Posted on 01/27/2014 3:28:50 PM PST by Kaslin
It is Super Bowl week; Time for a football analogy to politics: The best defense is a good offense. Yep. Perhaps the most successful head-fake tactic of the left has been political correctness and I think that it is high time that we got our defense off the field and start throwing some play-action post routes of our own.
The leftist playbook includes instructions to accuse the right of being cruelly unfair in response to every assertion of a conservative standard. Reducing taxes is to “fund the government on the backs of the poor.” Opposing Obama’s takeover of health care is to “reveal racist contempt towards a black president.” Contending for the right to life is to “wage war on women.”
Democrats win many elections by painting Republican candidates as insensitive puritans who are absent one heart and the right side of their brain. What the Republican candidates are actually missing is a GOP playbook with instructions to avoid trying to be loved by everybody. Democrats have become experts at tapping Republicans with a small rubber hammer just below the knee. Watching the Republican kick his own legs out from under himself has become so predictable that it is not even humerus (rim shot, please).
You may have heard of one of my fellow Townhall.com contributors, an up-and-comer named Dennis Prager. Dennis effectively explores the tension between standards and compassion on his radio broadcast (see http://townhall.com/talkradio/dennisprager/438233). “The liberal tendency is to apply compassion to social policy when standards should prevail and conservatives’ tendency … is to place standards over compassion in personal life and they end up looking cold…”
Playing defense most of the time scores zero points. And decades of compromise just moves you closer to the opposition’s end zone. But we are beginning to see some bold maneuvers by the Republicans recently that have me very encouraged; Two examples:
Across Colorado, conservative communities have begun to take control of their local school boards. In 2013, Douglas County residents fended off a $1MM+ campaign by the union to re-take control of their school board. The first resolution passed after conservatives were elected in 2009 was to declare that the Boy Scouts were welcome on campus, reversing the prevailing attitude. This was followed by instituting merit pay for teachers, implementing a real voucher system, and disengaging the teachers union. The courage began to spread last year as inspired neighboring communities sought coaching from the battle-hardened Douglas County school board members and began replacing their liberal boards with conservative parents.
Now is the time for the Douglas County School Board to drive the conservative stratagem even further. By privatizing a high school, wholesale replacing the curricula with patriotic, anti-common-core syllabi, and banning radical environmentalism as a state sponsored religion, the board could keep the liberals playing prevent-defense. A good measure of success would be when liberal complaining turns into a thousand screams.
In Oklahoma this past Friday, State Representative Mike Turner boldly challenged, “whether marriage needs to be regulated by the state at all.” He floated a bill that would remove the state’s role of licensing matrimony. This was in response to a recent court order that strikes down Oklahoma’s definition of marriage as traditional one-man-one-woman.
Getting the state out of marriage is certainly not a new idea. But now that a state legislator has actually taken the first tangible step in that direction, the left finds itself backpedalling fast. Who would ever have thought that we would see the ACLU coming to the defense of marriage? But that is exactly the awkward role that the ACLU of Oklahoma has stepped up to. Now that they have marriage defined the way they like it, they are on their heels in a panic to keep the state involved.
America’s first Vice President and second President, John Adams, wrote in one of his many intellectual exchanges with his wife, Abigail: “I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics andphilosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture,navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their childrena right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary,tapestry and porcelain."
I have long been intrigued by Adams’ sociopolitical graduation, captured 163 years later in Abraham Maslow's model, the Hierarchy of Needs. Through sacrifice, hard work, intelligence and war, conservatives build the foundations on which liberty can flourish. Subsequently, the compromises of majority rule naturally tend toward losses in that liberty. And when their sons’ sons focus all their attentions on self-actualizing, conservatives come to realize that the foundations need adjusting.
So back to my football analogy; I hope to see conservatives rain aggressive plays all over the field like a million short passes from Peyton Manning. We have surrendered far too much ground. It is time that Americans remember the basics and become champions once again.
Go Broncos!
Nobody is forced to get a state marriage now.
They already do, Utah suspended the gay marriage issue yet the state and feds said they would still accept it for benefits.
//Which means they are married and fully legal//
Not if we put marriage back in the churches alone where it belongs. They can already enter into contracts that give the legal benefits of marriage, they just want to call it ‘marriage’ and the next step is to force churches to perform them even against their beliefs. Take away their power and give it back to the faithful.
Why do people let ‘the state’ control them?
And all that can be done without being ‘legally married’.
Me three. Get them out of my religious rites.
//I think what’s going to eventually is that those faiths that will never accept whatever impossibility the state is deciding to call marriage at the time will quit acting as the state’s representative in civil marriage.//
And probably lose their tax exempt status. That is where the threats will start in order to get churches to cave.
Frankly, if as a church, you are more concerned about your tax status than the truth...you have bigger issues than you think.
We all know that, what I was asking was does that poster support it or does he want to change the law.
This distraction from conservatives fighting this gay agenda politically, seems to be deliberate.
Whatever you are trying to say, you are sure wrong about it.
The early federal laws dealing with marriage had absolutely nothing to do with paternity, zero.
You can marry without making it legal, why don’t you?
I keep pointing out that if you don’t want a legal marriage, then don’t bother with the laws, people do it all the time.
BINGO!
This is America, people don’t have to join a Mosque or FLDS, or a gay church, or a Lutheran church to marry if they don’t want to, they don’t even have to believe in God to marry.
And they really don’t have to stay in that religion forever, and depend on it to decide on their divorce and property rights and child custody.
Would you read the thread before you keep posting nonsense, you don't a marriage license to marry in America, not even for a legal marriage.
You are bingoing a post that totally wrong.
Read post 104.
/Your information isn’t accurate.
I’m not aware of a state that allows clergy to perform “legal” marriages without a marriage license (or marriage certificate, or formal notice, to be recorded by the govt.) required.//
Wow you completely missed the point of RKBA’s post. He never said that. He said that churches can marry you without a license(BTW, you said on this thread that marriage licenses are not necessary to be ‘legally married’ are you now saying they are?) and they can. The example of mixed race marriages is a good one. A church may or may not require legal paperwork in order to perform a marriage BECAUSE MARRIAGE IS A RELIGIOUS RITE, you can be ‘legally married’ without ever having a ceremony (just signing the paperwork and filing).
RKBA is correct, marriage as a sacrament (or religious rite) is separate from the legal entity.
Why are you so wrapped up in what our corrupt government says Marriage is when God says otherwise? Who cares what the government says, I am married because MrR and I made a covenant to each other and to God, regardless of what the state says. The state could invalidate our ‘legal marriage’ tomorrow and it wouldn’t matter because we are still married in the eyes of God. Seriously, you are coming across as putting the government over God.
Agreed.
So marry without the state, what is keeping you from doing that?
We have our hands full trying to get enough votes to stop gay marriage and hold off polygamy, and you guys all think that we have the votes to make America a theocracy?
No they aren’t so why do the gays want it? Because they want control and they want to force themselves into our religious rites.
That is what I said, not what he said.
""I’m not aware of a state that allows clergy to perform “legal” marriages without a marriage license (or marriage certificate, or formal notice, to be recorded by the govt.) required.""
As far as not needing a license or clergy or anyone else, Common law marriage is still legal, as long as it meets the legal requirements, of course if you don't want a legal marriage, then do what you want.
How is it a distraction? Short of a constitutional amendment the feds will still accept what the states do or do not sanction.
We need to go grass roots and fight the gay agenda that says we need to accept them.
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