I never paid much attention to what Roger Ebert said about movies.
Given that I usually take-in only three or four films a year, Ebert’s analysis of any particular film or actor or “scene” just wasn’t going to be something that would capture my attention.
But the final seven years or so of Ebert’s life offer some seriously thoughtful and thought provoking lessons, for those who still care to learn. Whether you reside on the right or left side of the political and cultural aisle doesn’t much matter. Consider some of the facts of Ebert’s final years, and the implications of his actions.
First, Ebert suffered with multiple bouts of cancer for over a decade, yet he and his wife Chaz Hammelsmith Ebert remained married and supportive of each other. Initially diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid in 2002, Roger would discover cancer in his salivary gland a year later. After being in remission for periods of time, he eventually contracted cancer in his jaw bone (which necessitated the removal of his jaw), and he lost his voice. Through all of this, he and were seemingly inseparable.
The things that the Eberts said and wrote about each other during their roughly twenty years of marriage were sufficiently extraordinary, even for otherwise healthy spouses. Yet despite Roger’s immense health struggles, neither of them seemed to have been deterred. Even in the past few years as a voiceless Roger absolutely needed Chaz to speak on his behalf, both out in public and in television interviews, never once did you see either of them convey anything short of love and respect for the other, and neither of them ever seemed awkward or uncomfortable with Roger’s diminished functioning. In a country where the legal definition of marriage remains a widely contested public policy issue all the while more than half of the nation’s marriages end in divorce, the Eberts, whether they intended to or not, publicly emulated what a marriage should be about -both in sickness and in health.
Secondly, Roger’s determination to remain professionally and publicly active despite his debilitations says some extraordinary things – both about Roger’s character, and about the value of human life itself. Losing your voice and having your face become severely disfigured is undoubtedly awful for anybody, but for someone who makes their living in front of tv cameras, such circumstances could be a career killer.
But not for Roger Ebert. Despite the loss of his voice Roger could still write, and what couldn’t be written Chaz could say for him. That’s how things went for Roger over the last seven years or so. Do an online search and story after story emerges of the Eberts playfully appearing at film festivals and movie premiers, Roger offering his signature “two thumbs up” gestures with Chaz doing the talking.
An extraordinary example of the Eberts’ “grace under fire” appears in a video on Youtube. Roger and Chaz are sitting on the set in a remote studio being interviewed by a CNN Host at the Anchor desk. The Host, noticeably awkward with Roger’s appearance and inaudible gestures, thanks Roger for his courage to continue appearing on TV, noting that Roger had been such a handsome on-camera performer for so many years. Through hand signals, scrawling on a note pad, and some vocal help from Chaz, Roger shoots-back at the host and says “what do you mean I was handsome? I think I’m still looking pretty good!”
The fact is, Roger looked rather odd with his jaw removed, but that apparently didn’t matter to the confident and in-love couple known as Roger and Chaz. The value of one’s life transcends their immediate physical appearance and level of functioning, and Roger’s sustained presence in the public square was a testimony to that ultimate truth. Yet on this point, Roger’s final years were an anathema to those who are quick to advocate for rationed healthcare and euthanasia, believing that people as old and incapacitated as Roger quite naturally have a “duty to die.”
Tragically, during the same week that the courageous Roger Ebert left us, some horrific news broke about Medicare, the federal healthcare program for senior adults. Under the federal Obamacare law, funding for Medicare is being gradually cut to allow for increased expenditures on Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for the poor, and on the Obamacare program itself. As a result, a new trend has emerged: Medicare is increasingly denying treatment to elderly cancer patients (Is this the “change” you were “hoping” for?).
From a raw political standpoint, this makes sense. Sickly senior citizens are a less-viable voter-block than are younger and middle-aged citizens (those who can benefit from Obamacare and Medicaid). But from a moral standpoint this is an abomination. Is the life of every elderly cancer patient as valuable as Roger Ebert’s was? In political terms, the answer is “no.”
Thank you Roger and Chaz for some important lessons. Are Americans willing to learn from them?
If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray,
and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways;
then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. 2 Chronicles 7:14 (KJV)
Originally Published on the Sultan Knish blog The only question worth asking about gay marriage is whether anyone on the left would care about this crusade if it didn't come with the privilege of bulldozing another civilizational institution.
Gay marriage is not about men marrying men or women marrying women, it is about the deconstruction of marriage between men and women. That is a thing that many men and women of one generation understand but have trouble conveying to another generation for whom marriage has already largely been deconstructed.
The statistics about the falling marriage rate tell the tale well enough. Marriage is a fading institution. Family is a flickering light in the evening of the West.
The deconstruction is destruction. Entire countries are fading away, their populations being replaced by emigrants from more traditional lands whose understanding of the male-female relationship is positively reactionary. These emigrants may lack technology or the virtues of civilization, and their idea of marriage resembles slavery more than any modern ideal, but it fulfills the minimum purpose of any group, tribe or country-- it produces its next generation.
The deconstruction of marriage is not a mere matter of front page photos of men kissing. It began with the deconstruction of the family. Gay marriage is only one small stop on a tour that includes rising divorce rates, falling childbirth rates and the abandonment of responsibility by twenty and even thirty-somethings.
Each step on the tour takes apart the definition and structure of marriage until there is nothing left. Gay marriage is not inclusive, it is yet another attempt at eliminating marriage as a social institution by deconstructing it until it no longer exists.
There are two ways to destroy a thing. You can either run at it while swinging a hammer with both hands or you can attack its structure until it no longer means anything.
The left hasn't gone all out by outlawing marriage, instead it has deconstructed it, taking apart each of its assumptions, from the economic to the cooperative to the emotional to the social, until it no longer means anything at all. Until there is no way to distinguish marriage from a temporary liaison between members of uncertain sexes for reasons that due to their vagueness cannot be held to have any solemn and meaningful purpose.
You can abolish democracy by banning the vote or you can do it by letting people vote as many times as they want, by letting small children and foreigners vote, until no one sees the point in counting the votes or taking the process seriously. The same goes for marriage or any other institution. You can destroy it by outlawing it or by eliminating its meaningfulness until it becomes so open that it is absurd.
Every aspect of marriage is deconstructed and then eliminated until it no longer means anything. And once marriage is no longer a lifetime commitment between a man and a woman, but a ceremony with no deeper meaning than most modern ceremonies, then the deconstruction and destruction will be complete.
The deconstruction of marriage eroded it as an enduring institution and then as an exclusive institution and finally as a meaningful institution. The trendy folk who claim to be holding off on getting married until gay marriage is enacted are not eager for marriage equality, they are using it as an excuse for an ongoing rejection of marriage.
Gay marriage was never the issue. It was always marriage.
In the world that the deconstructionists are striving to build, there will be marriage, but it will mean nothing. Like a greeting card holiday, it will be an event, but not an institution. An old ritual with no further meaning. An egotistical exercise in attention-seeking and self-celebration with no deeper purpose. It will be a display every bit as hollow as the churches and synagogues it takes place in.
The deconstruction of marriage is only a subset of the deconstruction of gender from a state of being to a state of mind. The decline of marriage was preceded by the deconstruction of gender roles and gay marriage is being succeeded by the destruction of gender as anything other than a voluntary identity, a costume that one puts on and takes off.
Destroying gender roles was a prerequisite to destroying gender. Each deconstruction leads naturally to the next deconstruction with no final destination except total deconstruction.
Gay marriage is not a stopping point, just as men in women's clothing using the ladies room is not a stopping point. There is no stopping point at all.
The left's deconstruction of social institutions is not a quest for equality, but for destruction. As long as the institutions that preceded it exist, it will go on deconstructing them until there is nothing left but a blank canvas, an unthinking anarchy, on which it can impose its perfect and ideal conception of how everyone should live.
Equality is merely a pretext for deconstruction. Change the parameters of a thing and it ceases to function. Redefine it and expand it and it no longer means anything at all. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but if you change 'rose' to mean anything that sticks out of the ground, then the entire notion of what is being discussed has gone and cannot be reclaimed without also reclaiming language.
The left's social deconstruction program is a war of ideas and concepts. Claims of equality are used to expand institutions and ways of living until they are so broad as to encompass everything and nothing. And once a thing encompasses everything, once a rose represents everything rising out of the ground, then it also represents nothing at all.
Deconstruction is a war against definitions, borders and parameters. It is a war against defining things by criminalizing the limitation of definitions. With inclusivity as the mandate, exclusivity, in marriage, or any other realm, quickly meets with social disapproval and then becomes a hate crime. If the social good is achieved only through maximum inclusivity and infinite tolerance, then any form of exclusivity, from property to person to ideas, is a selfish act that refuses the collective impulse to make all things into a common property with no lasting meaning or value.
As Orwell understood in 1984, tyranny is essentially about definitions. It is hard to fight for freedom if you lack the word. It is hard to maintain a marriage if the idea no longer exists. Orwell's Oceania made basic human ideas into contradictory things. The left's deconstruction of social values does the same thing to such essential institutions as marriage; which becomes an important impermanent thing of no fixed nature or value.
The left's greatest trick is making things mean the opposite of what they do. Stealing is sharing. Crime is justice. Property is theft. Each deconstruction is accompanied by an inversion so that a thing, once examined, comes to seem the opposite of what it is, and once that is done, it no longer has the old innate value, but a new enlightened one.
To deconstruct man, you deconstruct his beliefs and then his way of living. You deconstruct freedom until it means slavery. You deconstruct peace until it means war. You deconstruct property until it means theft. And you deconstruct marriage until it means a physical relationship between any group of people for any duration. And that is the opposite of what marriage is.
The deconstruction of marriage is part of the deconstruction of gender and family and those are part of the long program of deconstructing man. Once each basic value has been rendered null and void, inverted and revealed to be random and meaningless, then man is likewise revealed to be a random and meaningless creature whose existence requires shaping by those who know better.
The final deconstruction eliminates nation, religion, family and even gender to reduce the soul of man to a blank slate waiting to be written on.
That is what is at stake here. This is not a struggle about the right of equality, but the right of definition. It is not about whether men can get married, but whether marriage will mean anything at all. It is about preserving the shapes and structures of basic social concepts that define our identities in order to preserve those very concepts, rather than accepting their deconstruction into nullification.
The question on the table is whether the institutions that give us meaning will be allowed to retain that meaning. And that question is a matter of survival. Societies cannot survive without definitions. Peoples do not go on existing through the act of occupying space. The deconstruction of identity is also the destruction of identity.
This week the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on two of the most critical cases of our time. On Tuesday, March 26, attorneys will make the pitch both for and against California’s Proposition 8. This, of course, is the Golden State’s pro-marriage amendment. It maintained the timeless definition of natural marriage as between man and wife.
Then, on Wednesday, March 27, the high court will consider the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), passed in 1996 with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed into law by then President Bill Clinton. It, likewise, secured the definition of legitimate marriage for purposes of federal law.
Although both cases certainly address a multitude of legal and political issues, they also involve a number of moral and cultural considerations that, if wrongly decided, will literally shake Western civilization to the core.
The stakes could not be higher. Of central concern is whether the Supreme Court will put its official stamp of approval on “same-sex marriage.” Ultimately, these nine justices will decide either to recklessly deconstruct, radically redefine and render functionally trivial the age-old institution of natural marriage – or leave it alone.
They’d better leave it alone.
Here’s the bottom line: Homosexual activists don’t want the white picket fence. They want to burn down the white picket fence. The endgame is not to achieve so-called “marriage equality,” but, rather, to render marriage reality meaningless.
In a recent column headlined, “The Revolt of Intelligence Against ‘Marriage Equality,” worldview expert Rick Pearcey addressed one prominent “gay” activist’s admission that the destruction of natural marriage signifies the left’s ultimate cultural coup de grâce.
“Masha Gessen, a lesbian and a journalist, spoke frankly about this at a conference in Sydney, Australia,” he wrote. “‘It’s a no-brainer that we should have the right to marry,’ she said. ‘But I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. … ‘Marriage equality’ becomes ‘marriage elasticity,’ with the ultimate goal of ‘marriage extinction.’”
Still, if counterfeit “same-sex marriage” becomes the law of the land, then much will follow before marriage extinction inevitably occurs.
One of liberals’ favorite Alinskyite defense mechanisms is to ridicule the opposition if confronted with some irrefutable argument against some hallowed left-wing delusion. Such is the tactic employed whenever a thinking person walks into the room and points this out: Once the government pretends that some vague combination of “love” and “consent” are all that a “marriage” requires, then other “arbitrary” and “discriminatory” parameters beyond a binary male-female prerequisite must also go poof.
That is to say, if the Court magically divines some constitutional right to “same-sex marriage,” then full “marriage equality” necessarily demands that polygamous, incestuous and any other equally aberrant nuptial cocktail be likewise permitted.
It’s a “no-brainer,” right?
To that end, I’m very concerned with the Supreme Court’s recent history of radically redefining that which cannot be redefined. Though examples abound, I’m thinking specifically, as concerns the topic at hand, of the Court’s 2003 holding in Lawrence v. Texas.
In Lawrence, the liberal majority, for the first time in history, radically redefined male-on-male sodomy – hitherto classified “a crime against nature” – as a “constitutional right.”
In his characteristically brilliant dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia voiced my concerns better than I can: “State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices,” he wrote. “Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision.”
So, if the high court removes one natural marriage parameter for one special-interest group, then “equal protection under the law” requires that it remove all natural marriage parameters for all special-interest groups.
Liberty Counsel made these very points in a friend-of-the-court brief filed with the Supreme Court: “Ultimately, there is no principled basis for recognizing a legality of same-sex marriage without simultaneously providing a basis for the legality of consensual polygamy or certain adult incestuous relationships,” noted the brief. “In fact, every argument for same-sex marriage is an argument for them as well.”
Another brief filed by 18 state attorneys general voiced similar concerns: “Once the natural limits that inhere in the relationship between a man and a woman can no longer sustain the definition of marriage, the conclusion that follows is that any grouping of adults would have an equal claim to marriage,” they wrote.
The brief further observed the self-evident “no-brainer” that legitimate marriage is “optimal for children and society at large.”
It’s all very simple. If anything is marriage, then everything is marriage. And if everything is marriage, then nothing is marriage at all. “‘Marriage equality’ becomes ‘marriage elasticity,’ with the ultimate goal of ‘marriage extinction.’”
I sincerely hope that the honorable and learned men and women who sit on the highest bench in the land recognize that all of these San Francisco-style social-engineering games are a deceptive means to a destructive end. And it’s not the emotionalist end they’ve dolled-up and dished out. The left’s fierce push for “gay marriage” has nothing to do with “marriage equality” and everything to do with “marriage extinction.”
Or, as Ms. Gessen candidly put it: “[I]t’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist.”
I just pray that at least five justices still think it should.
The mere words same-sex marriage connote it’s not a “marriage” by use of the term, but rather an aberration of a societal norm that a small group are determined to force onto the majority. Only 3% of Americans are gay.
Since the beginning of time, before marriage was formally recognized by state laws, it was defined between a man and a woman not just for kicks, but because people of the opposite sex have coupled off to procreate, as a means of continuing society. It takes a man and woman to biologically create a baby, so naturally society began to recognize marriage between a man and a woman to encourage stable families and cultures.
Two men and two women will never be able to create a baby. This is fact not fiction. People argue that not every married couple has children. While every married couple won’t choose to have babies or be able to, marriage between a man and woman is at the core of society’s cultural foundation and must be protected.
The Supreme Court is hearing arguments in two cases, California’s Proposition 8, where citizens voted to ban gay marriage, and the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, defining marriage between a man and a woman. Proponents of gay marriage are asking the court to ignore centuries of a societal norm and legalize gay marriage as the law of the land on the basis of the 14th amendment.
Activists often refer to the 1967 Loving vs. Virginia case to argue that denying gays a right to marriage is discriminatory. In the Loving case, the Supreme Court ruled laws banning interracial marriage were illegal because they violated the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection of the laws” clause, which applied to all citizens. Mildred Loving, a black woman, and her husband, Richard, a white man, had the right to marry because the institution of marriage is inherently between a man and a woman, not between two men or two women, and therefore gay couples don’t have a right to marriage.
During arguments in the California case, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia plainly pointed out, marriage has never been a “fundamental” right for gays, as lawyer Theodore Olson tried to assert. “When did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the 14th Amendment was adopted?” said Scalia.
For gays to suggest a right to marry is akin to blacks fighting for civil rights is not only preposterous but also offensive to the highest order. Emmett Till, a 14 year old black boy was beaten, his eye gouged out, murdered, and thrown in the bottom of a lake with a “cotton gin fan barbed wired to his neck” all because he whistled at a white woman. Till was denied civil rights. The Supreme Court declared black slaves property instead of citizens in the 1857 Dred Scott case; therefore denying blacks equal rights to their white slave masters under the Constitution. I don’t see how denying gays marriage rights is akin to slavery holding blacks in bondage as property, as liberals assert.
My mother and father joined “sit ins” at segregated lunch counters in the 1960s to fight for the basic right to eat, work, live and learn in the same places as whites. Blacks and some whites were lynched, murdered, hosed down and arrested so blacks could enjoy their undeniable rights under the Constitution. I don’t see gays undergoing the same struggle in their quest to marry.
America is almost a moral wasteland as it is. People are expected to look the other way, condone and accept as societal norms things like teen pregnancy, out of wedlock births, and the left’s constant mockery and disintegration of traditional family values. Cue the liberal rant: “Stay at home mom Ann Romney never worked a day in her life.”
It’s no coincidence that 38 states where gay marriage was placed on the ballot voters rejected it because it attempts to redefine a societal norm. Nine States and the District of Columbia allow gay marriage. The DC Council voted to approve gay marriage, bypassing a ballot initiative for fear residents would reject it. Of the remaining states, courts forced them to allow gay marriage. While some states have voted in favor of gay marriage, the majority voted against it because they think it’s wrong.
What’s overlooked in the gay marriage debate is that gays represent 3% of the US population yet they are attempting to force their life choices as mainstream on the 97% majority. From gay marriage, to gay adoptions, homosexual curriculum in public schools, and the demand for gay Boy Scouts leaders, when will this gay war on society END?
Dear Mr. Clinton, with all respect to the office of the president which you held for 8 years, I must say that it is not just ironic that you are now asking the Supreme Court to overturn the legislation you signed into law 17 years ago. It is downright tragic.
In your March 7th editorial for the Washington Post, you wrote that although it “was only 17 years ago” when you signed the Defense of Marriage Act, “it was a very different time.”
May I ask you, sir, if 17 years have changed the nature of men and women, of mother and fathers and children, of the essential elements of a family? Have 17 years changed multiplied thousands of years of human history? Have 17 years changed fundamental faith values embraced by several billion people worldwide?
You explain that, 17 years ago, “In no state in the union was same-sex marriage recognized, much less available as a legal right, but some were moving in that direction.”
In point of fact, since 1996, 32 states have voted to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman (the majority of them since 2004), including my current home state of North Carolina, which just last year overwhelmingly wrote natural, organic marriage into the constitution by a vote of 61% to 39%, despite a strong majority of Democrats statewide.
It is true that, for the first time, several states voted in 2012 to redefine marriage, but those were heavily blue states where traditional marriage proponents were outspent by as much as five-to-one, and even then, the voting was close.
Can you really claim some kind of mandate when 9 times out of 10 (32 states out of 36), when the people have been given a right to vote, they have voted against genderless marriage? The mandate is actually against your position, sir, not for it.
In your editorial, you offer a transparently weak justification of your signing of DOMA, which leads me to ask: Mr. Clinton, did you have no conscience when you signed that bill into law? Did you have no gay or lesbian friends? Had you not met any upstanding gay or lesbian couples, working hard to raise a family? I’m sure that was not the case, sir, and with all candor, your justification for signing DOMA in 1996 while asking the Supreme Court to overturn it in 2013 smacks of political correctness more than dispassionate conviction.
You wrote that when DOMA comes before the Court on March 27, “the justices must decide whether it is consistent with the principles of a nation that honors freedom, equality and justice above all, and is therefore constitutional. As the president who signed the act into law, I have come to believe that DOMA is contrary to those principles and, in fact, incompatible with our Constitution.”
Do you honestly believe, Mr. Clinton, that any of the framers of the Constitution countenanced a day in our great nation when men would be marrying men and women marrying women, and in the name of the Constitution, at that? And since when did our Constitution guarantee the government’s endorsement of all romantic attractions and sexual behaviors? And are you genuinely unaware that redefining marriage is just the tip of the iceberg of a massive societal transformation in the name of LGBT rights, including the undoing of gender distinctions?
And with your brilliant legal mind, sir, are you oblivious to the fact that polygamists and polyamorists, too numerous to be ignored, are also appealing to “freedom, equality and justice” in the pursuit of their “rights”? What will you say to them, especially given the fact that their lifestyles are now being mainstreamed by the very same media that has so shaped American thinking on homosexual issues?
You wrote, “Because Section 3 of the act defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, same-sex couples who are legally married in nine states and the District of Columbia are denied the benefits of more than a thousand federal statutes and programs available to other married couples.”
But what does this have to with the radical redefinition of marriage? What does this have to do with sanctioning an institution that will guarantee that a child has either no mother or no father? What does this have to do with rendering marriage genderless, to the point that marriage certificates could be reduced to Partner A and Partner B, along with birth certificates being reduced to Parent A and Parent B? (In this context, I should mention the Florida judge who “approved the adoption of a 22-month-old baby girl that will list three people as parents on her birth certificate – a married lesbian couple and a gay man.”)
Mr. Clinton, if marriage is simply the union of two people and not the union of a man and a woman, can you give me one solid intellectual reason or one compelling social argument why marriage cannot involve more than two consenting adults? What is so special about the number “two” if it does not consist of a male and female, with their unique biological and social compatibility and, in normal circumstances, their ability to produce children whom they will raise for the next generation?
You claim to know now that DOMA not only provided “an excuse for discrimination,” but that “the law is itself discriminatory.” Surely you must realize that polygamists, polyamorists, and others will find your current position “discriminatory.” More importantly, the sanctioning of same-sex “marriage” will mean that multiplied tens of millions of God-fearing Americans will be codified as bigots, surely the height of ugly discrimination.
Mr. Clinton, you were right before. You are wrong now. I pray that God will give you another change of heart.
One significant development in the recent election was votes in four states approving same sex marriage initiatives. Until now, all previous state referenda to approve same sex marriage – 32 of them - failed.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page – a place where conservatives usually turn for intellectual capital – saw this as cause for celebration.
According to the Journal, marriage definition should come from voters, not from court orders. Americans, they argue, have “shown themselves more than capable of changing their views on gay marriage the democratic way.”
In other words, our definition of marriage should follow process, not principle. Let voters decide.
“As views on gay marriage change, and a growing number of Americans support it, politics will follow. This is how it’s supposed to work.”
I’d guess if I asked the Wall Street Journal editors if the American constitution should be viewed as a “living document” – if our understanding of its words and what they mean should be open to change to reflect attitudes of the moment – they would say “no.”
Liberals think the constitution should be re-engineered every few years like an iPad.
So it is not surprising when liberals, for whom tradition is meaningless, trash once sacred institutions in favor of impulses of the moment.
But it does surprise me when those whose politics are supposedly right-of-center, who view America’s founding documents as sacrosanct and give the highest priority to preserving their integrity, are cavalier regarding the integrity of an institution thousands of years older than our constitution.
But it’s a point of view not uncommon.
In the 1850’s, Stephen Douglas proposed solving the dilemma of whether slavery should be permitted in new states by suggesting that they should just vote. What could be more American than submitting the question of slavery to the democratic process of each state?
To this Abraham Lincoln observed: “God did not place good and evil before man telling him to make his choice. On the contrary, He did tell him there was one tree, of the fruit of which he should not eat, upon pain of certain death….I should scarcely wish so strong a prohibition against slavery in Nebraska.”
Lincoln’s rejoinder to the idea of “popular sovereignty” – that states should vote to determine if slavery would be legal – was that there are core truths – truths that define right and wrong, good and evil - that precede the democratic process.
To reject this premise is to buy into moral chaos. Which is what we are approaching today.
The claim that somehow it is a sign of a healthy, free society that by way of the vote we can re-write our language, our dictionary, our oldest, time-tested traditions is a sign of how lost we are.
Same sex marriage advocates argue that their efforts will save the embattled institution of marriage. But this takes a symptom of the disease and calls it a cure.
As American society has become more self-centered and materialistic, family and marriage have been imploding.
According to the Pew Research Center, in 1960 72 percent of American adults were married. This dropped to 51% in 2011.
Marriage and family is the pillar of any healthy society. It is the institution through which children are born and raised and through which time-tested truths and values are transmitted from one generation to the next.
To deal with the crisis of the collapse of family and marriage by redefining what they are is the sign of a society losing its way.
Fortunately, America is still a free country. Individuals can make their own choices about how they choose to live.
But taking personal choices to deviate from our social standards of right and wrong, true and false, and decide to change those truths and standards, so that nothing is any longer considered deviant, is a bridge to nowhere
In case you haven’t heard, some of the stars of the popular TV show “Sister Wives” are suing the state of Utah, arguing that its laws against bigamy are unconstitutional. And just last week, a reporter asked White House press secretary Jay Carney, “How does the president stand on polygamy?”
Polygamy? Are you kidding?
Not surprisingly, Carney ignored the question, but it is a question he won’t be able to ignore for long. In an extensive, feature article, Time magazine described how “once secretive plural families like the Dargers of Utah [also part of “Sister Wives”] are coming out of the shadows and beginning to advocate for their way of life.” (The article was entitled, “I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do: Polygamy Raises Its Profile in America.”)
But what else could we expect? First same-sex couples have come out of the closet and now “plural families” are “coming out of the shadows.” After all, if two men can get “married,” why not one man and several women? And if there is a fundamental “right” to marry the person you love, shouldn’t that “right” also extend to the persons (plural) you love? Surely “marriage equality” means equality for all, right?
On July 25th, AP News reported that “Kody Brown and his four wives just want to live like any other family — free from the threat of being tossed in prison.” Surely, “tolerance” and “diversity” require this too, do they not? (Yes, I’m being sarcastic, but if “tolerance” and “diversity” and “equality” can be used to support same-sex “marriage,” then they can be used to support polygamy.)
The Browns are being represented by no less a prominent attorney than Jonathan Turley, professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and a frequent TV commentator. Turley is claiming that the very court rulings that paved the way for same-sex “marriage” also pave the way for polygamy. And this, it turns out, is exactly what Justice Antonin Scalia predicted in 2003 in his withering dissent of Lawrence v. Texas, where 6 Supreme Court justices found a constitutional “right” to Sodomy. Scalia warned that with the court’s ruling, “State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest . . . are ... called into question by today’s decision.”
Not surprisingly, Turley is now arguing that “under previous U.S. Supreme Court rulings, such as one that struck down Texas’ sodomy law, private intimate relationships between consenting adults are constitutionally protected.” But of course! And despite the fact that Scalia was ridiculed for issuing his 2003 warning, his words are proving to be strikingly prescient. In fact, already in 2003, a conservative reporter wrote that “Polygamy is the next civil-rights battle,” stating that the “Multiple-wives crowd hopes to capitalize on [the Lawrence v. Texas] sodomy decision.”
In 2005, during a question and answer session at Yale University, ACLU president Nadine Strossen stated that polygamy was among the “fundamental rights” that her organization would continue to defend, and in 2011, Joseph Farah asked rhetorically, “if marriage is a discriminatory institution because it prohibits same-sex couplings, why would it not be discriminatory to prohibit more than two people from participation?” He also noted, quite rightly, that “there is much more demand for polygamy throughout the world than there is for same-sex marriage,” not to mention much more historical precedent for it.
But this is not just an issue that is being played out in the courts. It’s also being played out in the court of public opinion, and just as the media has helped promote the acceptance and even celebration of homosexuality (along with bisexuality and transgenderism), it is doing the same for polygamy. (For the media’s recent promotion of polyamory, see here.)
After all, it was just a few months ago that Vice President Joe Biden said, “I think ‘Will & Grace’ probably did more to educate the American public than almost anybody’s ever done so far. People fear that which is different. Now they’re beginning to understand.” The same can be said for shows like HBO’s “Big Love” and TLC’s “Sister Wives,” as Americans are “beginning to understand” polygamy as well. Why should they fear it?
Polygamists now have a friendly face, and if the women are happy sharing their husband and making a life together with their children, how can we object? At least that’s what the popular argument would say.
I wrote last year that same-sex “marriage” represented a further fall down the slippery slope than did polygamy, and so it’s only logical that the continued push for same-sex “marriage” will be followed inevitably by the push for polygamy (and more).
The lesson from all this is simple: If we don’t draw an absolute line in the sand and declare on a national level that marriage is the union of one man and one woman only, this sacred and most foundational human institution will soon become so malleable as to be totally unrecognizable. And so, we either do the right thing today or we face the radical consequences tomorrow. Which will it be?
We hear from both sides on the Chick-Fil-A controversy in this high spirited debate between Daily Caller Reporter, Michelle Fields, and Host of 'The Six Pack' on Siriusxm radio, Dave Rubin.
Company president Dan Cathy told a Baptist website the Atlanta-based restaurant chain is "guilty as charged" in its support of traditional marriage.
"We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit," Cathy said in article published Monday by the Baptist Press. "We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that."
Saturday, July 21, 2012
"The New York Times" wrote a shocking article calling attention to the income inequality caused by single parenthood. That's right, the liberal "New York Times" found that inequality is caused more by marital status than by finance, Wall Street, or tax policy. Are liberals encouraging the decline of marriage? Find out on this Trifecta.
I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. For eighteen years, I’ve been playing singles tennis. But, recently, I decided to switch to doubles in an effort to attenuate some back and knee pain I’ve been experiencing on the hard courts. So my friend Gary Faulkner and I decided to sign up to play doubles for the local tennis club. Gary, being somewhat effeminate, decided we should sign up for mixed doubles. Although technically a male, Gary likes to occasionally play the role of a female.
Unfortunately, the Wilmington Tennis Foundation (WTF) rejected our request to play mixed doubles. They insisted that the definition of mixed doubles requires a man and a woman. They further insisted that the terms “man” and “woman” are determined objectively. In other words, it isn’t enough that someone plays the role of a woman. She actually has to be a woman to qualify as a woman. In the wake of the WTF reaction, Gary plans to file a complaint with the Obama Department of Justice.
For those who are not Swift enough to detect satire, Gary Faulkner is not really my friend. To the contrary, he is a gay rights activist who is deeply distraught over North Carolina’s recent passage of Amendment One limiting the definition of mixed doubles – oops!, I mean marriage – to unions involving one man and one woman.
Gary Faulkner’s strong emotional reaction to the vote is perplexing for two reasons: 1) He insisted that Amendment One was “unnecessary” prior to its passage, and 2) He was already married before the amendment came up for a vote. Both of these points are important and deserve separate treatment below.
First, anyone following the Amendment One controversy in North Carolina knows that it was necessary to pass in order to keep judicial activists from redefining marriage by judicial fiat. Gay rights activists like Gary Faulkner know that blocking the judiciary with a constitutional amendment was the only way to preserve the institution of marriage from Marxist social engineers who want government, not family, to be the foundation of society. Were the amendment unnecessary, Faulkner would not be so emotionally distraught in the wake of its passage. In fact, Gary Faulkner hasn’t been this upset since Victor Willis of the Village People married a woman.
Second, heterosexual gay rights activists like Gary Faulkner do not lead the march for same-sex marriage out of a love for gay people. Most do it out of a hatred of Christians. Faulkner, who has a well-documented history of making hate-filled and defamatory statements about Christians, has a political motive for supporting same-sex marriage. He wants marriage re-defined. Then he wants to see churches that refuse to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies stripped of their tax-exempt status. Finally, he wants to see churches that refuse to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies shut down in the name of “equality” and “tolerance.” The result would be a nation in which the only Christian churches remaining would be those that have abandoned basic Christian principles.
It’s been a hard few weeks for Gary Faulkner. But he holds out hope for the future by referencing the fact that young people are more supportive of same-sex marriage than older people. That’s because Gary and his Marxist contemporaries have gained the kind of control over the schools that they have not yet gained over the churches.
Of course, the fatal flaw (and I mean that literally) in Gary Faulkner’s grand vision for America is that he and his Marxist contemporaries have been pushing abortion as steadfastly as they have been pushing same-sex marriage. The problem with abortion is that it produces an aging population that does not replenish itself. As people age, they have a tendency to discard silly emotionally-driven ideas – like the idea that 96-98% of society’s conformists should re-arrange themselves on behalf of 2-4% of its deviants.
If Gary Faulkner were not such a champion of abortion rights, 53 million more people would have been born since 1973. About two million of them would have been homosexuals eligible to marry someone of the same sex. And, who knows, some of them might have played mixed doubles in their spare time.
In my last article, I explained how embarrassed the liberal elites were in the aftermath of North Carolina’s decisive passage of the marriage amendment. In their view, it was a triumph for backwoods bigotry. But there was a deeper sentiment lurking beneath the headlines and the sound bites: It’s hardly fair that these bigots get to vote! Just think of how wonderful America would be if only the enlightened ones could make the decisions.
A headline last week on the militant, gay activist site Truth Wins Out read, “North Carolina chooses bigotry over prosperity.” The article went on to say, “Those who live in the intelligent parts of North Carolina voted overwhelmingly against Amendment One, but unfortunately, there just aren’t enough intelligent parts of North Carolina.”
So, those living “in the intelligent parts” of the state, meaning primarily the counties and cities with major university populations, recognized how idiotic it is want to safeguard natural, organic marriage. Unfortunately, most North Carolinians were too dense to understand that a man has the civil right to marry another man. Presumably, the intelligent ones – the university students and their friends, not to mention the professors – have learned what really matters from authoritative sources like “Will and Grace,” a show justly touted for changing American opinion by no less a cultural pundit than our vice president, Joe Biden.
A commenter on another website, self-identified as a white gay woman exclaimed, “As I sit in the back of the bus and can only WISH the president would stop letting these backwoods S.O.B’S push me to the back of the bus as if me and my family do not contribute to this country!”
Backwoods S.O.B.’s indeed. Unintelligent bigots and boars. How do they (we?) even have the right to vote? It’s not fair to the enlightened ones (apparently akin to the “brights,” as some atheists self-defeatingly describe themselves). Presumably none of the intelligent ones live in Mississippi either.
Last week, on my Line of Fire broadcast, I received a call from a young lady named Sophie, a student at the University of North Carolina, living in Durham. She too was terribly embarrassed by the voting actions of her fellow North Carolinians, but she was quite proud of her county and city, since they had voted against Amendment One.
This was part of our conversation:
Sophie: And I don't think that is any coincidence that the counties that are heavily populated, developed and have universities all voted against the amendment.
Brown: So the smart ones, in other words.
Sophie: I'm not saying the smart ones
Brown: The educated ones?
Sophie: I'm just saying the people who were educated about the amendment and understood the consequences of voting for the amendment, because this is way more than marriage because if it was just about marriage then we wouldn't have an amendment at all because it’s already illegal in North Carolina.
Brown: No, Sophie the reason for the Amendment, is so no activist judge can … redefine marriage and when people go for civil unions that's just a step towards it. It was 100% to do with marriage...
A little later in the conversation, we got down to brass tacks:
Sophie: Well, this just shows the downfall of direct democracy. I mean sometimes I think that some things really should be left to the people who understand the consequences of the law and I think a lot of political . . . Almost every person who is high up in the North Carolina government has voiced their, their thoughts against this amendment, including the former democrat and republican mayor of Charlotte.
Brown: So Sophie, I think we . . . we just need the smart people, the educated people who think like you, to take control and to weed out these bigoted backwoods, Bible preachers like me, and America will be a better place. Why don't you just say it? Why don't you just say it?
Sophie: You’re putting words in my mouth. You’re putting words in my mouth.
Brown: Well those are the words you just. . . . OK then say it.
Sophie: I think if people understood the consequences of the amendment, that they would not have voted for it.
There you have it. The people who live in the “intelligent parts” of North Carolina, “the counties that are heavily populated, developed and have universities, all voted against the amendment.” Yes, “Almost every person who is high up in the North Carolina government” opposed the marriage amendment, leaving only the backwards, uneducated, bigoted blue-collar workers to vote for it, and sadly, they constituted a substantial majority. And “this just shows the downfall of direct democracy.”
So I have a proposal. Let’s be fair to America and honor the elites, and let’s get out of the way of the inevitable social progress that is coming our way, like marriage ceremonies pronouncing lesbian couples “bride and broom” (this really happened). And let’s leave it to the cultural “brights” to rule the day.
Surely, no group of highly educated, intelligent and enlightened progressive, social elites has ever hurt their country. Surely we have learned by now that “some animals are more equal than others.”
I never paid much attention to what Roger Ebert said about movies.
