In this gospel, liberals find both an intellectually plausible explanation for their unhappiness and psychological relief from knowing that they are now on the side of the angels.
How can liberalism — an egregiously false and destructive worldview – be so wildly popular? Granted, some oddballs are attracted to an idea because it's false and destructive, but most liberals are basically normal people. How can tens of millions of regular Joes and Janes be so enthusiastic about legitimizing homosexuality, killing unborn babies and flooding America with unassimilable and hostile foreigners?
A partial answer is that Americans are surrounded from cradle to grave by liberal indoctrination. Granted, isolated pockets of sane thinking — commonly called "conservatism" — do exist. But America, like every society, must have a philosophical system which enables the leaders and the people to understand reality and make decisions. In America, when the leaders articulate their basic beliefs, they usually speak liberalism, albeit sometimes with a conservative accent. And since America's leaders can usually be voted out of power, the conclusion is inescapable: Most Americans support (if only passively) liberalism.
But an atmosphere of liberal indoctrination, although necessary, is not a sufficient explanation of liberalism's iron grip on America. After all, the Soviet Union was even more saturated with propaganda for the ruling ideology (and with threats against those who opposed it) than America is, and yet it was probably never the case that the majority of Russians believed in communism.
No, something else is at work here. To get a hint of the missing and indispensable element, the sine qua non of liberalism's rule, consider an incident I overheard recently on Christian talk radio. A prominent Christian thinker summarized New Atheist Christopher Hitchens as being dead wrong, but "a nice guy."
Christopher Hitchens a nice guy? Given his intense hatred of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and his crusade to rid the world of Christianity (and all other religions), how could any sane Christian describe Hitchens as "nice?" Even Hitchens' fans wouldn't call him "nice;" that makes him sound like a wimp.
What the Christian thinker was hinting at, when expressed more correctly, is that many people find Hitchens appealing on account of his sincere righteous indignation. For Hitchens, opposing religion is not an academic game; it's a matter of life and death. This human vitality is a welcome change from the cynical nihilism that characterizes so much of contemporary public discourse, and many find it appealing.
The basic message of Hitchens, and the rest of the New Atheists (Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, et al), is that religion is evil and the source of most of man's woes over the millennia. This message, in turn, is just a specific case of the more comprehensive message of liberalism, that traditional life – the traditional forms of religion, morality, sex roles, love of one's kin, tribe, race and nation, and so on — is evil. And liberalism's common name for this comprehensive evil is "conservatism."
This, then, is the real source of liberalism's power: It promises liberation from the evil of conservatism, a liberation that comes only through embracing nondiscrimination. Call it the False Gospel of Liberalism.
"Nondiscrimination," of course, has many names: nonjudgmentalism, open-mindedness and multiculturalism being the most common. But the single best description of liberalism's all-purpose cure for what ails us is: Thou Shalt Not Discriminate.
Like the perversion of Christianity that it is, liberalism identifies both man's fundamental problem and the basic solution of that problem. Instead of correctly saying that man's basic problem is sin, liberalism sees conservatism as the root cause of evil in both individuals and societies. And instead of offering repentance and faith in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins, liberalism tells us to stop discriminating.
And since most Americans breathe the intellectual atmosphere of liberalism, they are generally ready to accept liberalism's gospel. In this gospel they find both an intellectually plausible explanation for their unhappiness and psychological relief from knowing that they are now on the side of the angels. And those who repent of their conservatism and come to faith in the liberal gospel are also eager to embrace the new life it offers by dedicating themselves to participating — to a greater or lesser extent — in the great liberal jihad against conservatism.
(Please note that by using that word "jihad," I'm switching religious metaphors. Let's remember that jihad is a strictly Islamic concept. Contrary to what you hear from many anti-Christian propagandists, there is nothing in Christianity even remotely similar to jihad.)
Since man is an inherently religious animal, the famous words of Chesterton are apposite: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing — they believe in anything." The vacuum left by the retreat of Christianity must be filled, and right now, liberalism is the most popular replacement religion. Everybody knows something's deeply wrong with individuals and society, and liberalism supplies understanding, a cure, and satisfying action.
What lessons can conservatives take to heart here? For one, we need to match the liberals' righteous indignation. It's often said that, during debate, he who loses his temper loses the argument. True enough, but he who lacks righteous indignation also loses. The dispute between liberalism and conservatism isn't an academic debate. It's a street fight, carried out with ideas and emotions instead of knives and guns. Although our appeal must be true and our arguments must be valid, if we fight according to the Marquis of Queensbury Rules, we lose. We must impress upon our listeners and readers the danger, the foolishness and the dishonor of liberalism, and the truth, goodness and beauty of conservatism. Given what's at stake — the survival of our nation — nothing less will do.
The other obvious lesson is, don't accept — either tacitly or openly — the liberal false gospel of nondiscrimination. To the average person, "don't discriminate" simply means "be nice." But that's not what it means to liberals, and their understanding rules the day. So what does liberal nondiscrimination really mean?
It means unlimited nondiscrimination. Liberalism contains no principle limiting the imperative to nondiscrimination. Common sense and the fact that every enterprise runs up against reality will limit the demands of liberalism for now. But it has become clear that liberalism is never satisfied. Equal opportunity is not enough, there must be equal results. And all groups and enterprises must have equality throughout: men and women, old and young, the various races, ethnicities and religions, all conceivable groups must be equal, or else our society is unjust.
I recently heard of a lawsuit by the mother of a wheelchair-bound high school student to force the varsity boy's basketball team to allow him to compete. The suit was thrown out, but what will happen the next time such a suit comes up? What principle of liberalism would forever forbid wheelchair-bound persons from competing with the fully-abled? Answer: There is no such principle.
And note that the forced integration of the wheelchair-bound with the fully-abled would be the destruction of basketball, and its replacement with something radically different.
Liberals are committed to nondiscrimination, and they mean business. Normal people assume that nobody would be so foolish as to carry it to extremes, and most contemporary liberals are careful not to push their program too fast — lest the frog realize he's being boiled — but I defy the reader to identify a liberal leader articulating any principled (as opposed to ad hoc) limit on nondiscrimination. Liberalism really is Nondiscrimination Uber Alles.
And please note: Unlimited nondiscrimination is unlimited destruction. Under the banner of nondiscrimination, liberals are literally destroying America. Not in the sense of turning her into a howling wilderness devoid of human beings, but instead changing her so radically that continuity with the America of the past is on the verge of being decisively ruptured. Liberals are radically changing America's morality, her religion, her laws, customs and pastimes, even her ethnic makeup. And if everything significant has changed, has not the old come to an end?
One can easily find examples of unjust discrimination. But liberalism does not say that unjust discrimination must be abolished. It says all discrimination must end. Liberalism demands indiscriminate nondiscrimination.
No, conservatives, let us decisively reject the basic principle of the Left. Some discrimination is necessary.
For "discrimination" does not mean "being cruel." It means "understanding, acknowledging and acting on differences that matter." We must discriminate between male and female, between child and adult, between criminal and law-abiding, between citizen and foreigner, between productive and lazy, between knowledge and ignorance, between the noble and the base, between the beautiful and the ugly, between the true and the false, because in every one of these dichotomies, the two things differ in important ways. Failing to discriminate is failing to understand reality and to do what is right.
And let us speak with a persuasive and righteous indignation that will impress the undecided. The survival of our nation is at stake.
Great discussion, but you’ve all gotten a little off track as the authors’ thesis isn’t that Liberals think religion is the source of all evil, but that the primary manifesto of liberalism revolves around non-discrimination, taken to its extreme at all political levels of society. Painted in the extreme, as it was in the article, its ridicules, and the article comes much closer to describing collectivism or communism than modern liberalism.
The term ‘Progressive’ in current vernacular is a recent development, having more to do with Conservatives’ success in equating the term ‘liberal’ with ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’ – terms that do not describe the modern liberal – than any real connection to the Progressives of earlier era.
One could draw a continuum from modern liberalism, through classical liberalism to libertarianism and not encounter any of the extremist ideas of government invasiveness recommended in the above text. The liberal basis for equality rests in the assumption of ‘equality under the law.’ But any slide into the socialist territory described above is broken by the other major tenet of modern liberalism – the one shared by all other liberal philosophies, but not shared by the extremes of Marxism, fascism, any forms of statism, militarism, monarchy or conservatism – is the one that fits on many a bumper sticker: Question Authority.
Not Kill Authority, not defy authority. Question.
Transparency is a buzzword of the current administration because a modern liberal believes a citizen has a right to see and question what his government is doing. Secrecy and arguments from authority are hallmarks of conservative rule because one major difference between liberals and conservatives is the extent to which they are trained up to question or blindly follow those in authority.
If you read the Dawkins quote beyond his use of the word ‘evil’ you can see that this exactly what he is talking about: if religion is used as an instrument to keep people from questioning their leaders, their leaders sometimes do evil things – and he lists the Crusades, the Inquisition and modern Jihadists – not modern Christians – as examples.
One of the peeves of the Left at the whole ‘liberal fascism’ meme is that it deliberately obscures the defining characteristic of fascism – other than enforcement through violence: its’ dependence on an all powerful leader. Now, for years Conservatives faced unfair comparisons to fascists also, based primarily on their coincident reverence for authority, so perhaps this is payback – but it does nothing to illuminate the discussion.
Conservatives like to pretend that liberalism is a religion, I think, because following a rigid dogma is the only way they know how to make sense of the world, so they imagine liberals must have a similar construct of hierarchy. Liberalism is much more concerned with adapting to circumstances on the ground – and solving problems in a fair and equitable way that at least attempts to live up to the words “Created Equal” – than trying to align themselves with some rigid, outdated, methodology.
Chasm:
“Liberalism is much more concerned with adapting to circumstances on the ground – and solving problems in a fair and equitable way that at least attempts to live up to the words “Created Equal” – than trying to align themselves with some rigid, outdated, methodology.”
What never occurs to liberals is to let people solve their “problems” by themselves. Every perceived social “problem” must be elevated to the government. But, the difficulty with our system of representative self-government, as liberals see it, is that everyone gets to vote, with the result that the views of the unenlightened masses are likely to prevail, instead of liberals’. This must be prevented as much as possible, and so the preferred approach is to resort to the courts, preferably the Supreme Court, where they can be relatively certain that their vision will be the one imposed.
The claim most often used is that equal results for all must be obtained by any input-output social arrangement, so the modern liberal is a radical egalitarian. Examples abound, but my favorite is the “GATE Closing plan”:
VISTA [CA] – Parents of Latino students at Vista’s most ethnically diverse school [Lincoln Middle School] are incensed over a campaign by other parents to preserve an honors program there. … The proposal to dismantle the Gifted and Talented Education, or GATE, program at the school is supported by the Latino parents, opposed by parents of the GATE students. … “All students should be treated equally,” Latino parents said in a letter to the board and district administrators. “We believe that the school should not create differences between students who know more and students who know less.” [Emphasis added]
San Diego Union-Tribune
May 19, 2005
Since it’s a lot easier to dumb-down smart students than it is to smart-up dumb ones, the only way to make students “equal” is to take away the rights of the smart ones – in this case, a quality education. And that’s the way it is with liberalism throughout the whole spectrum of human activity. The real problem never gets solved because its solution violates some postulate of liberal thought that usually has never been proven and must not be challenged on pain of death.
A close second favorite is described in “The Economic Organization of a POW Camp” by R.A. Radford. At the beginning of each month, Allied POWs were given “CARE” packages of roughly equal contents. Through trade, the well-being of individual prisoners and that of the overall camp was thereby lifted. If a liberal were to be injected into this scenario, he would have immediately [if not sooner] begin to decry the “inequality” and “injustice” of such consequences as one prisoner having two chocolate bars instead of one, and another having two packs of cigarettes instead of one. If there is a better example of peoples’ contempt for equality and their desire for inequality, I wish someone would tell me.
God made people unequal in abilities, wants, and needs; but liberals, seeing themselves as gods, it would seem, must remedy His mistakes – someone having to dispose of the trash notwithstanding.
Re: “The liberal basis for equality rests in the assumption of ‘equality under the law.’”
This is the original basis. It is not the one in use today.
Re: “But any slide into the socialist territory described above is broken by the other major tenet of modern liberalism …”
How does this follow?
Re: “…one major difference between liberals and conservatives is the extent to which they are trained up to question or blindly follow those in authority.”
A man once had a bumper sticker that read, “Question Authority” and was shocked – SHOCKED, mind you – when his own kid questioned HIS authority.
I disagree with this attempt to define the endpoints of the liberal-conservative spectrum. In essence, it is claiming that the liberal end is of a moderate, “middle-of-the-road” character where in fact it is more aptly described as revolutionary defiance. This revolutionary defiance is the Left endpoint of today’s liberalism. To get a sense of this, consider conspiracy theories, an obsession and pre-occupation not just of the most extreme liberals, but those liberals who could be described as moderate [such as groups like “Scholars for 9/11 Truth” and “Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth” who believe there was a conspiracy, for example].
“…A clue to the real attraction of conspiracy theories, I would suggest, lies in the rhetoric of theorists themselves, which is filled with self-congratulatory descriptions of those who accept such theories as ‘willing to think,’ ‘educated,’ ‘independent-minded,’ and so forth, and with invective against the ‘uninformed’ and ‘unthinking’ ‘sheeple’ who ‘blindly follow authority.’ The world of the conspiracy theorist is Manichaean: either you are intelligent, well-informed, and honest, and therefore question all authority and received opinion; or you accept what popular opinion or an authority says and therefore must be stupid, dishonest, and ignorant. There is no third option. … The absurd idea that to be intelligent, scientific, and intellectually honest requires a distrust for all authority per se and a contempt for the opinions of the average person, has so deeply permeated the modern Western consciousness that conspiratorial thinking has for many people come to seem the rational default position. … Where phenomena remote from everyday human experience are concerned – the large-scale structure of space/time, the microscopic realm of molecules, atoms, and so forth – it is perhaps not surprising that human beings should for long periods of time have gotten things wrong. But where everyday matters are concerned – where opinions touch on our basic understanding of human nature and the facts about ordinary social interaction – it is very likely that they would not, in general, get things wrong. … The belief that extremism in the attack on authority is no vice has a powerful appeal even for suit-wearing journalists and media executives (especially if they are liberals), even if they have too much sense to follow it out consistently.” – “We the Sheeple? Why Conspiracy Theories Persist”, by Edward Feser
“Never tear down a fence until you learn why it was put up.” – Old African proverb
One of my high school teachers told the class [over 50 years ago, BTW] that if anyone believed he had an original thought, to go to the library and research it out. One student did and came back with his head hanging. What he believed to be an original thought turned out to have originated with the ancient Greeks.
It takes a significant amount of arrogance for one to believe a single generation has better solutions to the world’s problems than the collective knowledge gained through 200 generations of Western thought. What liberals don’t consider can aptly be described by historian Paul Johnson: “The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in numerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.” How many liberals who “question” authority have bothered to research their “glib assumptions” before taking to the streets to tear down a “fence” they perceive as a social “problem”, especially one of “inequality”?
Chasm,
Probably true. But hang around here long enough and you’ll find that essays can generate some of the most interesting threads; and usually in a direction the author would have never though of.
I’m not certain I understand you statement; “One could draw a continuum from modern liberalism, through classical liberalism to libertarianism and not encounter any of the extremist ideas of government invasiveness recommended in the above text.”
Modern Liberalism stresses the interdependence of human beings, and the need for a government that promotes freedom by providing health care, education, living wages, and fight the forces of prejudice and ignorance through the promotion of equal outcomes for all.
Classic Liberalism It is committed to the ideal of limited government and liberty of individuals including freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly, and free markets. The two could not be separated by a wider gulf.
I find your; “Conservatives like to pretend that liberalism is a religion, I think, because following a rigid dogma is the only way they know how to make sense of the world, so they imagine liberals must have a similar construct of hierarchy.” Comment most interesting. Liberalism, or more accurately Progressivism Is a Religion. It has commandments, dogma, sacraments, and prophets. An example of each would be;
A good example of Progressivism’s Commandments would be Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. I know, I know; there are twelve not ten, but you get the idea.
An example of dogma: All policy must be couched within euphemism. Strict adherence to this precept is required in order to make unpalatable policy seem innocuous; to get the average person to accept the change as so minor as to not constitute anything to be concerned over.
Want an example of a Progressive Sacrament? That’s just too easy; abortion.
Two Progressive prophets come immediately to mind Al Gore and Barack Obama.
Regarding your close; ” Liberalism is much more concerned with adapting to circumstances on the ground – and solving problems in a fair and equitable way that at least attempts to live up to the words “Created Equal…” might I suggest some light reading? Try Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. http://www.tnellen.com/westside/harrison.pdf
There is a more in depth analysis of the Religion of Progressivism posted on IC today.
Bill,
I think the key to our misunderstanding, generally and your confusion over my remark specifically revolves around the concept of “equal outcomes for all”
I did not use this phrase, but it seems to be a theme both in your remarks and the thoughts of the author. Now, I have no doubt that you could run rings around me with the quotes of intellectuals (like Saul Freakin Alinsky!) and examples where this “outcome” strategy is arguably employed. And perhaps debate on this point just illustrates my own break with what you claim is the ultimate ‘doctrine’ of liberalism – a break which puts me slightly closer to your Classical Liberal camp in light of my personal dedication and honor of Constitutional rule. I am specifically drawing that exact distinction: that there is a far-far-left faction that may see outcomes as the goal, but they are a very tiny and powerless minority. The vast majority of the normal, modern liberals that I know and talk too are much more focused on, just as you say, seeking “equal treatment and opportunity under the law.
And don’t try and kid me: to pretend that the meager social safety net we provide is anything like a vast downward re-distribution of wealth is just laughable in light of the fact that the last 10 years has consisted of nothing but a continual sucking of wealth upwards. There has literally not been such a wealth disparity in this country since the Gilded Age the conservatives oh so wistfully yearn for.
I do not know why conservatives want to return to the 19th Century, and I really don’t see what the appeal is to even a classical liberal.
Pre-child labor law, pre-minimum wage, no safety net, creationist teaching, pre-interstate highway system, Jim Crow America does not seem like a place I’d like to live, but that’s just me. Conservatives are now openly telling us that’s where they want to take us (on this blog even), what’s in that for a Classical Liberal like you?
The typical liberal not so much concerned with destroying conservatism, nor even religion as much as fighting against what we see as the real threat to our Constitution and republic: the rise of corporate oligarchy and their corruption and takeover of government. It’s not even that we oppose capitalism or wish to see corporates destroyed (as I’m sure you believe) as mush as we’d like corporations to be more responsible, another thing liberals think conservatives would agree on in principle.
To give you an idea of the imbalance, and also why some liberals think conservatives (especially the populist ones) are fighting the wrong enemy in us when we should be uniting against this threat, consider that video I posted a link too on another thread (http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/765). Here is a liberal activist, with a mission to make us a healthier nation, and he is forced to literally beg Corporate America to be more responsible with our food.
And Saul Alinsky? Seriously? If that is the working definition of “Modern Liberal/Progressive” than I think we have definitely determined that conservatives are still fighting the Dirty F**king Hippies. I can tell you categorically that fewer 1 in 100,000 liberals over the age of 40 have ever heard of Alinsky, much less read him (I haven’t), and that figure drops to zero for those born after his death. That sort of thought just isn’t present in any ‘on the ground’ liberal thought. You’re fighting the wrong enemy.
Your ‘euphemism’ assertion must certainly be a case of projection, as you can’t seriously believe that conservative leaders haven’t mastered the art of doublespeak, what with ‘No Child Left Behind’ (totally unfunded, left everyone behind; ‘The Patriot Act,’ (undermined 4th Amendment protections); ‘The Clear Skies’ initiative; the list goes on.
As for your ‘sacrament,’ support for a woman’s right to make her own medical decisions doesn’t come down from on high, as a mission developed to destroy human life, but comes from our memories. Liberals remember the horrors of back-ally abortions. They can see with their very own eyes what happens when zealous officials attempt a moral crusade, as in the case of the Kansas AG who, in his zeal to bust Dr. Tiller and PPH, illegally subpoenaed and handled patient medical records and resorted to literally spying on civilian patients. We can easily predict what will happen should states make abortion illegal – lives will be lost while even medically necessary abortions are litigated in the courts, given that the pressure from both prosecutors looking to fulfill their crusade and hospitals seeking to limit legal liability will force all women to get court permission before any kind of abortion is performed. You know this is true. The end result is more government intrusion and supervision of our lives, something you’d think conservatives would see, but they don’t like to argue the ‘on the ground’ end result of their obsessions.
Gore and Obama as prophets? Pu-leeze. Gore was just as whiny and annoying to us back in his PMRC days as he is to you now. We may appreciate his advocacy in ringing the alarm on climate change, but that’s because we know what science is telling us (and we do trust science) and it’s nice to have a public ally. And Obama is no more a far-left socialist radical than David Broder. He takes a lot of flack from his left on issues of constitutional importance, such as his refusal to disavow many of the presidential power-grabs initiated under Bush/Cheney. The guy gave away without a fight the liberal positions on HCR, and accepted all kinds of counterproductive conservative ideas – and still can’t pass the dam bill. Liberal Prophet My Ass.
Sedenaman,
Like Bill and many conservatives, I think you are tilting at straw men and giving way to much power to a far-far left faction.
A couple of things. Fist, it is a historical fact that it’s been conservatives that have waged so hard for voter suppression, and liberals on the side of minority and populist voting rights. Why do you think conservatives hate ACORN so much? Because they register poor voters. You can argue that this creates a Democratic advantage because these voters might be more likely to vote for one, but you can’t argue that keeping the masses from ballot access is a Liberal goal.
Second, if liberals are so sure that they will win arguments at the Supreme level (and I assure you, with the Roberts Court, they aren’t), doesn’t that indicate that they believe their ideas are Constitutionally correct?
And doesn’t it undermine your case a bit when your “favorite” case of liberal overreach involves an obscure civil lawsuit brought by some idiot parents? I can assure that not only is there very limited support for such an action among actual liberals, but I can guarantee that this case has never been a liberal rallying cry.
It is the one in use today, at least by all the mainstream liberal I know. That’s what I’m telling you.
Then this man was a conservative with a used car. I’m sure my parents were quite proud the day I could make my case in a reasoned and intelligent way, as opposed to whining like a child.
I’d counter that it takes a significant amount of obstinacy to believe that 19th Century, or even 1rst Century ideas are sufficient to solve the myriad of 21rst Century problems. That’s not to deny that there aren’t moral lessons from the past – but I don’t think Jesus had much to say about derivative trading and asset bubbles.
Sedonaman,
One more point to illustrate what I mean and regarding your fondness for the VISTA school case. There is no mainstream leftist thought that advocates breaking up merit programs. In the debate over improving education, both liberals and conservatives do actually have competing cutting-edge solutions: charter schools on the left, and vouchers on the right (besides abolishing the Dept of Ed altogether, I mean). Now, the voucher deal is mostly designed to funnel money out of the public system and into private schools and mostly fails to achieve overall educational improvements whereas charter schools allow for local school autonomy from the district to devise curriculum and hire faculty (and works best with a high level of parental input). I won’t belabor educational policy, but the point being that those are the ideas being put forth from either side, and not some dream of mediocrity and dumbing down. It’s the conservatives who are against teaching proper science in our schools, lest we forget.
“Fist, it is a historical fact that it’s been conservatives that have waged so hard for voter suppression, and liberals on the side of minority and populist voting rights.”
False.
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2008/06/12/100-republican-firsts-for-leftwing-dummies/
Chasm:
“Like Bill and many conservatives, I think you are tilting at straw men and giving way to much power to a far-far left faction.”
Then how is it that so many of their ideas permeate society? Take affirmative action for example. Now here is a liberal social idea that started where all liberal social ideas start: the academy. No one wants to appear unenlightened, so they follow what the academy preaches. Judges are no different, so they imposed it on the rest of us.
“…it is a historical fact that it’s been conservatives that have waged so hard for voter suppression, and liberals on the side of minority and populist voting rights.”
Liberals have done more to suppress minorities than the Klan ever dreamed possible, and they did it with minority complicity under the guise of “We are for you”.
“Why do you think conservatives hate ACORN so much? Because they register poor voters.”
No. Because ACORN’s goal is to bring down the system of democracy and capitalism. They are the embodiment of the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm who can’t produce any wealth themselves but want to control all that is produced by others. If this is not true, why do they always oppose tax cuts?
“You can argue that this creates a Democratic advantage because these voters might be more likely to vote for one, but you can’t argue that keeping the masses from ballot access is a Liberal goal.”
I agree with you here. In fact, liberals are so much in favor of the masses having access to the ballots that they even want the dead to vote, and Disney cartoon characters to vote. The one exception here is they try to suppress the military vote.
And I’m glad to see you equate Democrats with liberals.
“Second, if liberals are so sure that they will win arguments at the Supreme level (and I assure you, with the Roberts Court, they aren’t), doesn’t that indicate that they believe their ideas are Constitutionally correct?”
They might believe that, but it doesn’t make it true. If their ideas are Constitutionally correct, why will liberals do anything to keep a conservative off the bench? Look what they did to Janice Rogers Brown. The fact that they “borked” her is proof that their being a help for minorities is all lies.
Also, how do you explain split votes? If an idea is “Constitutionally correct,” then the vote would be unanimous one way or the other in every case. Justice Taney in Dred Scott “knew in his heart that slavery was constitutional.” It was unconstitutional because it violated some higher principle, like man is created in the image and likeness of God [an ancient idea, BTW] and therefore all are created equal.
If you are all for the masses having access to voting, I presume that it is so that voters can express their desires through their elected representatives. But what good does it do if democracy is defeated by liberal courts? Liberals, who can’t get their programs through the legislative bodies, claim the Constitution should be interpreted “according to society’s evolving standards.” But who decides what society’s evolving standards are? Elitists who have never been, much less lived, outside the ivory towers of the Washington/Boston corridor, or the people of the entire nation through their elected representatives?
“And doesn’t it undermine your case a bit when your “favorite” case of liberal overreach involves an obscure civil lawsuit brought by some idiot parents?”
It is disingenuous to require that I list them all.
“I can assure that not only is there very limited support for such an action among actual liberals, but I can guarantee that this case has never been a liberal rallying cry.”
Democrats have been running the public school systems in this country for over 50 years, and since you’ve already established that Democrat equals liberal, we’ve proven the support is far from limited. The teachers union is one of the Democratic Party’s war machines. In exchange for teacher union support, Democrat politicians have fought tooth-and-nail to keep vouchers from becoming a reality, and education reform in general. I think conservatives have this wrong though. Vouchers will not make dumb schools smart, but rather smart schools dumb by letting the public school riff-raff into private schools. Plus, it would give the ACLU carte blanche to wreak havoc on them.
Also, teachers are force to pay dues that support the Democrats, whether the individual teacher is a Democrat or not. Now they have passed a law that denies union members a secret ballot in their elections. Doesn’t sound very [small “d”] democratic or [classical] liberal to me.
“It is the one in use today, at least by all the mainstream liberal I know.”
This sounds eerily like, “I don’t know how he won; I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
I’m telling you I disagree.
“Then this man was a conservative with a used car.”
You got a reference link?
“I’m sure my parents were quite proud the day I could make my case in a reasoned and intelligent way, as opposed to whining like a child.”
I would describe this as conservative, certainly not liberal. Your ideas do not magically mutate just because you vote for Democrats.
“I’d counter that it takes a significant amount of obstinacy to believe that 19th Century, or even 1rst Century ideas are sufficient to solve the myriad of 21rst Century problems.”
The burden of proof is on the advocate of social change to justify what he is advocating. It is insufficient for the advocate to ask “why not?” or to invoke the claim that a vast amount of time has rendered past knowledge irrelevant. [See “ancient idea” above.] What makes human nature today different from what it was 2,000 years ago?
“That’s not to deny that there aren’t moral lessons from the past – but I don’t think Jesus had much to say about derivative trading and asset bubbles.”
He didn’t have to; it had already been said over 1,200 years before Him: “Thou shalt not steal.”
MM first: I know from the other thread that your reading comprehension isn’t all that great so I’ll go slow. You’ll notice (although I guess you didn’t) that I used the word ‘conservative.’ It’s right in your post. The specific reason I used the word ‘conservative’ is because before the Civil Rights era of the 1960′s, many people, especially in the South, who pushed for things like literacy tests for voters were of course Democrats. This is basic American political history. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of ’64 and the Voting Rights Act of ’65, enabled against the vociferous objections and filibusters by a block of Southern Democrats, Nixon actively exploited the schism between Northern Liberal Dems and the conservative Southern block, calling it the “Southern Strategy.” I hope I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. This flip of Southern Dems to Republicans is well known, and responsible for the state of our electoral map.
And now, yes, the Republicans are far more invested in voter suppression than Democrats. Witness the voter purge list scandal from the 2004 election and Bush under staffing and undermining the Voting Rights Section of the Justice Dept, one of the sub-scandals of the AG firing scandal. And speaking of literacy tests, wasn’t that Republican conservative Tom Tancredo advocating for them a week or so back? It’s understandable, I mean, if minorities continue to vote with Dems at current percentages, the Reps are overwhelmed by demographics alone in a few years. Statistically, and you can comb the fivethirtyeight.com archives yourself, Republicans are just done as a national party unless they either bring minorities into the tent (hint: you guys are missing the Asians. They are naturally conservative, but they still break our way. Ask yourselves why that might be) or else play the turnout game – energizing their base and demoralizing the Dem camp and suppressing votes wherever possible.
And what, exactly, I’m supposed to infer from a list of black Republicans and things Republicans have done in the past, I don’t know. Your argument seems to be: because the entire eastern seaboard was a Republican stronghold in 1960, Condi Rice was Sec State and we kinda swooned over Colin Powell once upon a time, Republicans couldn’t possibly want to suppress votes. Doesn’t compute, sorry.
And Sedonaman,
I’m not really qualified to debate the whole affirmative action thing. I realize it’s a bugaboo for you guys, though I’ve never really understood why. I mean, I get that it clashes with your idea of what fairness is supposed to look like, but I guess I’ve never seen the all pervasive negative effects that you perceive. I think there are bigger problems to address.
I’m sorry, I don’t know what this means. I’ll need specific examples. Mine are above, in the post to MM.
That’s quite a venomous outburst. Typical of someone who only bathes in the glow of Faux News propaganda. Acorn’s entire operating budget is around $25 million dollars a year. That’s a disappointing bonus for some of our Wall Street Titans. Bill Gates’ jet probably cost more than that. If you believe a tiny organization helping the poor can undermine the entire capitalist system, than you clearly don’t have either much faith in our system nor much of a sense of proportion. I imagine they’ve never come out in favor of tax cuts because it’s not really an issue for most of their clients – they are already so poor they don’t pay much, if any. Why would they waste precious resources on an issue of little concern or help to their clients?
I don’t equate them, though there is some overlap. For future reference: I am a Liberal-Democrat under the Bill Wavering Classification System (BWCS). This is in distinction with Modern Liberals and Progressives, which are defined rather more old school and both to the left of me. Democrats, Classical Liberals, and Libertarians are to my immediate right. Contact Bill for more information.
Judge Brown was eventually confirmed, so I don’t know what your beef is. But she is a perfect example of an argument thread that I’ve not yet been able to articulate. an activist and a corporatist who may agree with you on abortion, but good luck suing Boeing if an airplane falls out of the sky and lands on your wife. Or if your boss sexually harasses you.
This gets to the heart of my bewilderment at your fury at straw liberals when corporatists and their judicial enablers are busy sucking up money and all the power in our government. Wellpoint, Blackwater/Xe, Exxon, News Corp, Goldman-Sachs… these are the ‘people’
(and thanks to the Roberts Court, they are more and more ‘people’ everyday) who hold all the power – not silly liberals (we can’t even get Obama to do what we want!). And these corporate ‘people’ do not care about abortion or affirmative action, but they do care about the votes of the people that do so they can get more judges like Alito, Roberts and yes, Brown – not to ever overturn Roe v Wade, but to issue more like Citizens United.
And pointless too, though I have no doubt that you keep a list of meaningless stupid lawsuits by silly ‘liberals.’ What I’m saying is that these lawsuits are cause celebre for no one but people interested in ridiculing them. There will always be stupid lawsuits, but that’s not indicative of overall liberal thought the way it is when the right files stupid lawsuits, like the And I’ll tell you why it’s stupid: despite the fact they raise plausible Commerce Clause issues (plausible to this Supreme Court anyway) but they utterly fail to show harm, and thus standing to file. Of course, I should bite my tongue if Brown got the case, she’d probably allow it against all precedent. That’s how she rolls.
Believe me, I know ALL about how school districts are run and Teachers Unions – many family members are teachers – though I’m by no means an expert on policy. Admittedly, trying to get change thru unions is like getting a bill through the Senate, but that’s a more a function of how collective bargaining works as a concept, than any innate desire for teachers to screw up education. You can rail against unions, but the truth is, it just wouldn’t be worth going into teaching at all if there wasn’t some security and value. As I understand it, the Charter School concept does cut the influence of tenure by giving more hiring control to the school, but I could be wrong about that.
As for the quote above, you say that like its a bad thing. EFCA is still tied up in congress and besides, the bill doesn’t “take away” the right to a secret ballot – it adds an additional option to the secret ballot called card check, and the ballot to be used is at the discretion of the workers, not management. If you were to ask an actual union member what they thought of card check, they’d tell you it was the unions idea and they were all for it!
Hear, hear!
I’m not sure what happened to the links in that post. There seems to be several sentences that were edited out too. The Leahy link is meant to illustrate the Democratic concerns with Judge Brown’s nomination, and to highlight her judicial flip-flops. The second link, which begins at “And I’ll tell you why…” is a PDF (warning!) of the Thomas More brief filed to overturn the Hate Crimes Law. Sorry for the confusion… I’ll stick with visible URL’s from now on.
To All;
Seems we’ve finally fixed my threading issue:
Equality of outcome is the ultimate goal of progressivism. Whatever your personal belief is, and although we’ve only been trading posts for a short time, you are Left. I have no problem with that; some of my best friends are leftists. Progressivism seeks to harness those on the left. They’ll gladly pull you along as long as your belief system coincides with theirs. More on this later.
You may not be versed in Alinsky; but I assure you that Barack Obama is. I might add here that reading ‘Rules for Radicals’ may give you some insight on a portion of the left that you underestimate; both in numbers and institutional power..
As for; “…my own break with what you claim is the ultimate ‘doctrine’ of liberalism” While II did say; “Modern Liberalism stresses the interdependence of human beings, and the need for a government that promotes freedom by providing health care, education, living wages, and fight the forces of prejudice and ignorance through the promotion of equal outcomes for all.”
Yes, I’ve claimed that equalization was the ultimate doctrine of liberalism. I’ve accused others on this site before of being ‘imprecise’ when they interchangeably use the words democrat, liberal, and progressive. I did say that equalization was the ultimate doctrine of Liberalism as I believe it is. That is imprecise from the standpoint that liberalism is different from progressivism. The ultimate doctrine of Progressivism is the earthly or secular perfection of Man; a much more radical philosophy. Liberalism and Progressivism are radically different ideologies.
While I agree with your statement about ‘equal treatment/opportunity’ under the law; there are decidedly different mechanisms for achieving such. When all is said and done; the law exists to protect the rights of persons. Once again, we must be precise with our terms. Rights are privileges irrevocably coupled to responsibilities. For example, there is a right to drive. The right to travel anywhere in the US 24/7 is irrevocably connected to certain responsibilities. You must license yourself and your vehicle. You must obey traffic regulations. You must carry liability insurance. Violate these laws, any of them, and criminal penalties are imposed. Willfully violate these laws often enough and your privilege may be restricted or revoked.
Now let’s look at marriage. Marriage is a privilege. There is no required certification program (although God knows there should be) and absolutely no criminal punishment or penalty for violating the contract. Support, visitation, the division of assets and other such things are imposed by civil courts during a divorce proceeding. But none of these are codified in law. There’s absolutely nothing anywhere that says violation of the contract to “Honor, Love, Cherish and Obey until death do you part” results in fines, incarceration, restriction, or revocation of exercising your privilege once again. Marriage is a privilege granted by the state, not a ‘right’.
Now we’ll attempt to deal with wealth redistribution. I’ll begin with this question: When was the last time a poor man offered you a job? The creation of wealth allows participation by all. As with anything else; some crawl, some walk, and some run. Should we make the sprinter carry 60 lbs of extra weight so a middle aged non athlete such as myself can keep up? Shall we tax the hell out of someone who has worked for that wealth to assuage the feelings of someone decidedly less successful? People spend their lifetimes moving up and down the earnings ladder.
People do get richer and people get poorer as well. When I was in my twenties, I was earning $3.25 an hour assembling computers on an assembly line. Fifteen years later I was earning six figures as the Director of Quality Assurance for a PCB manufacturer. The job I have now pays @ $35k per year; so I’ve ridden a roller coaster as far as salary is concerned. The difference was we always budgeted money as if I were still assembling computers. Now, we have all we need and most of what we want. I’m 55 and I was actually looking forward to Congress passing health care. I’d have been able to retire! Our investments would have provided a comfortable living, but my earnings would have slid to the point that the government would have subsidized 100% of the insurance cost. I wouldn’t have known how to act! After decades of every entitlement program created by the left missing me, I finally could have got something in return for all the April 15th checks I’ve written over the years.
Now we’ll deal with Saul Alinski and the Progressives in government. Your quotation regarding; “If that is the working definition of “Modern Liberal/Progressive” than I think we have definitely determined that conservatives are still fighting the Dirty F**king Hippies.” Is most apt. Most of those ‘Dirty F**king Hippies’ as you put it are the ones pulling the levers of institutional power in Washington today. Bill Ayers, Van Jones, Carol Browner, Todd Stern, and Kevin Jennings to name just a few: All associates of Barack Obama. These are the 60’s radicals that tried to change the system from outside and failed miserably. So they decided to ‘penetrate that system and alter it from within; a much more successful strategy.
Start digging deep into the backgrounds of these unaccountable advisors and friends of the President and a core connection begins to reveal itself: Either through their educational experience or their later formal affiliations with advocacy groups, one name keeps popping up. Saul Alinsky.
You’ve said; “…that fewer 1 in 100,000 liberals over the age of 40 have ever heard of Alinsky, much less read him (I haven’t), and that figure drops to zero for those born after his death. That sort of thought just isn’t present in any ‘on the ground’ liberal thought. You’re fighting the wrong enemy.” I’m certain you meant under forty so we’ll ignore the typo. You also said; “Your ‘euphemism’ assertion must certainly be a case of projection, as you can’t seriously believe that conservative leaders haven’t mastered the art of doublespeak…”. Agreed, both sides can employ such a strategy, once they learn it. But what side invented that strategy? Saul Alanski not only wrote the rules for radicals in the 70’s he also wrote an associated set called the ethics of power tactics.
Rule #11 – Goals must be phrased in general terms like ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ ‘Of the Common Welfare,’ ‘Pursuit of Happiness,’ or ‘Bread and Peace.” From this morphed the idea of calling tax increases ‘investments’ welfare mothers the ‘losers of life’s lottery’ and abortion ‘choice’. So now we’ve arrived at the choice issue.
Regarding abortion. If it suits you, we’ll break this issue into two parts.
First; let’s discuss the core of the abortion industry. Have you ever heard of Margaret Sanger? She started the American Birth Control League and eventually, Planned Parenthood. Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist. Her other colleagues included avowed and sophisticated racists. One, Lothrop Stoddard, was a Harvard graduate and the author of The Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy. Stoddard was something of a Nazi enthusiast who described the eugenic practices of the Third Reich as “scientific” and “humanitarian.” And Dr. Harry Laughlin, another Sanger associate and board member for her group, spoke of purifying America’s human “breeding stock” and purging America’s “bad strains.” These “strains” included the “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of antisocial whites of the South.”
Not to be outdone by her followers, Margaret Sanger spoke of sterilizing those she designated as “unfit,” a plan she said would be the “salvation of American civilization.: And she also spoke of those who were “irresponsible and reckless,” among whom she included those ” whose religious scruples prevent their exercising control over their numbers.” She further contended that “there is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of these groups should be stopped.” That many Americans of African origin constituted a segment that Sanger considered “unfit” cannot be easily refuted. Google it, see for yourself. Most of the above paragraphs are direct quotes http://www.blackgenocide.org/sanger.html A person who began a movement to deliberately, and with malice of forethought, set out to rid the country of what she defined as the irresponsible, the reckless, and the unfit, is today celebrated as one of the most enlightened ‘progressive’ thinkers of history is enough to send chills up the spine. That you believe this to be an accomplishment of ‘enlightened’ thinking is nothing short of astonishing. Just one personal example of how progressives use liberals to unknowingly forward a much more dangerous agenda.
Second; exactly where in the Constitution is this ephemeral ‘right to privacy’ that was ‘discovered’ to approve Roe vs. Wade? Would you please point out for me the article or amendment? In previous posts you’ve formerly declared yourself a supporter of the Constitution; here’s your opportunity to prove that statement.
Abortion should have always been a ‘states rights’ issue. Regardless of what has been said. Once abortion had been approved by some states, that process would have followed its path. Some states would have allowed unrestricted access to abortion, some would have not only allowed unrestricted access but public funding as well. Other states would have restricted or nullified the procedure. People could have ‘voted’ with their feet.
Abortion advocates could go to abortion friendly states. And Right to Life advocates could have gone to the more restrictive states. That wasn’t good enough for the progressives: Oh no! We are going to forcibly haul all these knuckle-dragging, mouth breathing troglodytes into the 20th century whether they want to come along or not. So much for my religious philosophy which requires that I respect ALL life from conception until natural death. A small group of ‘Sanger supporters’; progressive racist eugenicists on their never-ending mission to perfect Man, hid her true nature from tens of thousands of liberals and feminists, and got them to unknowingly support their agenda of sterilization. I can well understand your determination to support a woman’s right to choose. After all, it was encoded in state law long before the ‘right to privacy’ was discovered, un-written but still lurking, in the ‘penumbras’ of our founding documents
This same classification of people ginned up the crowds during the Obama campaign. We’re a year into his administration and it is obvious to even the most casual observer that he’s ‘not ready for prime time’. He doesn’t even participate in crafting any of the legislation he tries to rally support for. Who actually wrote the Stimulus Bill? That was a Nancy and Harry production; two of the most progressive members of the federal legislature ever elected. Why do you think it turned into such a boondoggle of no jobs but plenty of payoffs to keep union policemen, teachers, and other public service employees on state payrolls?
Al Gore; who for the last decade has been telling anyone that will listen that if we don’t absolutely strangle the greatest economic engine ever conceived by man and transfer most of that wealth to the third world; we’ll all drown by next week! And he almost got away with it too.
We can tie this up nicely by quoting Alinsky’s (I know; you probably REALLY hate this guy by now) ethics of power rule #10
Rule #10 – “You do what you can with what you have and clothe it in moral garments.”
Who cam deny that President Obama’s administration doesn’t have the best interests of the entire planet at heart when urging the passage of HR 2454 otherwise known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. (Talk about doublespeak!)
One might reasonably question just how the doubling of consumer energy costs enhances security. What about the additional cost baked into literally every good and service that the American consumer purchases? What is the economic impact? None of this matters. All that matters is that we, in Nancy Pelosi’s words; “…passed transformational legislation which takes us into the future.” Or Edward Markey’s comment that; “… we can (begin) to say that we are going to send president Obama to Copenhagen in December as the leader of the world on climate change.” So; just how did that whole Copenhagen thingie work out for the ‘Narcissist-in-Chief’? More shenanigans from the progressives hidden in the federal legislature. That Obama doesn’t’ protest any of this demonstrates that he doesn’t believe anyone is exactly hijacking his agenda.
Pardon me for trying to catch up, but there are also references from other persons to affirmative action and ACORN.
Affirmative action, in my mind is an example of the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’. Moat people define good fortune as when preparation meets opportunity. What happened to a student who is thrust into a college education situation for which he/she is unprepared scholastically? They get hammered. There are plenty of avenues for achieving an advanced education in this country. We’ve an outstanding system of community colleges. Lower a students qualifying scores on aptitude tests or grade point because of race; and you are (either intentionally or intentionally) setting that student up to fail by placing him/her against competition they cannot overcome. More often than not, they end up swamped, defeated, and it turns into another story about “The Man keeping me down.”
I got creamed in college. I actually went from a more prestigious university, where I could not keep up, to a community college where the competition was decidedly less intense, and more personal attention could be brought to focus by the staff because of smaller class size. In short, a much better place for me to learn. Not everyone belongs in the Ivy League. Throwing someone into that ‘deep’ water just to satisfy a racial imbalance is doing a disservice to that student.
On voter suppression. If you have to show a valid ID to buy cigarettes, or rent a DVD at Blockbuster; why on God’s Green Earth shouldn’t you have to show proof of identity to vote? That’s all we ask. “But that’s too hard!” Opponents say. “Poor people don’t have ID’s” trying to turn it into a discrimination issue. The 2000 SCOTUS decision in Bush vs. Gore should have settled this long ago. The ruling, if anyone cares to go back and check it out, said, in essence, that there is NO constitutionally guaranteed right to vote in a national election! C’mon people!
Chasm:
You never explained why there are split votes in Supreme Court decisions.
Regarding the media, consider the following observation:
But it doesn’t take rocket science to figure this out, only common sense. Fox news must be doing something right if Øbama hates them. It baffles me why there is anyone with an IQ above room temperature who still swallows the swill of the Leftstream Media.
Faux news indeed.
Hey Bill, Just a few quick things: Of the phrases in Alinsky’s rule 11, you’ll notice only one, “choice,” has even been heard since about 1969. Conceptually though, we know this today as ‘framing,’ and conservatives are masters.
Regarding the right to privacy: The case you’re thinking of is Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the legal right to privacy. I learned about Griswold in 8th grade history (I had a very hip, ex-attorney history teacher. He didn’t teach Roe, though.) What I didn’t know until I looked it up, however, is that in a preceding and similar case dismissed by the Court a few years earlier (Poe v. Ullman), Justice John Marshall Harlen II wrote in his dissent:
Would you really disagree with his interpretation of a ‘continuity of liberty?’ Or will you argue that, no – the enumerated liberties are exactly what the framers had in mind? That can’t be so: the 9th Amendment is pretty clear on that, and for that matter the 4th is pretty clear that the Gov has no business snooping around our homes.
The thing is, you go and argue that privacy is not an enumerated right, and further that it’s not even covered in the blanket protections of the 9th Amendment (you really have to fill me in on the trick to denying this, btw), and then what? Can the state, killer of liberty, now intervene on any matter of privacy they wish? That doesn’t sound very conservative or ‘small government’ to me. What if your state legislature found itself with a majority of women and they collectively decided they were sick of men leaving the seat up and voted en masse to require men to pee sitting down? I notice there is no Constitutional right to pee standing up, so I guess you’re screwed.
And I’ll be honest with you Bill, when we liberals hear the words, ‘there is no right to privacy,’ we know you’re talking about Roe, but we also think it’s a Griswold dog-whistle (note: Griswold struck down a law prohibiting the sale of contraception, as if you didn’t know this). And this makes us think is that you don’t care about ‘privacy’ as an issue at all.
Sendonaman, you’re right, I didn’t address your Court question. I though about it for a second, but then figured it’s pretty self evident that people can disagree about politics, and moreover that the Supreme Court is a political body, whether it likes to think of itself that way or not.
Chasm,
Feb 11th 8:46 you stated; “The liberal basis for equality rests in the assumption of ‘equality under the law’”.
And on Feb 13th Sedonaman said; “Also, how do you explain split votes? If an idea is “Constitutionally correct,” then the vote would be unanimous one way or the other in every case.”
In this instance I have to side with Sedonaman. If you are judging the constitutionality of legislation; then it is either constitutional or it isn’t. All votes should be unanimous. This would be comparing the ‘value’ of the constitution against the content of the legislation. However; if you are judging the value of the legislation against the content of the Constitution, you get a decidedly different result. The difference comes in interpretation.
Is the Constitution a ‘framework’, a fixed reference, under which all ‘new’ legislation is to be judged? Or is the Constitution just another document, to be redefined to include or exclude content and intent as one supposes? If the US Constitution is ‘solid’ and legislative intent changes with whatever passed for ‘current’ morality; then we have an established metric to compare against. If both the Constitution and legislative intent alter meaning depending on current morality; the ‘living document’ concept, then there is no established limit, minimum or maximum. This ‘living document’ theory is usually the only condition that will give a liberal sufficient cover to say they ‘favor’ equality under constitutional authority. Most disingenuous. Like playing a baseball game while the rules of the game evolve during the contest.
In the same post he also said; “Democrats have been running the public school systems in this country for over 50 years…”
This is actually a fairly good example of the intentions of progressive administrations in many other regards. Federal control of the public school system is ubiquitous. What you may and may not teach what you can say or not say, which groups are approved of the user of facilities after school and which may not (think GLBT vs. Christians), who can pray (Muslims) and who cannot (Christians). The content of the menu in the school cafeteria, the speech content of graduates, the content of lessons taught, invocations before classes or sporting events ect. The list is endless.
If you look at average federal contribution to any public school district’s budget, it comes out to @ 7 cents on the dollar. If the US government believes that seven cents entitles them to that kind of iron fisted control over public schools; I wonder how much control they intend to exert on American society in return for each persons health care premium, hmmm? I can assure you that that list would also be endless; what you eat, how much you eat, where you live, if you live, how you work, what you may or may not do in recreation. Keep going as I’m certain they will.
Now to our central ‘issue of contention’;
In Griswold vs. Connecticut SCOTUS found the right to privacy implicit in the US Constitution. However it is the Dissent of Justice Black that affixes the role of the US Constitution in the restrained use of federal power to decide a ‘states right’ issue. A portion of his opinion follows; “I repeat so as not to be misunderstood that this Court does have power, which it should exercise, to hold laws unconstitutional where they are forbidden by the Federal Constitution. My point is that there is no provision [381 U.S. 479, 521] of the Constitution which either expressly or impliedly vests power in this Court to sit as a supervisory agency over acts of duly constituted [state] legislative bodies and set aside their laws because of the Court’s belief that the legislative policies adopted are unreasonable, unwise, arbitrary, capricious or irrational. The adoption of such a loose, flexible, uncontrolled standard for holding laws unconstitutional, if ever it is finally achieved, will amount to a great unconstitutional shift of power to the courts which I believe and am constrained to say will be bad for the courts and worse for the country. Subjecting federal and state laws to such an unrestrained and unrestrainable judicial control as to the wisdom of legislative enactments would, I fear, jeopardize the separation of governmental powers that the Framers set up and at the same time threaten to take away much of the power of States to govern themselves which the Constitution plainly intended them to have. …” Which is exactly what has happened? How Prescient! Remember I never argued the legality of abortion only the venue where it should have been decided. Federal precident is always more over-reaching that state law.
Now we turn to Roe. A summary of that decision may be found here. (I intentionally found a reference that supports your opinion.) http://andrew_redux.blogs.com/redux/files/AndrewSchoutenRoeWadeBrief.doc Although I’m neither a lawyer nor a constitutional scholar; I did find it interesting that neither side of SCOTUS (concurring or dissenting) cited the Ninth Amendment. My first question would be; if SCOTUS had discovered an immutable right to medical privacy in the Ninth Amendment how could any insurance company exclude medical coverage for a pre-existing condition? That they have, and still do, would seem to indicate that such a right to true total medical privacy does not exist, or someone would have forced this at the federal level long ago.
I’m neither a lawyer nor a constitutional scholar, but I’d say if Supreme Court Justices avoided the Ninth Amendment specifically, they must have had reason for doing so. I feel I’m on solid enough ground her to ignore your Ninth Amendment reference as well.
On to the discussion;
Justice Blackmun began his concurring opinion with Greek and Roman law and continued to describe this ‘evolution’, if you will, of prenatal protection and the lessening of the medical threat undergone during the procedure because of the evolving state of medical technology. The provided reference goes on to say; “Thus, Blackmun wrote a lucid, groundbreaking opinion that was both based in good legal precedent, sound reasoning, subtle understanding of the political ramifications, up-to-date medical knowledge, and exhaustion of intentionalist interpretation and an acknowledgement of contemporary conditions…” Notice two items here: First the inclusion of the phrases legal precedent’, ‘political ramifications’, ‘sound reasoning’, ‘intentionalist interpretation’ and ‘acknowledgement of contemporary conditions’. Notice the author’s approval of the politics, the reasoning, and the interpretation? The second item is; the absolute absence of ANY specific Constitutional reference to support this decision.
Justice White’s dissenting opinion however; concluded that the majority opinion overturned numerous existing state statutes (negating states rights) and fashioned a constitutional right by fiat. He interpreted the significance of the decision to mean that SCOTUS had stripped the various state legislatures of the ability to determine the political question and said; “…that this was “an improvident and extravagant exercise” of judicial review and that the Court entered into a debate and handed down a decision which was best left to the political process.” There’s that pesky ‘states rights’ arguement once again.
As I stated previously; “Abortion should have always been a ‘states rights’ issue.”
I’ve received no disagreement to this statement other than your citing of the Ninth Amendment which was dispatched in the above paragraphs. So I must conclude that your ‘passion’ for this issue precludes the ‘states rights’ argument and that you’re OK with; “We are going to forcibly haul all these knuckle-dragging, mouth breathing troglodytes into the 20th century whether they want to come along or not.” In other words; the reinterpretation of the body of our Constitution in order to ‘discover’ an un-enumerated ‘right’ that has no basis in practical existence. So much for your claim to be a; “…supporter of the Constitution.” 49,551,703 abortions have been conducted in the US. http://www.nrlc.org/abortion/facts/abortionstats.html since 1973 (1,376,436 average per year). So much for safe, legal and rare too, huh?
Your assertion of; “Can the state, killer of liberty, now intervene on any matter of privacy they wish? That doesn’t sound very conservative or ‘small government’ to me.” The short answer is ‘yes, it is.’ It’s once again answered as a ‘states rights’ issue. The federal government shouldn’t be able to go there. A ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution doesn’t match here. So it should be left to the individual states.
I’ve also yet to receive any acknowledgement on the ‘record of accomplishment’ of Margaret Sanger? Should I take this as agreement, or just an example of liberalism’s penchant of, once again, ignoring the more unappealing branches of the roots of their own ideology? That the overwhelming majority of the above cited number of abortions has occurred among the African American population would cause one to readily discern that the goal of Margaret’s philosophy is still decidedly in play. Apparently it’s a question only you, as a supporter, can answer. I await your reply.
Regarding your statement; “Hey Bill, Just a few quick things: Of the phrases in Alinsky’s rule 11, you’ll notice only one, “choice,” has even been heard since about 1969. Remember, this is an ‘evolving’ standard, much as YOUR constitutional interpretation seems to be. A short list follows;
• HR 1 The American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009 (Porkulus)
• HR 2454; The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (Cap & trade)
• HR 2764 Omnibus Appropriations bill (Son-of-Porkulus)
• HR 3200 America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 (House health care bill)
• S.1796 America’s Healthy Future Act of 2009 (Senate health care bill)
• And the as yet unnumbered Baucus/Grassley Jobs Bill (Son-of-Porkulus II)
Who could possibly argue with goals like ‘Affordable Health Choices’, ‘Clean Energy and Security’, ‘Recovery and Reinvestment’, or ‘Healthy Choices’? There are many more. I just went back a year from the present. You’ll need to do better than that to defend your point.
To summarize. I eagerly await your response to the following queries
• Your acceptance or rejection of Ms. Sanger’s philosophy as constituting (pardon the pun) the core of the progressive platform regarding this topic.
• An clarification regarding the undeniable racial component of this liberal core issue.
• Your ability to name yourself a ‘…supporter of the Constitution.” In view of the manner in which that same document had to be deliberately mis-construed in order to ‘discover’ support for choice.
• A reason for your avoidance of the discussion point that this is an issue best left to the states.
• A reasonable explanation regarding the safe, legal, and rare statement in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary regarding ‘choice’.
• Your analysis as to how a defensible ‘medical’ right to privacy exists regarding only ‘choice’ and not all other medical conditions.
Chasm:
Re: “… I realize it’s [affirmative action] a bugaboo for you guys, though I’ve never really understood why. I mean, I get that it clashes with your idea of what fairness is supposed to look like, but I guess I’ve never seen the all pervasive negative effects that you perceive.”
What about inefficient allocation of scarce resources? A classroom seat in a top university is a scarce resource. This can be seen from the fact that universities do no accept all who want to attend. I am over 65. Would it be an efficient allocation of that resource if people like me lobbied for affirmative action for old folks just because the current old-to-young student ratio isn’t the same as it is in the population in general, and that the student body doesn’t “look like America”? Examine the graph at the end of
[url="http://www.uiowa.edu/~030116/116/articles/bronner2.htm"]this article[/url]. You will notice that in order to admit more minorities, the school had to stoop low and create a third category, “Admit to remedial program”. Now, why is a top university wasting resources on remedial instruction? That’s what community colleges are for: anyone 18 or older with a body temperature of 98.6 can get in to one by paying only a modest registration fee. He can then transfer to a university at the end of two years of establishing his academic potential. But no. The schools get the mealy-mouth media to carry headlines like, “Minorities at UCLA plummet” and report [somewhat disingenuously, I might add] that minorities are not getting a college education. I have seen a number of reports making this conclusion, and not one ever brought up community colleges. This politicizes the schools and drives them to make the freshman class “look like society”. Higher education exists to pursue truth, not to present a façade of a pre-conceived notion.
“If you do not graduate the man, you have exploited him.” – Football Head Coach Joe Paterno of Penn State. I have tried to find them, but the graduation rates for those admitted under AA are a closely guarded secret. Why? For public institutions, they should be public information. Because to reveal them would be to admit their theory is full of holes, and to liberals, it is success that must suffer defeat, not failure.
As I stated before, ideas originate with the academy, and AA has been in effect in the workforce, government and private, now for about 20 years. Since AA is diametrically opposed to quality, the whole society is not as well off just so a few pseudo intellectuals can feel good about themselves. How does a minority member feel after being admitted by some AA program and subsequently fails to graduate because he couldn’t keep up with the rigors of an advanced curriculum. What Coach Paterno said about an athlete applies equally to academics. But never mind – those who flunk out this year will be replaced by other similar faces next, and no one will be any the wiser. Note here that those with the cockamamie notions are not the ones who suffer for their failed ideas.
Re: “I think there are bigger problems to address.”
Yes, there probably is at least one, but education is near the top. If our educational institutions were more dedicated to that pursuit of truth, we might find that a lot of other problems would solve themselves.
Far from being a simple “bugaboo”, AA is a very serious problem for this country.
Bill:
Great post! Thanks for your help.
Equal outcomes are a reasonable objective when an process receives equal inputs. Education has fallen into disarray ever since tracking systems were abolished to “main stream” students. The translation is load a class up with low achievers in the hope that the high achiever ability will run off without regard to IQ or work ethic. Sad fact doesn’t work; even sadder fact American K-12 systems are designed to operate with the main streaded dodo class in spite of its failure to produce a high quality graduate. Why can’t Johnny read? Thank a liberal!
EEOC is like selecting the low bidder on an item that can affect life or death. In the bidding example a low “responsive” bidder would be better. In the EEOC case we fill positions with the lowest level that can fit the position in the name of diversity or some far in the past slight. Hmmm, why do so many eeo candidates fail? Is the current CIC an eeo student, he certainly is a failure but who knows his records are sealed.
In colleges federal money (you know our money extracted through the liberal progressive taxation system) gives grants to those in “need” with no care about quality of input (read that as merit). So, why can’t the college graduate read? Try special admissions for weak and useless students coupled with some majors that give a high grade for diversity. Then they hit the workplace and eventually are found out, unless they go into government.
Mr. Wavering – you write, Marriage is a privilege granted by the state, not a ‘right’.
Assuming that’s correct, there’s still a few issues we might want to discuss sometime. For example, should the state be involved in granting such privileges, and on what basis? Or, e.g., is restricting it to “one man and one woman” an example of what Mr. Roebuck terms “unjust discrimination”?
As long as we’re going to arbitrarily re-define privileges as “rights”, why not let marriage be between three men and five women, one of whom is 11 years old (after all, why should age matter?) And what about animal “rights” too? Make that three men, five women, and Fido. Why not arbitrarily define this as “marriage”? To deny Fido connubial bliss is clearly discrimination, as it would be to limit the number of marriage partners (why not one man and 50 women?), or set an arbitrary age cut off to marry [if 16 is legal, why not 15 years and 364 days, 363 days, 362 days, etc.]?
And since we’re on the subject, why should the state set speed limits too? Or enact banking laws? Or regulate interstate commerce? What gives the state the right to “involve” itself in these affairs any more than to define marriage?
The answer, of course, is found in the Constitution which permits or restricts certain actions, as well as provides the overall framework within which all this takes place. This, coupled with common law (and common sense), defines how we act as a nation of laws.
Those who want to challenge the status quo have the onus of showing how/why an issue is wrong, and thus deserves to be changed. It isn’t up to us to defend the status quo from their hypotheticals. But of course this means they actually have to approach the discussion seriously, instead of just raise, ahem, important issues that e.g. must be discussed.
Sedonaman,
You’re welcome. One does what one can to advance the debate.
Mickey G,
Your statement that; “Equal outcomes are a reasonable objective when a(n) process receives equal inputs.” intrigues me. How does one go about guaranteeing the equality of input? I understand how that may be accomplished in chemistry or science. Place the same parameters on a problem and you’ll likely gat the same results. A little difficult to do with education as it’s difficult to guarantee the same dedication, preparation level or even the same concentration of the student. This is exactly why affirmative action is a bigoted process.
Ah, Raymond,
Long weekend? Hope you enjoyed yourself immensely!
Your assertion; “…should the state be involved in granting such privileges, and on what basis? Or, e.g., is restricting it to “one man and one woman” an example of what Mr. Roebuck terms “unjust discrimination”?”
For my money, no the state should be involved in granting such privileges. Personally I believe that furthest the ‘state’ may go is to grant a ‘civil union’. That may be between a man and a woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, a man and a goat…; well you get the idea. My marriage is granted by the Catholic Church, and as such is between my wife, a woman of noble bearing I might add, and myself.
I don’t personally think the state has the power to grant what is clearly a joining of religious stature. Civil unions are good enough to be recognized by these same states when it comes to property dissolution during the cancelling of the contract, enough to set precedent for inheritance, the granting of benefits (pension or health). In short the entire gamut of civil rights may be solved with the granting of civil unions. The state, in my opinion, ‘borrowed’ the term marriage.
However, the sanctity of marriage has definite religious connotations. Oddly enough, this is exactly why civil unions aren’t good enough for gays. They want that ‘sanctity’. Do you understand? They cannot believe that something that feels, on every level, to be so correct for them, can possibly have any negative consequences. They believe that the process of pronouncing their specific ‘union’ choice as correct requires it be called marriage. This is a core argument. If religious persons are prohibited from denouncing their ‘joining’ and the state grants their ‘joining’ the same stature as marriage, then there can be no more question regarding their choice as being ‘correct’.
What they believe they pursue is acceptance. What they desire is something we may not give; absolution. Judgment is reserved for the Creator alone. All 6.4 billion people on the planet could agree that homosexual unions are the most normal, highly evolved, and sought after conditions on the planet. That will mean nothing when they face God. I don’t know God’s mind; do you? I cannot condemn a person, I have no right. I have enough on my plate trying NOT to condemn myself, as do we all.
I care not if the couple is named Adam & Eve or Adam & Steve. It’s really none of my business. And, as I said before, I’ve enough to worry about worrying about me. If I do not own the right to condemn, then I also do not own the right to absolve. That’s the core of their issue. By the time they meet their Maker, they will be long past the opportunity for a change in behavior. They must stand with the choice and accept the consequences whatever they may be. This is the source of their ‘discomfort’, if you will. They must gain absolution, and no one here may grant that. The choice is courageous in a way; to accept the possibility of eternal damnation for their beliefs.
This does wind back to our earlier discussion. “I shouldn’t have to accept eternal damnation for my personal beliefs.” Atheists would rather presuppose no God at all than suppose they will be held in final account. Ah well; it does take all kinds doesn’t it?
Chasm dear, are you alright? It’s just that we haven’t heard and you are usually so ebullient. Anyway; I’m off on a 3 day business trip. Won’t have much opportunity to check in. But I promise to catch up once I’m back.
See you Out There!
Bill, you know, after I posted that – I read it, I re-read the portion of your post about privacy and Roe, and I wondered if I really needed to do a remedial history of the right to privacy – just so we were all on the same page. My citing of the 9th was really off-the-cuff, and not based on research on Roe, but Griswold. It was mostly intended to wrap up the concept of a ‘continuity of rights,’ which is also called a ‘penumbra’ in Roe. I actually starting writing a post, going into the relevant parts of the Fifth, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments. But then I thought, “Naw, Bill already knows this sh**, he’s just testing me. That’s why he goaded me with the ‘right to privacy in Roe’ crap, he wanted to see if I would correct him.”
Sadly, no.
Or rather, sadly, I am going to have to explain a little more judicial history. It’s true that SCOTUS didn’t rely on the protections of the Ninth (in Roe), but it’s also true that a lower court did. The Court held, instead, that the right to privacy was rooted in the Fourteeth Amendment (and indeed, perhaps this case is notorious for the fact they didn’t care about 9th, but it shouldn’t matter), however, and although this was explained to me long ago, I believe the reasoning goes something along the lines of (I’m sure I’ll get some legal terms wrong here, but you’ll get the idea): Ninth protections are great, n’all, but it isn’t relative to legal protections because the State isn’t taking an active role in the enforcement of laws in this amendment. The Fourteenth, however, is all about how the State uses it’s power to enforce laws on citizens, so when you feel you’re getting dicked over by the gummint, you usually go to the 14th and try and prove they don’t hold the power to dick under what is generally known as “Substantive Due Process.” You can go look that up in Wikipedia yourself, but suffice to say, the words ‘due process’ do appear in the Fourteenth. The error that you assume is that ROE is the first time SCOTUS attributed privacy protections to 14th rights. Griswold gave privacy protection under both the 9th (Goldberg) and the 14th (Harlan).
Turning for a moment to your concern about ‘States Rights’ and venue, and with all respect to Justice Black, keep in mind that both Griswold and Roe (as well as several similar cases that preceded these two) did get argued in the State venue. [note: upon cursory research, this may not be always true, especially for Roe, as that was filed in District Court. But I'll let stand because of the 'several similar,' and because it's not ultimately important.] That’s the way it works. Moreover, the conservative discussion of ‘States Rights’ seems to always assume that the State has all the rights, leaving the individual citizen out of the discussion entirely!
It’s always a discussion about whether it’s the State Government or the Feds that gets to impose it’s will on the people – never a recognition that at core it’s a “Citizens’ Rights” issue. In a nutshell: Your state passes a law (or already has one) that screws you over in some substantive way, so you get to exercise your right as a citizen and sue their ass. In State Court, the Judges say, “you know, buddy, you’re exactly the kind of person we want to screw over, and our state passed this law just so we could, screw you over. Dismissed.” But here’s the beautiful part: now you get to go argue your case in front of SCOTUS. And if you convince them robed guys that, indeed, your State is screwing you for an arbitrary reason, or one that violates already established rights, then they will overturn that State law – and here’s the part I know conservatives really hate – once SCOTUS agrees with you, all other similar laws in all other states are invalid too. This is called ‘equal protection.’ Look it up.
In other words: your assertion “Abortion should be a States’ issue,” is true – and it was true – right up until the moment that it’s not. That is, right up until a citizen successfully litigates the problem all the way to SCOTUS. Then, by the definition of our Constitution and laws that right is true everywhere in the Republic. That’s just the way the system was designed.
Now, this process, repeated thousands and thousands of times over the last 230+ years, with millions of people getting dicked over, either by their government, a corporation, or a fellow citizen, and then winning the right to get un-dicked (de-dicked?), accounts for the whole of our legal system, warts and all. You can’t just throw out the stuff you don’t like, or scrap the thing and start over, or pretend that this isn’t how it works – short of actually changing the Constitution, which I know is a thing conservatives drool over.
Now I’m going to launch into one of my scenarios (sometimes known as a ‘thought experiment. Note to MM: Nothing in the following paragraph is actually happening. Some assumptions of fact, will be wrong, but I will try my best to ensure the assumptions of law are as accurate as possible. Please don’t cite population statistics to ‘prove’ a false assuption thus invalidating the exercise. kthx.)
Suppose you live in Montana. And maybe you do. One day, every single Jehovah Witness and Christian Scientist in the entire nation moves to Montana, and they go about using their combined majority to start throwing some weight around at the local and state level. After a couple of years, they have well established themselves at all levels of state gov, including Governor. They go about passing a series of laws outlawing a great many medical procedures, including blood transfusions and kidney transplants. This is not a positive development in your life, as your kidneys are failing and you’re currently at the top of the recipient waiting list! Oh, noes! You file in the State court, alleging a violation of your ‘right to life,’ but the court rules that they are not, in fact, violating your right to life – God is (the Judges are Christian Scientists too). They rule that neither the State nor Fed Constitution mandate a ‘right to medical procedure,’ and they rule that your privacy rights aren’t in jeopardy, because having kidney disease isn’t criminal, and they aren’t requiring you disclose your status – you just can’t go to a hospital and get treated for it. You’re free to leave the State if you wish, though. Petition for relief, denied.
Quick aside: I find it interesting that critics of Roe are always more familiar with the dissent, and with criticism of Roe, than the actual ruling itself. Not that I’ve read the entire thing, but I think I do have a basic grasp of the logic of the actual ruling. One of the critics you cite talks of ‘inventing’ a ‘right to medical privacy,’ and I grasp that you interpret the ruling this way too. I don’t believe Roe hinged on a specifically medical aspect of privacy, or even that ‘privacy’ was the ultimate factor in deciding the case (tho it remains a legacy), but the sections that do deal with it, it’s just generally on 14th privacy protections with Griswold and others as president.
The quip about ‘pre-existing conditions’ is ironic in many ways, because of course you have 9th Amendment rights to pay cash money to treat your pre-existing condition. You just don’t have the right to demand an for-profit insurance company sell you a policy, something that Democrats very much tried to address before being acused of trying to “destroy democracy.”
Back to Roe: a great deal of the ruling “based in good legal precedent, sound reasoning, subtle understanding of the political ramifications, up-to-date medical knowledge, and exhaustion of intentionalist (sic) interpretation and an acknowledgement (sic) of contemporary conditions” (your citation), was a very detailed examination of the right to life of the fetus. And you know what? They found an un-viable fetus didn’t have a right to life. Bottom line. You may not like it. You are certainly within your rights to try and change the Constitution to give a fetus that right. But that’s where we are.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yea, the State Court rules against your ‘right to medical procedure’ and you die.
So here’s the punch line: Your heirs take the case all the way to the Supreme Court, and not only will their lawyers argue for your ‘medical’ privacy protections under 9th and 14th and as many amendments as they can think of, and cite Griswold and possibly Roe in doing so, they will also argue that a ruling based on scriptural reading to deny medical procedure and right to life violates the First Amendment ‘separation of church and state,’ and most ironic of all, they’d probably have to specifically rely on Roe as precedent for ruling in terms of mootness and standing – you’re already dead! just like Roe had already given birth – so your heirs’ lawyers are going to have to argue the case is “capable of repetition, yet evading review” just to get in the door.
Happy ending: SCOTUS rules in your favor! Citing a right to life (cuz you’re not a fetus), a violation of various rights under the 1rst, 9th and 14th Amendments, the laws in question are declared unconstitutional. Yay! Postscript: Furious Christian Scientist activists are vowing to go after State Medicare payments that are used in such procedures. Boo.
Let me close this section by saying I’m all for States’ Rights. In many instances, I totally agree that States should be free to experiment with their own democracy. It’s the way the founders intended. For instance, I am an apostate on the left because I totally disagree with the Federal Hate Crimes Law. I not only agree that there are already laws against violent crime in general, but that States themselves are free to enact such Hate Crimes bills if they wish, and that Federal intervention in the manner is completely unnecessary. The Commerce Clause, or whatever they think they’re hanging that on, isn’t good enough. I’ve seen many SCOTUS rulings that I’d consider overreach – several by this court, which claims to philosophically oppose such ‘activism.’ Roe and Griswold aren’t among them. For while I do agree that States Rights are important, I think Individual Rights are more important. Change the Constitution to give equal rights to fetus’ at conception, or move on.
Finally, to address your specific bullet points:
I haven’t really addressed Sanger because I really don’t know much about her besides what conservatives tell me. And I really don’t much care too, either, except to renounce eugenics. This dovetails with my earlier observation that conservatives tend to see the world as an authoritarian structure (and I mean this in the kindest way. Not that you are ‘Authoritarians’ so much as you look to authority for guidance, and work well in hierarchy), whereas liberals do not. Conservatives revere their leaders, and dissect their thinking for guidance – liberals revere their accomplishments. That is not to say we don’t have admiration for some of our leaders, we do, but not like you guys. This was re-iterated to me the other day when I was reading about the Texas School textbook broohaha that went down last month. Seems the conservative review board thought there was too much emphasis on the liberal accomplishments of the past century – The New Deal, Social Security, The Great Society, The Civil Rights Act, etc – and wanted to add balance. So they inserted requirements that textbooks talk about… Conservative leaders: Reagan, Buckley, Pat Robertson and Phillis Schafley(!).
I will accept what you say about Sanger as probably true, but her philosophies are not mine, and I don’t even care enough about her to find out. I don’t think her philosophy had anything to do with Roe, though if I’m wrong, I’m sure I’ll hear about it.
Since you brought up the race issue and you seem pretty clear about it all, I don’t know why you need clarification from me. If you are trying to get me to say that liberals are racists and this it’s all a plot to wipe out minorities through forced abortion, that just ain’t gonna happen. I am familiar enough with the legal issues surrounding abortion – and with the arguments made by women in my life letting me know in no-uncertain terms that they will make the decision, pro-life or not, in any relationship no matter what – to issue back and forth, but I do not spend my days researching statistics and social impacts and don’t have much ammunition to argue back with. I don’t do conspiracy theories. Instead, I would defer to actual social scientists who study the issue and underlying causes. My *hunch* would be that several factors, including poverty, family disintegration because of poverty, liberal cultural sexual mores and complete resistance from Conservatives to actually teach people how not to get pregnantall contribute to the statistics you cite, but don’t quote me. Outlawing abortion isn’t going to reduce poverty or keep families together or stop people from f**king, and since Conservatives are not interested in addressing poverty or teaching proper sexual education, and legislating forced marriage and outlawing illicit sex are violations of all those things we’ve been talking about – well, here we are. Again, that’s just a guy talking. I let social scientists and politicians deal with the mess that our very messy system allows. Liberals are ok with mess, and do not share your desire to rewind, literally and in every way it seems of late, to the 19th Century.
As I hope I explained well enough above, the rights the Justices really ‘discovered’ were that fetuses don’t have any, being completely, you know, tethered for life to an actual person. At any rate, if you think about it, ‘discovering’ rights is what our system is designed to do – we, as individuals are empowered under the Constitution with all rights except those explicitly taken away from us by the Constitution. That’s the whole point. A law or a Judge can’t discover or grant a right – they, and the Constitution, can only take them away and limit our liberty. The actual Constitution, Amendments aside, is pretty clear that it’s not taking away any of my rights at all except to, say, declare myself a Senator or President without first going through an election. And so the system is designed to ‘root out’ or ‘discover’ those specific instances where the Government overreaches, and steps on our rights.
I mean, there’s no specified Constitutional right to yo-yo, and there’s no state law specifically allowing me to yo-yo, and yet I still have a right to yo-yo. I do, right? The city council can’t just ban yo-yo-ing even in private just because the mayor thinks Duncan is evil, amirite? We don’t really need to ‘discover’ my rite to yo. Yo?
Uhh, coverd that. It’s best left to the people.
I’ve never used that statement. Nor is it an argument ‘for’ abortion. It’s an ideal. And it would be easier to attain if we taught our kids that f**king makes babies, and to use contraception all the time every time they have sex, rather then be prudes about the whole thing.
If we’re going to continue with this ‘medical’ business after this post, we’re really not communicating. To highlight what I said above, I hope you know you have a right to any legally approved medical treatment available in the United States – provided you have the cash to pay for it. You can change your gender if you got the credit. What you *don’t* have a right to, apparently and thanks to Republicans and Tea Baggers, is to buy insurance at a reasonable price if you have health problems.
I have a dream that one day Dr. Jackson will actually address the content of one of my comments. But it’s likely to remain just a dream – I mean, I actually went along with the description of marriage as a ‘privilege’ and not a ‘right’. I explicitly described it as a privilege.
Then Dr. Jackson writes, As long as we’re going to arbitrarily re-define privileges as “rights”…
Maybe one day he’ll actually address what I write instead of what he wants me to have written. But at this point, I doubt it.
Mr. Wavering – This may cause you to rethink your position, but I agree with you regarding civil unions, and that the state should not be in the marriage business.
But while religious sanction may be a goal of many homosexual activists, I think you neglect a practical factor in your analysis of their motivations. If civil unions were legally equivalent to marriage as it is today, then I’d agree that gays would be churlish about pursuing state-sanctioned marriage. In practice, though, ‘separate but equal’ seldom is.
Separating marriage from the state would go a long way to remedying this. Then it would be up to churches to decide what criteria they wanted to require for marriage. (So long as those criteria met the legal standard for civil union, then it’d probably make sense to allow a marriage certificate from such a church to be a ‘fast track’ to a civil union, but that’s just a detail.) Gay couples could find or found a church that agreed with them if they wanted ‘sanctification’, while churches that didn’t like that would be – as they are now and should be – free to turn them away.
As to knowing God’s mind – well, I’m not sure there’s a mind to know, though if there is, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t look much like any of the religions I’ve looked at up to now. But that’s a separate issue from policy.
I have a dream that Raymond will actually one day read what he actually writes.
“Assuming that’s correct …”, is a hypothetical concession.
“I actually went along with the description of marriage as a ‘privilege’ and not a ‘right’,” is another hypothetical concession to a point one doesn’t necessarily believe to be correct.
“I explicitly described it as a privilege” is indeed a categorical statement, but not when it refers back to a hypothetical statement. Then it’s just an observation about a hypothetical, not a statement of one’s actual belief.
It will be so much easier when the day comes that Raymond writes a direct statement, like, “I believe that marriage is a privilege, not a right”, instead of “Mr. Wavering – you write, Marriage is a privilege granted by the state, not a ‘right’. Assuming that’s correct …”
But direct statements leave one no wiggle room, and Raymond is all about leaving his escape routes open.
Phil:
“As long as we’re going to arbitrarily re-define privileges as ‘rights’, why not let marriage be between three men and five women, one of whom is 11 years old (after all, why should age matter?) … etc.”
What Mr. Ingles is arguing for is a society without rules because if we extend his philosophy, it wouldn’t be acceptable to discriminate between reasonable discrimination and unreasonable discrimination. And since the burden of proof is on the advocate, may I suggest he start his research by watching the 1951 Laurel and Hardy movie “Utopia”?
Sedona,
How do you know what Mr. Ingles is arguing for? HE doesn’t seem to know.
Sedona and MM:
Careful. Raymond might start having wet dreams about you, too.
Um, if marriage is a privilege, doesn’t that imply that the State can revoke a marriage? You compare it to a drivers license to ‘prove’ that it’s a privilege, but the defining characteristic of a DL is to prove capability driving a car and understanding traffic laws – with the understanding that it can be revoked for misuse.
Are you guys really willing to cede to the State the right to end your marriage? I’m not. I categorically define ‘civil union’ (tho not marriage in a church) as a right, and the California Supreme Court agrees with me. That’s why PropH8 had to amend the State Constitution to get around their agreement. With me.
The state can indeed “revoke” a marriage performed by the state, just as it can revoke a driver’s license granted by the state. But this does not mean it can be done arbitrarily. Each privilege has a set of laws and regulations governing it. Get too many points on your license, and it is revoked. Commit bigamy, and the marriage will be “revoked”.
So unless you’re a bigamist, or otherwise perpetrate a fraud through marriage, you have nothing to worry about. Just like you have no reason to believe your driver’s license will be revoked because a cop doesn’t like the way you look.
While the state recognizes marriages that are performed by religious officials, the state cannot “revoke” a religious marriage. Divorce a Catholic, for example, and you are still married in the eyes of the Church until the church grants an annulment.
This is because marriages began as a religious ceremony, not as a state function. Through history and tradition, the state and religious authorities have agreed to a system that allows one body to recognize the acts of another. Because we are a nation without an established religion, the Constitution (through the laws it engenders) allows the state to perform non-religious marriage ceremonies that mimic a religious ceremony — but without the religious aspects.
The common theme is the uniting of a single man and single woman in a legal relationship of marriage. [In some states no actual official function is needed, just a certain number of years to allow for common law marriage status].
It’s not the uniting of more than two people, or two people of the same sex, or people of different sexes for business relationships only, etc. that define this action. This is because the marriage reciprocity is limited. Religions do not grant business partnerships, personal unions, etc. The state does this. If the state wants to allow two people to unite legally outside marriage, it has the power to do this. But it doesn’t do it through marriage. It does it through a civil union, and the two should not be confused.
Rights, on the other hand, cannot be revoked. Commit a specific crime, and certain rights can be limited (such as the right of free speech while incarcerated). But even in jail prisoners do not have all their first amendment rights “revoked”.
Those who want to change the common law and legal codes defining marriage have the burden to show why this should be done. It is not our burden to justify the continuation of the present situation, particularly when we are focusing exclusively on state actions. States can create civil unions without arbitrarily defining them as just another form of marriage.
Those who insist that the state exclusively define “marriage” independent of history, tradition, and the state-religion compromise concerning the performance and recognizing of marriage have other agendas at work.
One of the things that is so jaw-dropping for a liberal reading these posts, is how much power supposedly cut-taxes-drown-government-get-off-my-lawn conservatives are willing to give to their State. It’s is though your operating understanding of the 9th Amendment is
That’s not really a joke. Some of your arguing assumptions and use of words like ‘creating’ rights, as though the government is in the business of passing laws to tell you what you can do, rather than what you can’t.
Let’s be clear: under a fundamental understanding of how the system works, gays had a 9th Amendment right to get married from the moment the Constitution went into effect, until the moment a clerk of a state court said ‘no.’ At that moment, a right that should be assumed, was denied, and the wheels start spinning and the process of debate began. Part of that spectacle was watching “small-government” conservatives trample each other in a rush to pass more laws and constitutional amendments specifically denying rights these poor couples had come to believe were their Constitutional birthright.
You had a right to drive without a license, until your state decided to regulate things. You had a right to drive as fast as wanted, until the state decided to amend that right. And you still have a right to crash and die due to lack of insurance coverage – tho, of course, your car will be covered.
Oh, I see. I didn’t say that marriage wasn’t a right, so perforce I must have been defining marriage as a right.
Really, Dr. Jackson? That’s all you got?
I actually think Mr. Wavering’s correct – marriage is a special legal status, a privilege granted to some people that has legal repercussions (e.g. spousal immunity). In other words, I believe that marriage is a privilege, not a right.
Note that Dr. Jackson already concedes a difference between a marriage in the state’s eyes and in the eyes of a church, though. They can be treated separately, and – as in his example of Catholic distinctions between divorce and annulment – often are.
So I don’t quite follow the bit about “If the state wants to allow two people to unite legally outside marriage, it has the power to do this. But it doesn’t do it through marriage. It does it through a civil union, and the two should not be confused.”
Why can’t the state change the way it recognizes marriage if it so chooses? Presumably there would be more churches that would refuse to recognize certain state-sanctioned marriages at that point (much the same way a divorced and remarried Catholic would not be recognized as married in the eyes of the church). But if that’s not a problem for the state now with the Catholic church, why would it be a problem then?
Note that I haven’t gotten anywhere near arguing for extending the privilege of marriage to other arrangements than ‘one man, one woman’ yet. I’d like to clear up this objection first.
This is the problem with someone who analyzes Constitutional Rights, which are a very specific thing, on the basis of how they feel about something they think should be a right because, well, they think it should be. It manifests itself in such phrases as “a right to drive”, which is a vernacular term, not an actual Constitutional matter (the actual subject of this discussion).
It’s also how you get the John Kerryesque statement “under a fundamental understanding of how the system works, gays had a 9th Amendment right to get married from the moment the Constitution went into effect, until the moment a clerk of a state court said ‘no’.”
So gays had a Right to marry before they didn’t have a Right to marry because some clerk somewhere took that “Right” away from them, and then all those “Rights” everywhere just went away. Just like that.
Now that Obama is president, there’s an opening for a Con Law professorship somewhere. Chasm should apply. After all, to understand Constitutional Rights and how they function, apparently one simply needs to know how to spell the word “right” and use it in a vernacular sense.
“I actually went along with the description of marriage as a ‘privilege’ and not a ‘right’”
“I explicitly described it as a privilege”
“I didn’t say that marriage wasn’t a right, so perforce I must have been defining marriage as a right.”
“Mr. Wavering – you write, Marriage is a privilege granted by the state, not a ‘right’.
Assuming that’s correct …”
How can anyone have any doubts about Raymond’s clearly stated position on the issue of whether marriage is a right or privilege?
Chasm:
The state can revoke a marriage, and it does under certain circumstances, just like it revokes a DL under certain [but different] circumstances. I’m not a lawyer, but aren’t abandonment and bigamy grounds for “revocation” of a marriage? Aren’t “annulment” and “divorce” just other words for “revoke” in the case of marriage?
Even if it were a right, no right is absolute. Appealing to intellectual arguments to justify “marriage” between homosexuals is to conceal what homosexuality is by keeping it abstract and ethereal, so to speak, so that people are less likely to recognize what is really being pursued: overturning the whole social arrangement so 1-2% can have the “right” to butt-f*** and feel good about it, all the while forcing society to accept it as “normal”, as though re-interpreting the law and getting people to patronize butt-f***ery will make homosexuals feel any better about themselves.
And the people of the State disagree with the Court. Not that continuing this line of argument will re-conceal what is being pursued, the whole idea of constitutional government is citizen rule through their elected representatives, not through judges. Therefore, the fact that liberal judges agree with liberals in general, is not even an argument, much less a credible one. As I have posted several times before, who is the best decider of “society’s evolving standards” – those who have lived their entire lives in the ivory towers of the Boston-DC corridor or the people of the whole nation through their elected representatives? Judges who think their job is to make that decision lend support to the idea that they should not be allowed to decide which laws are constitutional and which are not. Those who agree with the “evolving standards” argument should be aware that eventually the worm will turn, as it always does.
>So I don’t quite follow the bit about “If the state wants to allow two people to unite legally outside marriage, it has the power to do this. But it doesn’t do it through marriage. It does it through a civil union, and the two should not be confused.” Why can’t the state change the way it recognizes marriage if it so chooses?
This is because marriages began as a religious ceremony, not as a state function. Through history and tradition, the state and religious authorities have agreed to a system that allows one body to recognize the acts of another. Because we are a nation without an established religion, the Constitution (through the laws it engenders) allows the state to perform non-religious marriage ceremonies that mimic a religious ceremony — but without the religious aspects.
The common theme is the uniting of a single man and single woman in a legal relationship of marriage. [In some states no actual official function is needed, just a certain number of years to allow for common law marriage status].
It’s not the uniting of more than two people, or two people of the same sex, or people of different sexes for business relationships only, etc. that define this action. This is because the marriage reciprocity is limited. Religions do not grant business partnerships, personal unions, etc. The state does this. If the state wants to allow two people to unite legally outside marriage, it has the power to do this. But it doesn’t do it through marriage. It does it through a civil union, and the two should not be confused.
Those who insist that the state exclusively define “marriage” independent of history, tradition, and the state-religion compromise concerning the performance and recognizing of marriage have other agendas at work.
Yes, Phil, just like that. Didn’t you even pay attention to what happened in California when a clerk decided to say “yes?” All hell broke loose with conservatives rushing to get injunctions to shut it down. It’s what precipitated our little constitutional crisis here.
Back in the day, all you needed to drive was a car and a road, if you could find one. You absolutely had a right to buy or build your own car and just go. Only once states started fixing the roads themselves, and wanting to clear up obvious logistical traffic problems, did they require a contract with citizens – a drivers license. This contract does abridge your rights. You no longer have a right to drive on the left side of the road, for instance. But its a voluntary contract we enter into in order to utilize out other rights, like choosing the make and model of our car, and going anywhere we like.
My reference link about the homosexual agenda, http://www.365gay.com/features/082908-corvino , got deleted by the site software. apparently, the HTML tags I’m trying to use don’t work the same on this site as others.
Chasm: If all you need to understand Constitutional Rights is a layman’s understanding of the vernacular term “right”, this means that I can perform surgery because I have a “Dr.” associated with my name.
SM,
Yea, but only for committing fraud (like marrying for citizenship), or an illegal marriage (like bigamy). Gays who marry aren’t frauds, and homosexuality is not illegal.
My, how quickly things dissolve from a civil constitutional discussion into an all-out emotional appeal against butf**king. That’s intellectual. Do you think about butf**king a lot, Sedonaman?
Not entirely. But that’s where we are. And the fact is, the people had to actively deny a class of citizens and inherent right. Sad, really.
By the way, Chasm is taking the action of a state bureaucrat, under a state constitution — which is a fundamentally different document than the US Constitution — and mixing the vernacular term “right” with a discussion of Constitutional Rights under the Full Faith and Credit Clause), and trying to assert that gay marriage is a “right”, driving cars is a “right,” etc.
Again, it’s the same thing as insisting that I have operating privileges at Baylor Hospital because my mail come addressed to me as “Dr. Jackson”.
You and I both ‘can’ perform surgery, but we’d get our asses sued and thrown in jail. You know very well that practicing medicine requires licensing, just like driving. In fact, before licensing, plenty of quacks killed a lot of people exercising their right to practice and sell ‘medicine.’
Chasm: Thanks for proving my point about the silliness of using the vernacular to define the legal (or in this case, Constitutional).
Yoor theory of “rights” is based on what you feel, not what the Constitution actually is.
Back in your beloved 19th century, you absolutely had the right to travel around the country selling “Dr. Phill’s Constitutional Elixer” “Guarenteed to keep that sh*t moving.” No one could arrest you for calling yourself a Doctor, and if you could convince someone you could take out their appendix, the job was yours. Only later, after we passed some laws, did we abridge your right to do that. Now, of course, you can do it on the internet.
No, my understanding of rights is that I have all of them, until someone or some entity takes one away. Then I fight to get it back, if the taking was unreasonable.
I don’t really care about losing my right to drive on the left side of the road. I’m definitely happy that unqualified people no longer have the right to do surgery. But I do care that friends of mine can’t enjoy the same rights of civil marriage simply because Sedonaman is a-scared of buttf**king.
Once again, saying you have a “right” to do something is not the same thing as discussing Constitutional Rights.
Chasm has a “right” to misunderstand Constitutional Rights, a “right” he exercises freely. The only way this becomes a Constitutional issue involving an actual “Right” is when his First Amendment Rights are impacted.
Otherwise, it’s just common language mascarading as informed analysis. But then, with Chasm, we’ve come to expect nothing other than this.
Phil:
Why not the Commerce Clause? There must be something they can mine out of it, like 1M/1W marriage is mutually beneficial because the partners trade services. “Trade” implies commerce, doesn’t it? And when one gets services from a spouse, s/he doesn’t have to obtain them elsewhere, which ultimately effects trade for those services across state lines. Bingo.
P.S. Sorry about the butt-f***ery statement, but I simply cannot find anything intellectual about it, other than most of those who engage in it seem to be of higher than average IQ. And thank you, Boston-DC corridor, for attempting to show us the light.
I don’t know what you mean by “Constitutional Rights,” then Phill, you’re going to have to be less smug and more specific. A law is an abridgment of a right. Every time. Its’ function is to delineate what is not allowed. When someone fights to the Supreme Court, they are trying to make the point that a particular law has done it’s function, that is, abridged a right, in an unfair, discriminatory or arbitrary way.
If what you mean is, that when we say things like “constitutional right to privacy” we are asserting a right that doesn’t ‘appear’ in the constitution, you are ignoring the fact that the only reason we refer to it that way is because a bunch of people had to argue that specific point all the way to SCOTUS. Therefore there was a ruling, and it acquired a ‘name.’ But SCOTUS didn’t ‘create’ the right, they just defined it specifically as something that can’t be taken, that is, something you can’t pass a law violating.
Going back to my simple example above, no one questions my fundamental Constitutional right to yo-yo. But if someone passed a law against it, and I fought to SCOTUS and won, they wouldn’t have ‘created’ my right to yo-yo, only acknowledged it.
>I don’t know what you mean by “Constitutional Rights,”
Chasm, there is nothing I can possibly say to educate a guy quoting the 9th Amendment who contends that he doesn’t understand what is meant by “Constitutional Rights” vs. the vernacular use of the word “right”.
All I can do is give you a practical illustration. I support your Constitutional Right to Free Speech, but I exercise my private, personal right to refrain from further conversation with an idiot.
Best of luck as you continue to struggle through life. Beware of other similar sounding words that mean entirely different things, like “Cancer” (an astrological sign) and “Cancer” (a malignant tumor), and “hoe” (a garden utensil) and “hoe” (a repository for venereal disease).
Chasm:
I see. Apparently, you didn’t read the article I referenced. http://www.365gay.com/features/082908-corvino . You will fight for your rights but have no problem placing your demands on other peoples’ freedom of conscience. Where in the Constitution does it give you that right?