End of the culture wars

NY Post ^ | June 27, 2010 | Kyle Smith

[Scanian]

You know something is changing in American mores when the supposed leader of the culture wars from the right, Sarah Palin, declares that smoking pot is “a minimal problem” and that “if somebody’s gonna smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody any harm, then perhaps there are other things our cops should be looking at to engage in.”

Like many other pointless wars, the culture conflict has mainly resulted in exhaustion. Now the troops are laying down their arms and going home.

More and more Americans, particularly in the youngest generation of adults, are shrugging at drug use, gay relationships, pre-marital cohabitation, single motherhood, interracial marriage (which is now all but universally accepted) and gun ownership. More and more people aren’t bothering to lug their church to the voting booth.

[Aevery_Freeman]

“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”

Why does the government have any involvement with marriage whatsoever? This is in the purview of the Lord.

Our government was designed to function with an inherently moral people not to provide morality. The idea of government bringing morality to a people is anathema to logical thought - you may as well ask Satan do do it.

[Scanian]

He mentions Roe but his statistics regarding public support of it are rather questionable.

[Citizen Tom Paine]

At one time in the not so distant past in the United States one could go down to the local drug store and by cocaine. Think Coca-cola. The current drug laws are all recent. The US operated for about 150 years with no problems with the drug laws. Think about it.

[Bigg Red]

mark

[reasonisfaith]

The author doesn’t seem to grasp the simple fact that pot smoking in private is very different, in a moral sense, from gay marriage and abortion.

Sure, there’s been an erosion of moral values in our society, as a result of the calculated plan by the America-hating cultural marxists of the Frankfurt School and the effects of television. But I’m of the opinion that this erosion is actively supported only on the left. The cultural divide remains.

To believe that views on issues like gun control and interracial marriage are related to the same moral principles as those regarding gay marriage and abortion is sort of dumb.

And to turn a comment by Sarah Palin about pot into the “end of the cultural wars” is just another example of a liberal misunderstanding reality.

Whether or not gay marriage is widely supported doesn’t depend on which political group people have decided to join, or which party they think should oppose it. Or even whether morality can be legislated. The reality of the cultural wars is found in the heart of the individual.

Common sense tells us pot smoking and abortion are not the same thing.

[nathanbedford]

I think the problem with the Supreme Court goes back farther than Griswold vs. Connecticut, I think it goes back to the Garden of Eden. The biblical allegory tells us that man is perpetually in rebellion against God because he would be God. That is the sum and substance of the first and second Commandments and the essence of the Christian message which provides a prescription for that condition. Because one wears black robes and sits on the Supreme Court does not exempt one from this universal and immutable law.

Professionals and practitioners of the legal arts are members of a guild who have fashioned their own vocabulary and adopted their own folkways. They have even adopted their own eschatology. And the more they can obscure their doings the more they get to play God.

This is the battle the originalists are waging against the God players on the court. Scalia says there is a higher authority, a higher secular authority, which is the United States Constitution. His adversaries on the court, the God players, regard the Constitution as an impediment, an obstacle, to their ability to do good. So, Laws in Connecticut against contraception are absurd and it is an intolerable remnant of the dark age to criminally prosecute anyone for practicing safe sex. When the urge to do good becomes strong enough, they cast about for competing authority to justify their predelictions. Today there are flirting with international law. Yesterday they examined penumbras. But every day they are intellectually dishonest because they are working backwards from their own prejudice.

Like any Pharisee, a Supreme Court justice is wonderfully skilled at masking what he does. He resorts to all of the mind games conveniently provided to him by The Frankfurt School which in effect writes political correctness into the Constitution as a new and super amendment. Not the least of these tools available to a God playing jurist is resort to stare decisis which, after 200 years with accretion after accretion and subtle amendment after subtle amendment, distorts the document 180° away from its original intent, as you suggested. Properly used, stare decisis is a legitimate tool to seek out and preserve the purpose of the Constitution. But when it is perverted to justify the opposite, it becomes an effective weapon in the hands of a God player like Justice Ginsburg.

I see Supreme Court Justices who impose statism on us to be only less plain spoken exemplars of the same art practiced against us by leftist politicians.

[moovova]

They can have my culture when they take it from my cold, dead hands...

[muir_redwoods]

"To believe that views on issues like gun control and interracial marriage are related to the same moral principles as those regarding gay marriage and abortion is sort of dumb."

And of course Abortion and Gun Control are two different things but a tolerance for individual choice, even when it tolerates infanticide, is based upon the live and let live attitude anathema to the Left. If we can educate the young to see that tolerating the intolerable is wrong but tolerating individual choice, even when that choie is destructive to the chooser, is the basis for freedom, we will have recaptured a Madisonian America

[Altura Ct.]

End of the culture wars

Uhuh and communism is dead too!

[firebrand]

Yet I can’t find my way to agree that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is unconstitutional in its inclusion of private businesses. I had a long argument with the libertarian candidate for governor about this, told him it could come under defense of one-eighth of the population. He wasn’t buying it. He saw me as being in that group you describe, wanting to do good and scrounging through the Constituion for backup.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

***What the heck is immoral about interracial marriage and gun ownership???***

If you were a 1870s-1970s DEMOCRAT,both, by Blacks, were bad!

If you were an 1960s-today’s DEMOCRAT gun ownership by whites is bad, and marriage is good ONLY IF YOU ARE GAY!!

[nathanbedford]

A Supreme Court which can read the commerce clause broadly enough to justify the 1964 civil rights act constitutional can read the Constitution narrowly enough to require the return of runaway slaves or to authorize separate but equal facilities for the races.

I believe the country got to the right result with the 1964 civil rights act but by the wrong path. We are now faced with an arrogation of power by the executive which I can only describe as an usurpation. The only thing that stands between the president of the United States and the power by the flick of his pen to stop drilling for oil across the whole continent, is a federal judge. Soon, the president will be able to shut down the whole Internet. He can set Wages for whole swathes of our economy. In instance after instance the Congress of the United States has abdicated its responsibilities to legislate and passed the prerogatives over to the executive under a much expanded rule-making and regulatory power.

Unless we can undo these constitutional distortions at the ballot box, the only institution that stands between us and a growing tyranny is the judicial branch. The judicial branch is not there to do good and it is not there to advance the popular will. It is there to do constitutional justice.

Do we want to be ruled like the European Union by a host of bureaucracies like the Federal Reserve Bank, or the Atomic Energy Commission, and other agencies operating through unelected czars? Once a matter becomes a question of regulation the scope of judicial review is severely circumcised. The bureaucrat is unelected. The czar is unaccountable, except to Obama. Somehow, as a nation we must get these things straight: it is not the business of Congress to legislate whether every pump on every oil rig is safe, that is the job of a regulator and inspector. But it is not within the job description of the executive to declare all drilling in America to be too dangerous to continue, that is a prerogative of the Congress acting with the consent of the Pres. (assuming his veto is not overridden) and subject to being approved as constitutional by a third independent branch. That is the way the system is supposed to work. But we have confused the inspection of rigs and pomps with the regulation across the board of an entire industry. We have abandoned the legislative prerogative to the executive. That very same executive is trying now to stuff the courts.

It has been the pattern of the left seek a more receptive forum to get its way. It tries to move the issue from the local, to the state, to the federal,to the international arena. It tries to move the procedure from voting, to litigating, to treaty making, always seeking a method or a procedure by which it can impose its will. The court should be the guardian of the Constitution and it should be the responsibility of the courts to put the issue in the right forum and keep it there and it should be the responsibility of the court to measure the attempt against the Constitution and not against the new flavor of the week served up by the left to justify its predilections.

We now see with the last two appointments by Obama to the court that he has utterly no regard for these considerations, in fact, he has explicitly stated his view of the Constitution and how it should be twisted to accommodate a redistributionist view of the world. When the Constitution, like American politics, gets mixed up with race the Constitution often goes out the window. This has been true both for and against the plight of the African American for more than two centuries. This one more reason why I quote Nathan Bedford's maxim ad nauseam:

all politics in America is not local but ultimately racial.

[kabumpo]

I know and love that film. You are absolutely right. Thank you.

[NucSubs]

Not nonsense at all. It’s dangerous to reflexively dismiss this news. I see it all around me everyday. What is more, I sense it.

[Lancey Howard]

No, it’s nonsense.
Let me know when the Democrats succeed in making “Fisting for Fifth Graders” a normal part of government school curriculums outside of Massachusetts.

[muir_redwoods]

It's not nonsense if his measures of opinion square with reality and it sounds to me like they do. I can believe what you want to be true or my own "lying eyes" and ears.

His guage of opinion among the young cohort he references is very much what my experience with people that age seem to feel. You can complain about it but your complaint has little effect on what is real.

[samtheman]

There are 3 legs to conservatism: social, economic, defense.

While I think an argument can be made that the Republican Party might have to de-emphasize social conservative issues, that does NOT lead to your conclusion that libertarians provide a sound electoral choice for conservatives.

Many conservatives believe as I do, that the defense leg is the most important of the 3. Libertarians fall way short on defense. Defense of borders, defense of America and defense of our allies. Libertarians (many in a haze of pot smoke) somehow see the world as safe enough, with no need for defense. (Hey, man, who would want to hurt us if we just get in the groove and act peacefully, you know, man, like, wow, give peace a chance.)

Libertarians are dead wrong on defense.

[firebrand]

Thanks. Interesting answer. Everything you say sounds spot-on. And that is what I felt too about the Civil Rights Act: right result, wrong reason.

It’s nice to see someone knows how to spell “ad nauseam.”

[bmwcyle]

I don’t let man decide my moral issues.

[bmwcyle]

PS End of this discussion.