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!
Very-much-agree bump.
No surrender, no capitulation. Put them back in their cages. They're what, 2% of the population, and they're going to roll us?
That capitulation on moral issues is not a good thing.
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Agreed.
Thank you.
And yet they didn’t found a theocracy. The only morality legislated into the constitution was to value limited government. Nor did they encourage states to legislate morality, though they gave them the option. While you suppose that was oversight I believe it was becuase they knew that even more dangerous that immorality would be a powerful government.
“What are the financial benefits and problems with marriage vs. cohabitation over the span of 50 years or so?”
Upshot: if you’re in a very traditional marriage where the husband works and the wife stays home and takes care of the kids, marriage may work out to your benefit tax wise. If both husband and wife work and earn similar amounts, i.e. the norm, it’s a complete screwover. Your taxes are higher than if you had remained single. Plus if you have to dissolve the marriage, you’re gonna be in a whole new world of economic hurt. Especially if you were the husband.
Living with another person and sharing the bills is where you save the money in a marriage, not on the taxes. Essentially all of the property benefits of marriage can be attained through how you carefully structure wills and contracts, and how you structure property ownership.
That’s why I’m a strong proponent of religious marriage and skipping caesar’s license. Why buy into this godless farce when there’s a better alternative?
True, there has always been marriage law, no matter what the ruling authority was called, government, a state religion, tribal law, the fact is that there was law.
In America, we don’t have a state church, and we don’t even force people to have a religion at all, it is childish to waste time on this game of gay churches, mosques, and churches, and whatever cults get created, all creating their own concepts of marriage that we all have to accept.
This isn’t a serious argument, it is just another way to stop conservatives from organizing a political strategy.
“The Congress was making marriage law as early as 1780 and 1794, I think they knew a little about their constitution.”
Yes, they did. And they still failed to mention it.
Marriage is a sacrament in the church. And that is as it should be. The Catholic churches took over a lot of functions after the fall of Rome. That doesn’t mean that having the state sanction marriage was a good idea before that or is a good idea now.
Do you really think that America will be passing the laws you are calling for?
That special branch of the judiciary, the family court, is as corrupted and ultimately ineffective as the ecclesiastical court is dispensing any degree of justice in the matter.
“He said, she said” is no basis for determining a logical and predictable outcome for the parties involved. And often the party or parties most negatively affected, the children, have no voice whatsoever.
The business of the state should be confined to things like prenuptial contracts and child care/support arrangements, and if one person wants to tie himself or herself to subordination to another person, a specific set of rules would be written to cover the necessary contingencies in carrying out the terms of the voluntary subjugation.
Civil unions or civil marriages are contractual agreements that rightly are the venue of civil government, and should be addressed and enforced accordingly.
Weddings under the sanction of a religious order entail a wholly different set of obligations and values than civil marriages or civil unions.
Marriage predated the Catholic denomination, and they aren’t going to become the state church and control our lives, anytime soon.
If the state gets out of marriage, and it’s left to places of worship, how would non religious people marry?
You know the saying: “The founders would be shooting by now”
My personal sense is that I am voiceless in the matter (especially since I live in a libtard-dominate state). So, since the matter is settled (at least as far as the libtards are concerned) my fallback position is to vex the left with their own poison.
So my stance is this: “Marriage” is the union of one man and one woman. If you change that equation it ain’t marriage any longer. If the state imposes its will on the matter then marriage means nothing and should be eliminated (as far as the state is concerned) or pried wide open to include multiple parties, barnyard animals, old rock albums, etc.
The only part of marriage that mattered (or should matter) was the church sanction. The government part only mattered when it was relevant. Since the libtard “won” it is now irrelevant.
Read his post, he said he does.
In a church. We’ve got 31 flavors doncha know ;’)
The founding fathers did not limit marriage to only Christians or Muslims, or the religious.
I said non religious people.
There is no legal requirement to obtain a marriage license to get married in a church. If the church in question wants to conduct the ceremony without a license, then that's up to them. In the eyes of the state you are unmarried if you don't get the license* regardless of whether you are married in a church. In European countries the civil and religious marriage are often separate ceremonies. For whatever reason the cultural norm in the US is to combine the two.
Given the widespread avoidance of marriage that has become the norm, homosexuals may be the only people who get licenses in 20 years anyway. I don't see much point in continuing with an immoral licensing scheme that is quickly going the way of the dodo.
(*a few states recognize common law marriage.)
Been my position for a good many years.
You wanna win?
If you have the ability to change the rules of engagement while still able to achieve and control the outcome then why not.
If the government has the power to sanction and define then remove their ability.
Gays want to “Marry”? Let em but, only under the rubric and authority only feeble minded bureaucrats can conjur up.
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