Commentary

How would the legalization of same-sex marriage affect your liberty?

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Let me just quickly review how traditional marriage supporters are being treated in the prop 8 trial by Judge Walker. ECM sent me this article from National Review.

Excerpt:

Take, for example, Walker’s resort to procedural shenanigans and outright illegality in support of his fervent desire to broadcast the trial, in utter disregard of (if not affirmatively welcoming) the harassment and abuse that pro-Prop 8 witnesses would reasonably anticipate.

[…]Take the incredibly intrusive discovery, grossly underprotective of First Amendment associational rights, that Walker authorized into the internal communications of the Prop 8 sponsors…

[…]Take Walker’s insane and unworkable inquiry into the subjective motivations of the more than seven million Californians who voted in support of Prop 8.

But the thing I want to focus on is the way that same-sex marriage would reduce the liberties of people who believe in traditional marriage, because this is something that is never discussed.

Consider this article from Jewish scholar Dennis Prager about the effects on your liberties that would occur if same-sex marriage became the law of the land.

Excerpt:

Outside of the privacy of their homes, young girls will be discouraged from imagining one day marrying their prince charming — to do so would be declared “heterosexist,” morally equivalent to racist. Rather, they will be told to imagine a prince or a princess. Schoolbooks will not be allowed to describe marriage in male-female ways alone. Little girls will be asked by other girls and by teachers if they want one day to marry a man or a woman.

The sexual confusion that same-sex marriage will create among young people is not fully measurable. Suffice it to say that, contrary to the sexual know-nothings who believe that sexual orientation is fixed from birth and permanent, the fact is that sexual orientation is more of a continuum that ranges from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality. Much of humanity — especially females — can enjoy homosexual sex. It is up to society to channel polymorphous human sexuality into an exclusively heterosexual direction — until now, accomplished through marriage. But that of course is “heterosexism,” a bigoted preference for man-woman erotic love, and therefore to be extirpated from society.

Any advocacy of man-woman marriage alone will be regarded morally as hate speech, and shortly thereafter it will be deemed so in law.

Companies that advertise engagement rings will have to show a man putting a ring on a man’s finger — if they show only women fingers, they will be boycotted just as a company having racist ads would be now.

Films that only show man-woman married couples will be regarded as antisocial and as morally irresponsible as films that show people smoking have become.

Traditional Jews and Christians — i.e. those who believe in a divine scripture — will be marginalized. Already Catholic groups in Massachusetts have abandoned adoption work since they will only allow a child to be adopted by a married couple as the Bible defines it — a man and a woman.

Anyone who advocates marriage between a man and a woman will be morally regarded the same as racist. And soon it will be a hate crime.

You can already see it happening in many places. Just this week Dr. J blogged about how Princeton University promotes or sponsors LGBT speakers who advocate for open marriage, but they won”t promote or support a student group that favors abstinence.

Comments will be strictly moderated in keeping with Obama’s hate crimes law.

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Videos

Five videos on Thomas Sowell’s most difficult book

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“A Conflict of Visions” is the most difficult Thomas Sowell book I ever read. So I hope these five videos from the Hoover Institute at Stanford University will give you all of the benefits without so much of the hard work.

Here’s a little written summary to get you started.

Excerpt:

In “A Conflict of Visions”, Thomas Sowell proposed that the fundamental difference between the policies of the left and the right derive from their respective views of human nature.

The left sees man in general as perfectly malleable. It sees every individual’s problems as being caused by society as a whole. Criminal behavior under this theory is merely a response to injustice; poverty is a condition brought on by greed; depression, drunkenness and illness are all seen as a fault of the medical system or our general “awareness”. Since individual problems are the fault of the whole of society, the solution must be to fix society by massive government intervention.

People on the right take an inverse view of the situation. Conservatives believe in individual responsibility. This means, if someone commits murder, he is bad. If someone is poor he has declined to take advantage of opportunities manifest within a free market system. If someone is uneducated, he has not worked hard enough to secure education for himself. This attitude among conservatives means that the perceived solution is not to change society in a general way but to get government out of the business of regulating the people in mass and making them take responsibility for their actions in particular. Social man then is not malleable, but the individual can be guided by market forces.

And here are the videos.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

If you’re interested in learning how the world really works, you can’t do much better than Tom Sowell.

News

Moderate George Will loves Paul Ryan’s plan for economic recovery

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Rep. Paul Ryan

Editorial from the Press Telegram. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Ryan would eliminate taxes on interest, capital gains, dividends and death.The corporate income tax, the world’s second highest, would be replaced by an 8.5 percent business consumption tax. Because this would be about half the average tax burden that other nations place on corporations, U.S. companies would instantly become more competitive – and more able and eager to hire.

Medicare and Social Security would be preserved for those currently receiving benefits, or becoming eligible in the next 10 years (those 55 and older today). Both programs would be made permanently solvent.

Universal access to affordable health care would be guaranteed by refundable tax credits ($2,300 for individuals, $5,700 for families) for purchasing portable coverage in any state. As persons under 55 became Medicare eligible, they would receive payments averaging $11,000 a year, indexed to inflation and pegged to income, with low-income people receiving more support.

Ryan’s plan would fund medical savings accounts from which low-income people would pay minor out-of-pocket medical expenses. All Americans, regardless of income, would be allowed to establish MSAs – tax-preferred accounts for paying such expenses.

Ryan’s plan would allow workers under 55 the choice of investing more than one-third of their current Social Security taxes in personal retirement accounts similar to the Thrift Savings Plan long available to, and immensely popular with, federal employees. This investment would be inheritable property, guaranteeing that individuals will never lose the ability to dispose every dollar they put into these accounts.

Ryan would raise the retirement age. If, when Congress created Social Security in 1935, it had indexed the retirement age (then 65) to life expectancy, today the age would be in the mid-70s. The system was never intended to do what it is doing – subsidizing retirements that extend from one-third to one-half of retirees’ adult lives.

My last post on George Will is here: Moderate George Will lauds the virtues of Michele Bachmann. He’s actually quite moderate, not at all a conservative, so this is very interesting.

ECM also send me this article from the American Spectator.

Excerpt:

Ever since his back and forth with President Obama during last week’s question time at the Republican retreat, Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap for America’s Future” has been gaining attention as a plan that the Congressional Budget Office has projected would actually solve our nation’s long-term entitlement crisis.

[…]“The lower budget deficits under your proposal would result in much less federal debt than under the alternative fiscal scenario and thereby a much more favorable macroeconomic outlook,” CBO writes in page 14 of its analysis of the Ryan plan.

CBO projects “real gross national product per person would be about 70 percent higher in 2058 under the proposal.” But after 2058, the CBO’s model completely breaks down when trying to project current trends, “because deficits become so large and unsustainable that the model cannot calculate their effects.” By contrast, the model shows the Ryan plan continuing to achieve economic growth in the decades that follow. This is demonstrated by the CBO chart below.

So the CBO is backing up Ryan’s calculations.