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!
That is a bald faced lie, it predates the United States in the colonies, and of course thousands of years before that. Do you really think this nation was founded on a law that you had to be a member of a Christian church (or mosque) to marry?
Even at the federal level the first marriage law was passed in 1780, added to in 1794, and 1798, and 1802.
About Time.
Conservatives everywhere can do one better: get married in church but skip the license. Let caesar define marriage as between 3 men, 3 women and a mule named Bob. There is no reason to pay for caesar’s marriage license. It isn’t required and in the eyes of God, it makes zero difference.
What tax break?
Homo marriage isn't. Traditional marriage has been around since the dawn of time.
Nobody says you have to get married in the eyes of the government. If you think it’s between a man, a woman and God go for it.
Marriage is an implied contract. And with implied contract there has to be a set of rules to adjudicate the inevitable differences that come up between two people.
Like, who is responsible for the care and support of the children who re the result of this union? If one or both parents abandon the duties, at what point does the greater community step in?
All these disputes, and other matters like inheritance, or property ownership, or even separation of parties with irreconcilable differences that may very well lead to mayhem or murder, are very much in the wider interests of the community. At one time, these disputes were settled within the confines of the religious authority figures, but with the deep schisms that have appeared between factions of the religious authority, this was no longer a reliable agency to settle differences. Religions sometimes are not very good at making judgments on a wide range of human mischief and malfeasance.
“I wonder what the Founders would say to that capitulation if they were standing in front of you today?!”
What capitulation? Marriage licenses are relatively new in the grand scheme of things: they came about in the middle ages. It’s a construct of caesar, not of God. And there is nothing in the Constitution about them.
If you can find a woman who’s willing, go for it.
“Government gets involved so that they can collect on licenses. For the money. And for social experiments.”
So why should we have anything to do with it?
Sure, but you can certainly learn from us as we learn from you.
Bond for Marriage License
[23 December 1771]
Know all men by these presents that we Thomas Jefferson and Francis Eppes are held and firmly bound to our sovereign lord the king his heirs and successors in the sum of fifty pounds current money of Virginia, to the paiment of which, well and truly to be made we bind ourselves jointly and severally, our joint and several heirs executors and administrators in witness whereof we have hereto set our hands and seals this twenty third day of December in the year of our lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy one.
The condition of the above obligation is such that if there be no lawful cause to obstruct a marriage intended to be had and solemnized between the abovebound Thomas Jefferson and Martha Skelton of the county of Charles city, Widow,1 for which a license is desired, then this obligation is to be null and void; otherwise to remain in full force.
th: jefferson
francis eppes
Any tax people here?
What are the financial benefits and problems with marriage vs. cohabitation over the span of 50 years or so?
Wrong. Completely wrong.
The State benefits from healthy traditional marriages. Economically, socially and even financially; marriage is a win/win for the state.
Remove marriages from the government? Yeah. We did that in the 1960’s with LBJ’s Great Society leaving us with the Welfare State.
Its way past time to begin punishing welfare queens and rewarding Mom and Dad and the Family.
“Marriage is an implied contract. And with implied contract there has to be a set of rules to adjudicate the inevitable differences that come up between two people.”
So make it an explicit contract. Do you think that the so-called family courts are a better venue to litigate marital problems than say an ecclesiastical court?
“Like, who is responsible for the care and support of the children who re the result of this union? If one or both parents abandon the duties, at what point does the greater community step in?”
How’s it working now when roughly half of kids are born out of wedlock anyway?
Are you living in Israel?
Nice try at blaming conservatives.
It’s Bush’s fault, right?
So where did you find it? I’d like to study it further.
As a lawyer, Thomas Jefferson sometimes dealt in divorce law, he felt that the Catholic church taking over marriage for most Europeans, after Rome collapsed, was relatively new.
The Congress was making marriage law as early as 1780 and 1794, I think they knew a little about their constitution.
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