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Many people support gay marriage as policy, even though they don’t support it morally, on the grounds that the law must be equally applied or that individuals should have the freedom to engage in any consensual relationship they choose. But this position poses several problems from a logical, or even legal, standpoint. I have been confronted with various arguments from time to time and, after giving them serious reflection and thought, I am bringing some of those questions, with my responses, together here for your review.
Mitt Romney
I’ve noticed several posts on Facebook recently that call out Mitt Romney for things he allegedly would have done, had he been elected, which would have rendered the election moot no matter who won. These folks are, of course, the same ones who insisted that Mitt Romney was no different than Barack Obama in matters of policy, and are usually libertarians angered by America’s rejection of their messiah, Ron Paul. For these misguided ideologues (is that redundant?), there is no tolerance of any deviation from the libertarian creed; no compromise is possible with people who have suffused, or even entirely replaced, religious faith with political dogma.
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Barack Obama
The following was posted as a comment to one of Erick Erickson’s posts by a user called “lakeworthcane.” It’s so spot on that I felt it needed to be seen in as many places as possible.
“Having watched and listened to Obama for six or seven years now, I think the man has a cartoon-like idea of life in general. He’s dominated by his cynicism: seems to have come to believe that all of life is nothing more than talking bologna and shining it on. That’s all he’s ever done. That’s all he’s ever had to do. That’s all that those who’ve elected him on the state and federal levels have ever required of him.
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The Boy Scouts of America voted today to wait until its annual meeting in May to address the question of whether to allow openly gay individuals to participate as Scouts and leaders. The measure has been promoted by at least one member of the Scouting board, but it appears that a strong outcry from people involved in scouting has forced proponents of the measure to retreat for the time being.
The BSA has been extensively criticized for its prohibitions on gays, with critics calling it discriminatory, among other things. Of course, those critics never explain why being discriminatory about membership in a values-oriented private organization is wrong. Nor do they bother explaining why it isn’t discriminatory for Leftist organizations to exclude conservatives as leaders. But hypocrisy is not the point.
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I never thought I would be tempted to leave America. But, with the developments of the past 5 years, the Progressivization of America, the election–and re-election–of a man who has no business being anywhere near the White House for any reason, much less for the fact that his election was secured simply because skin is black, and the prospect of being weighed down by debts impossible to bear or pay off, I have begun to think some place of refuge may be in order.
Piers Morgan
The entirety of Piers Morgan’s argument for more gun control, as he himself points out in the interview, is about the last 4 mass murders in America. So, for people like Piers, the controversy is about the big events, the ones the media pay the most attention to.
The everyday, onesie-twosie shootings of kids on their front porches in Democratic strongholds like Chicago don’t mean a lot to people like Piers, even though many, many more people, indeed many, many more kids, die everyday as a result. But these single-victim shootings are rarely reported by the nightly news outlets.
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Ron Paul
Ron Paul’s campaign has claimed that it has the bulk of support from military service personnel, more than all the other candidates combined, according to some sources. If true, that would represent a significant achievement for Ron Paul in terms of actual, financial support, not to mention the symbolic significance of having the largest cohort of military members supporting your non-interventionist foreign policy positions. You’ll forgive me, then, if I say it sounds too good to be true.
So, I took some time to analyze Ron Paul’s contribution statistics to see if the claim would stand up under scrutiny. After all, if the majority of the military is in the tank with Ron Paul, I’d like to know that going into the upcoming election season. What I found is revealing. I don’t want to give away the conclusion just yet, but I will say there is certainly a pattern that has emerged in the race for the Presidency that orbits Ron Paul’s campaign. I’ll explain shortly.
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Russell Kirk
“Ever since the end of the Second World War, the tendency of American public opinion has been more or less conservative. But there exists some danger that conservatives themselves might slip into a narrow ideology or quasi-ideology—even though, as H. Stuart Hughes wrote some forty years ago, ‘Conservatism is the negation of ideology.’” -Russell Kirk, The Errors of Ideology
Despite Dr. Kirk’s warning, the slide into “a narrow ideology” has been an ongoing trend for people who call themselves “conservative” in recent years. This hardening of the mind is likely the result of two external causes, 1) a natural response to the leftist ideologies that seem to be carrying the day in government and the media, and 2) a lack of knowledge and understanding of what being “conservative” actually means, according to the minds who have defined it, due largely to an educational system that has worked tirelessly to extinguish such knowledge.
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The ever erudite conservative commentator P.J. O’Rourke wrote,
Photo by James Kegley
“Collectivism doesn’t work because it’s based on a faulty economic premise. There is no such thing as a person’s ‘fair share’ of wealth. The gross national product is not a pizza that must be carefully divided because if I get too many slices, you have to eat the box. The economy is expandable and, in any practical sense, limitless.” — P. J. O’Rourke
O’Rourke’s comment is right on. The primary difference between collectivists of any stripe and those who favor a free market is whether they believe (or admit) that the economy can be expanded.
The collectivist belief that the economy is a zero-sum game always leads to some form of deprivation. At first, it may be only deprivation of a given commodity; if there are 1,000 loaves of bread available, but 1,500 people who want it, obviously some are going to have to go without. This is a microcosm of the larger economy, e.g. where there is a limited amount of resources, some people may get more than others.
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