Gay Marriage: What Does Marriage Mean?

Back on August 6th, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial in Friday's Weekend section entitled Now What for Marriage? The piece discussed California Ninth Circuit District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker's verdict rejecting the state's 2008 Proposition 8, which defined marriage in the state as exclusively between a man and a woman.

A friend and I discussed the case the next week, during a long drive. He informed me, to my surprise, that a long time conservative advocate had joined David Boies in arguing against the Proposition, and, in effect, for gay marriage.

The editorial discussed the various contentions made by defense witness David Blankenhorn on the instability of gay marriages. It also highlighted Boies' contention that a marriage is a private contract, not a community event.

What I found particularly interesting, however, were the latter passages of the editorial.

Dana Mack, the author of the piece, and a defender of parenthood and, thus, conventional concepts of marriage, wrote,

"If marriage today is little more than a declaration of emotional commitment with tax and inheritance benefits, why not settle for the alternative of civil union- which ideally would grant the same legal and economic privileges to domestic partnerships as marriage does, and without the messy burden of history?

Fact is, the gay-marriage movement derives less of its animus from the material benefits society at large accords marriage than from the social and cultural dignities granted by its long history. In lobbying for marriage, gay men and women clearly care much less about legal advantages than they do about weddings, rings, and the spiritual trappings of married life.

The care about marriage precisely because in a culture searching for meaningful symbols, marriage is the veritable symbol of culture. Jonathan Rauch, a leader in the gay-marriage movement, puts it succinctly enough: Gay people want to marry because "marriage is the foundation of civilization." "

Mack finishes by asking,

"The question, however, is whether giving them license to piece together remnants of so decayed an institution as marriage will not aggravate all the more the fraying of its fabric."

Just so. Isn't that the real irony of the gay-marriage movement? Having muscled their way into being allowed to "marry," they empty the term of its meaning.

Marriage has been, historically, the institution by which society repopulated itself. But gay people, in a natural state, without highly-advanced technology or radical changes in other social institutions, i.e., adoption by same-gender couples, can't reproduce themselves.

Marriage is, at its base, about having children. Gay people can't have children naturally. Ergo, allowing gays to marry renders the term and concept of marriage meaningless.

What we have here is simply word games. You can use the law to try to reinterpret and redefine what marriage is, and who can marry. But deep down, people's common sense informs them that when marriage includes types of couples who can't biologically ever have children together, then marriage no longer has much meaning.

It's not about discrimination against gays. It's about removing the last vestige of the historically unique meaning of marriage.

And that's sad.

States Legislate Against ObamaCare

One of the last of my Wall Street Journal reads from my absence early this month was the lead staff editorial on August 5th entitled Show Me ObamaCare.

The lead sentence states,

"The political revolt against ObamaCare came to Missouri Tuesday, with voters casting ballots three to one against the plan in its first direct referendum.

Missouri's Proposition C annulled the "individual mandate" within state lines, or the requirement that everyone buy insurance or else pay a tax. Liberals are trying to wave off this embarrassment, but that is hard to do when the split was 71.1% in favor in a state John McCain won by a mere 0.1% margin. The anti-ObamaCare measure carried every county save St. Louis and Kansas City with 668,000 votes, yet just 578,000 Republicans cast a ballot in the concurrent primaries."

The editorial went on to make a major point about how unelected bureaucrats will, under ObamaCare's provisions, define what "health care" is in America. This involves, among other things, defining the elements of "medical loss ratios," which are the measures by which the costs of delivering care, e.g., expenses for capital and people, are meant to be controlled.

But my interest in the piece was mostly about this state challenge to the federal law.

Will the federal government seek to moot or overturn this Missouri law under supremacy, by which federal law automatically supersedes state laws?

Will such action incite further rage in Missouri, causing the election of anybody running against federal-level Democrats?

Would such action by the federal government cause even more support for the states' lawsuit against ObamaCare, as well as a wider, united move by states to amend the Constitution so that supremacy is radically redefined and limited, if allowed at all?

These are, I believe, all causes for hope and optimism concerning the American experiment. It would seem to be time for the people, through their states, which are the parties to the Constitution- which parties do NOT include the federal government, itself- to revisit the agreement and more explicitly place limits on federal power, as well as the ability of federal elected and appointed officials to become a permanent political careerist class.

Blanche Lincoln's Latest Vote-Buying Earmarks

I wrote this recent post describing what happened in New Jersey when the state's supreme court broke our own rules on fiscal management.

Now the Wall Street Journal has reported that Nebraska Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln has gone to great, essentially illegal extent, to get money from the federal government, in the form of an earmark, with which to bribe the state's voters in the run-up to this November's election.

Congress, believe it or not, has actually legislated limits on how much money the government will pay to bail out farmers. But Lincoln, whose first two tries at buying votes were defeated by her own party members, finally got Wonderboy's administration to use an old "Depression-era law," under which tariff funds can be used to make "emergency payments."

So Lincoln shook down taxpayers across the nation to the tune of $1.5B to try to buy her way back into the Senate. Despite rules in Congress enacted to try to stop this sort of nonsense.

In a year of unprecedented deficit growth, economic sluggishness and general ill-will toward Congress, Blanche Lincoln ignores all that and sticks to tried and true principles.

When an incumbent, use taxpayer money to buy your way into Congress.

No wonder so many voters just want new faces in Congress, regardless of the party affiliation of almost any incumbent.

Pataki and Pickens On US Dependence On Foreign Energy & Money

George Pataki and T. Boone Pickens engaged in a rather novel discussion on CNBC yesterday morning. Pataki was a guest host, while Pickens appeared, by phone I think, to discuss energy policy.

Without having arranged it, both agreed on the need to wean US off of foreign oil and financing.

It wasn't always like this, but now it is. For decades, Cassandras have preached the evils of US foreign-held debt and imported oil. Back then, however, the US GDP grew faster than the deficit, and the Mideast wasn't sponsoring anti-American terrorists, nor growing particularly powerful in its own right.

Now, the US deficit is growing much faster than GDP, causing understandable consternation among global holders of US debt. Meanwhile, a tipping point seems to have been reached on oil purchases, as other sovereign nations either nationalize their oil fields or make aggressive bids, as nations, to develop the energy resources of other countries.

Oil has become a weapon in the hands of our enemies, exacerbating our deficits. And our mounting debt, also in the hands of unfriendly nations, adds to the perils confronting the US.

Both Pataki and Pickens decried the dependence of our country, succinctly, on foreign financing and energy sources.

It was a completely non-partisan, honest expression of the twin challenges facing a US which has spent itself into a dangerous fiscal situation while continuing to import oil that is a much-desired global commodity.

What Happens When We Break Our Own Rules

Monday's Wall Street Journal featured an editorial by Steve Malanga entitled How States Hide Their Budget Deficits. Consider this brief passage regarding New Jersey,

"Meanwhile, New Jersey compounded its woes with other ploys. In 2004, the state broke the cardinal rule of municipal budgeting when it borrowed nearly $2 billion to close a budget deficit, which is like borrowing on your credit card to pay off your mortgage. (The state supreme court ruled this move unconstitutional but allowed it to go forward anyway because it didn't want to "disrupt" government operations.)"

That last sentence seems key, does it not?

Here you have a state with a constitution, laws and a supreme court which is expected to rule on both, and if the state is violating the constitution under which its citizens expect the state government to operate.

But New Jersey's supreme court stood silently by, allowing unconstitutional behavior. Much like the case in which it allowed current Senator Frank Lautenberg to run as a Democrat after the filing deadline, when Bob "The Torch" Torricelli had to drop out due to ethics violations.

Why is anyone surprised that we have such dire financial situations in states, and at the federal level, when our own courts fail to apply the relevant constitution?

When a court notes that a state is violating the state's own constitution, but fails to stop it because it doesn't want to get in the way of "government operations," we have a major problem.

The constitution in question means nothing. Government officials have no limits to their exercise of power.

This is why the Tea Party movement has gained such momentum. Existing governmental entities are failing to do their jobs, allowing abuses of power.

Paul Ryan: Canary In The Coal Mine?

The lead staff editorial in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago was entitled Washington vs. Paul Ryan. Very apropos.

The occasion of the piece was liberal economist Paul Krugman's calling Ryan "the flim-flam man" in his New York Times column of the prior week.

Krugman further alleged that Ryan's "roadmap" to fiscal responsibility was,

"a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America's fiscal future."

For the sin of acknowledging that Medicare is, as presently run, insolvent, and should be replaced by a voucher for purchase of insurance to provide the same services, Ryan is being crucified by Democrats, and ignored by many of his own Republican colleagues.

As with so many contemporary issues in Washington, this is one having many facets: macroeconomic, deficit, government control, and the loss of individual liberty, to name just a few.

The Journal editorial put it this way,

"In that sense, Mr. Ryan is really presenting Washington with a philosophical choice between ever-more indebted government and a plan to pay for the promises we've made while still preserving free markets and economic growth. The firehose of invective pointed at Mr. Ryan is in part an effort to scare voters and in part an effort to prevent voters from understanding that there is in fact a choice."

Ironic, in that virtually every non-partisan pundit you see on, say, CNBC, endorses Congress taking meaningful steps to address Medicare and other out of control spending. Yet, when Ryan offers realistic approaches to doing so, members of both parties react in predictably, unproductive partisan manners.

Democrats paint Ryan as a demon who is trying to destroy Medicare and old-age benefits, while members of his own party try to distance themselves from his comprehensive views and proposals for many needed government budget excesses.

Ryan doesn't confine himself to the usual 'waste cutting' solutions, but goes after the big stuff. As the quoted editorial passage notes, the real gut issues of who controls choice, how spending is done, and how services are provided.

I've argued in a prior post regarding ObamaCare that it is based on three horribly-flawed program designs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. All feature general pots of taxpayer funds out of which individuals are paid on a sort of first-come, first-served basis. Individualized accounts would have been a far more rational approach.

Unfortunately, our federal government is too-often run by people, both elected and civil service, who weren't the brightest candles on the cake, so to speak. Thus, these social welfare programs were designed and run under unrealistic assumptions of ever-increasing tax revenues and voter appetite for social spending. Not to mention ever-increasing appetites of global investors for US debt obligations.

None of these turned out to be true for as long as these programs have to run.

Whether you like Ryan's proposals or not, he deserves credit for saying what he thinks is right for the country, despite his own party members' attempt to acknowledge this. In a Congress dominated by power struggles between the parties, rather than either one focusing on lasting, sustainable solutions for serious problems involving federal deficits, spending, taxes and personal liberties, Ryan stands out as someone who is willing to take positions on issues his colleagues would prefer to ignore.

He deserves much better than Krugman's attacks. But, then, that's all Krugman seems to understand how to do.

More Congressional Deception Re: Countrywide Sweetheart Loans

It's recently been revealed that the Senate Democrats, in a parting gift to Chris Dodd, the resigning Democrat from Connecticut, covered up just how many sweetheart mortgage loans he received as a "Friend of Angelo" Mozillo.

It's been known for some time that Dodd and Kent Conrad received such loans, though both continually denied knowing so.

Now, it's become public that Dodd received, according to the Wall Street Journal,

"as many as six VIP loans, including refinancings, from Countrywide Financial, not just the two in 2003 that triggered the investigation."

We apparently won't know whether Kent Conrad was similarly favored, because the ethically-challenged Republican Senate leadership made a deal to submarine any more details of the Countrywide VIP program.

As much as many of us loathe the Democrats in Congress, this deal makes it clear why we also have plenty of that hatred left for Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, too.