Nov

25

2003

Meanwhile, back on the farm

Filed Under Politics | 2 Comments

Immediately after posting the link to this morning’s Wall Street Journal editorial at right, I read E.J. Dionne’s own analysis of the Medicare drug benefit bill that passed Congress yesterday. It contained this gem:

While Clinton and Frank admire Kennedy, both think he “made a mistake,” as Frank put it, in thinking a real compromise would emerge from the current system. “I think we started down this slope in June,” Clinton said, referring to the vote on the earlier bill, which she opposed and Kennedy favored. Clinton had predicted that the already inadequate drug benefit in that bill would be weakened by Republicans in subsequent negotiations.
That’s right, we now have a two-party system comprised of “the big spenders”, and the “spend even more!” big spenders. I’m getting a sinking feeling about this.

EDIT: HA! I didn’t read far enough down. Dionne’s column concentrates on the idea that the Democrats are wimps who let the more disciplined Republicans run roughshod all over them. A case in point:

Breaux and Baucus were the only two Democrats allowed to negotiate the Medicare bill with the Republicans, House Democrats having been totally excluded. Would Republicans have put up with such an arrangement?
Dionne has apparently not be updated on the fact that the Democrats killed the Energy bill because several Republican Senators campaigned hard against it – you guessed it, on the grounds it wasn’t fiscally responsible. The really ironic part is the Republicans who fought the Energy bill were the more liberal of the Republicans in the Senate, not the conservatives. Has the world turned totally upside-down?

Nov

20

2003

Conservative he ain’t

Filed Under Lies, Corruption and Scandals | Comments Off

Andrew Sullivan attests he is not “somehow less of a human being”. I’ve never said he is less than a human being. But just because he believes his “sexual orientation” is a part of his genome doesn’t mean he has the right to dictate my morality to me.

“Wait a second”, you say. “Isn’t that the other way around? Aren’t YOU the one dictating morality?”

As a matter of fact, I am. The old saying that “you can’t legislate morality” is a lie of the first magnitude peddled by secularists and liberals for years as a way to subvert the power of the majority to do what it has every right to do. ALL laws are a statement of the state’s morality, from abortion to welfare. Name any law that is NOT an expression of the morality (the “code of good conduct”) of the society, and I’ll change my thinking, but the fact is that whatever the state codifies in law is by definition a sanction by the society of a given value judgement, or a proscription against one. So when supporters of gay marriage say they have a right to marriage, they are saying the people have no say in setting their own standards for their society, in fact there ought never be any standards for any society. My political science professor in college described that as the definition of “anarchy”, but I prefer to call it “chaos”.

While I’m on the subject, I should note that this is all a very appropriate discussion here, under the watchful gaze of Mr. Lincoln. One of the most atrocious claims by the gay rights crowd is their attempt to equate their crusade with the civil rights struggle of black Americans. Nothing could be more heinous to the sensibilities of the American people than to make this claim. Why? Because of all our laws, the one most enshrined as the codification of the American morality is called The Constitution of the United States. The liberals twist the meaning of our sacred document by invoking the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, written specifically to protect men and women whose skin color was different the right to decide for themselves what was in their own hearts. The equal protection clause is not a free license to sanction any conduct, any action one thinks should be legalized, even an activity that one might be predisposed to by gene structure. For those who need an example, it’s quite possible (though I’d think not probable) that one could be genetically predisposed to some other activity the public finds distasteful, like kleptomania. Does this mean that we must hand over our property to anyone who steals it?

This issue is clearly outside the scope of the equal protection clause as it was written, and despite a margin of one judge in Massachusetts, it still is. Under another of our Amendments, the power to define marriage is a power “reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Nov

20

2003

The meaning of it all – almost

Filed Under Religion | Leave a Comment

I’ve noticed a disturbing and quite annoying trend. Some people – such as the President of the United States – say Islam is “a religion of peace”, then other people – such as the justifiably angry people at littlegreenfootballs – make fun of the term, then the cycle repeats. What’s annoying is that last part, where nobody confronts the disconnect and we just repeat the process of not finding where the problem is.

Larry Elder has finally given us a glimse into this void by posting an interview with journalist Robert Spencer at WorldNetDaily. Spencer fills in the gap by describing where it is that we find the differences between the radical Islam we’re at war with and the more moderate strain that occupies the mosques of the West, including many of those in the United States. He still doesn’t address the core theology that would explain how the moderates have the justification to igore the more violent parts of the Quran (essential if any of us is ever going to have an intelligent argument with those poor muslims who aren’t predisposed to violence but don’t know better), but at least we now have a context that non-muslims can use to ask the right questions.

Nov

1

2003

Dancing on both ends of a two-headed pin

Filed Under Law and Ethics | Comments Off

Is it time to fight fire with fire? Allen E. Parker Jr. thinks so. The human-rights lawyer is trying to reverse Roe v. Wade by invoking an obscure part of the law that allows a plaintiff to sue to have a previous ruling in his favor reversed.

Parker believes Doe and Roe were wrongly decided and that there is a promising way to challenge them using the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FCRP) that govern federal trials. Parker

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