She’s a great patriot, and a great American.
But I wish the activist left would stop using her, and situations like hers, to push agendas that undermine our society and accelerate the politics of division that have poisoned our discourse.
Copyright 2011 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based Customs broker and international trade lecturer.
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“The garbage started with Garth Brooks and never stopped.”
Yeah. And Billy Ray Virus. I’m a fan of the older Dwight Yokum stuff, but it’s because I’m a fan of his guitar player, Pete Anderson. Pete has put out some wonderful, and eccentric solo albums.
Too bad, always liked her music
I don’t think she has had an album out in a decade
IMO she has Dixie Chicked herself.
A woman cannot marry another woman. She can pretend to, that’s about it.
Maybe her and “partner” can form a duo and call themselves the
Chixie Dicks?
I didn’t need that.......
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