The Problem With Gay Marriage Isn't The Gay Part

Gay marriage is a huge, polarizing issue.  The crux of the issue isn't homosexuality, oddly enough.  It's the anachronous, illogical entanglement of church and state concerns in the institution of marriage as we know it.  Marriage, as a concept, has different implications depending upon the context in which it's being discussed.  It has religious aspects as in the joining of two souls under God and it has the legal implications of binding many of the responsibilities of two people in a sort of contractual joining of two individuals under the State.  One's credit affects the other, the burden of debts are shared, insurance coverage spans between them, etc.  These are two very different facets of the institution which would be extremely complicated to manage simultaneously in the best of circumstances.  When the fact that one is a religious matter while one is a state matter are considered, that alone is enough to warrant a separation of the two into separate arrangements entirely, to say nothing of the practical complications that arrise due to their comingling.

Upon separating the two aspects of marriage as per one of the founding principles of our nation, the problem then becomes somewhat easier to discuss and manage.  

If the legal facet of marriage is reduced to a contractual comingling of responsibilities and benefits as currently connoted by the institution of marriage, the emotional and moral offenses incurred by those who resist the concept of gay marriage so strongly, would seem to be removed.  Even if homosexuality is not condoned by a person's religion, what would they care if two people would like to share responsibility for each other's debt?  I'm sure they would still condemn the lifestyle as a whole, but legalities of the situation would no longer be encumbered by the moralities of it.  As an aside, under this new separate model, there doesn't seem to be a logical defense for outlawing polygamy.  Who cares if 10 people want to all be responsible for each other.  The concept would need its own nomenclature, a la Civil Union, and would have to be executed by an agent of the government, Justice of the Peace, County Clerk, whathaveyou.

Marriage then, would be a purely religious concept having no legal implications.  It would be carried out by a religious agent.

People who currently object on religious grounds would have no basis to object when discussing the legal implications and now that the religious piece would be its own separate concern, homosexuals would have no basis to object.  

Weekly Whiskey Tango Foxtrot - Vol. II

Sorry, but I was out of town on vacation last week, so this one actually covers two weeks. Lucky you!

New York decided to impose a so-called Millionaire's Tax that somehow not-so-surprisingly affects a lot more people than just those that make a million bucks. The tax increases start for those making $200,000 ($300,000/couple). This officially keeps New York as the highest taxing state, with California on their heels. Reports say actual rich people like Trump and Limbaugh are moving out of town to avoid the new taxes.

Glenn Beck started selling a Dashboard Obama...uh...if I don't agree with Obama, then I'm not buying one of these, and if I did agree with him, I wouldn't buy one of these...so who's the intended buyer here...?

Once again, Congress has passed a law that has unintended consequences. This was done last year, but just went into effect recently. You'll remember Congress passing a law that banned/recalled any products designed for or sold to children that contained lead. Well, children's sized dirt bikes and mini-ATVs contain lead, so... Well, you get the picture. You know, if your kid is caught sucking on one of the battery terminals, eating a brake handle, or swallowing a tire stem (some of the offending items), then your child is going to need a lot more than a law to protect them from the world. The worst part is that this may in fact increase child mortality because parents will likely purchase more powerful models in order to be able to get their kid a bike/ATV. Models they have no business riding, which is why the less powerful child models were created in the first place...

Obama decided to release certain memos that detailed the interrogation techniques utilized by the Bush administration against terrorists. It is noteworthy that he did so in the interest of transparency, yet did not feel the urge to release any memos that detailed the results of those interrogations. So he shows us memos that detail techniques we already knew about, but won't show us memos about results we already knew about. Hmmm....

Some tool named Derek Piazza, who's a professor at the College of Alameda, decided late in 2007 to throw a hissy-fit and try and get two students suspended from their school for praying for a sick teacher. Apparently, he considered it to be "disruptive behavior". Look, I've never seen anyone praying that actually disrupted anything. Thankfully, the students have filed suit, and I wholeheartedly agree with them. They are only asking for a public apology and only enough money to cover legal expenses. If this guy has enough time to get all bent out of shape over someone praying for a fellow teacher to get well, then he is obviously not using his time wisely enough for his job and should be let go. C'mon, Mr. Piazza, do something productive with your life!

Janine Garofalo decided to make an ass out of herself, and I say more power to her. It just further serves to alienate her and her ideas (and indirectly the people who feel the same way). In case you missed it, she declared that all attendants of the tea parties that occured on Tax Day were racist rednecks who were upset that America elected a black president. She even went so far to bring eugenics into the mix, stating that conservatives have a brain defect that cause them to think...conservatively. What an idiot. You know, I'm not sure how long they're going to keep up this ridiculous "this is because Obama is black" thing for anybody that criticizes the president. Being a black president (even the first black president) does not automatically buy you the "Get out of Public Critique" Community Chest card in the game of Americopoly.

CNN's Susan Roesgen "reported" on the Chicago Tax Day Tea Party that it was "anti-government, anti-Democrat, and...not really family viewing". She obviously had an agenda and went on to prove that she (and the left in general) really have no idea what these tea parties are about. She actually even became a sort of salesman when she brought up the $400 tax credit (woo-frickin-hoo) and the billions coming to Illinois as part of the stimulus bill. What she doesn't get is that those payouts are part of the reason those people are there.

Brown University will be celebrating 'Fall Weekend' instead of Columbus Day this year. Apparently, the university feels that because Columbus was such a meanie to Native Americans, he doesn't jive with Brown's values they try to emphasize. Oh that's swell; so now we have to worry about celebrating any holiday at all that honors a person who doesn't subscribe to values present today, regardless of whether or not those values existed then. Mistreating Native Americans did not define his life, and is obviously not the reason we have Columbus Day.

Good grief. Apparently Obama decided that the monogram "IHS", a common Christogram for Jesus, was too offensive, controversial, or whatever for a recent speech he gave at Georgetown University. The White House had the university cover up the monogram because it was going to be visible behind the president during his speech. Oh, the horror.

The Representative Replies

If you'll remember a few weeks ago, I sent a letter to my U.S. Representative that represents my district. To my surprise, I actually got a letter back! Now, I'm not naive to think that he specifically took note of my letter and decided to reply back, but I do feel that my letter must have been one of many that voiced a common concern regarding the AIG bonus legislation. There must have been so many that he (or at least his staff) felt the need to respond to the criticism.

An even bigger surprise was that he actually agreed with me.

His letter was two pages long, but the nut of it was on the first page. Here's what he wrote, with emphasis mine.

Thanks for contacting me in opposition to H.R. 1586, the AIG bonuses legislation that I now call the "take-it-back-with-a-tax" solution. With hindsight, I should have not voted for this bill.

As you probably know, the AIG bill was brought up hurriedly because of the public outcry over the bonuses. It had broad, bipartisan support. The vast majority of the House voted for it, both Democrats and Republicans. Most Members understood the bill was meant to recover outrageous sums paid with the help of US taxpayers to the very AIG traders who were responsible for AIG's incredible financial mess. And although I recognized possible constitutional problems, I thought we should leave these for the courts to decide because mounting public anger over coddling Wall Street was eroding the ability of Congress to properly meet the huge financial challenges facing the country.

Democratic governments both lead and follow their electorates. Congress might have done a bit more leading on this one. At the least, we might have slowed the rush to judgment.

He then goes on to say how he now understands the situation was a bit more complicated than initially thought. He understands that the stimulus bill they passed contained verbiage specifically allowing these types of bonuses. He understands that most of the targets of this bill have no blame for AIG's financial mess. In fact, he said, "They are no more guilty than anyone else working on Wall Street for outsized pay."

In other words, he admitted that it was wrong for them to rush to a decision in this matter without fully weighing their options or repercussions. While I am glad that he fully admitted their error (after all, they are only human), I was a bit disappointed at his almost casual reference to ignoring what he thought to be a breach of constitutionality. I didn't appreciate him having the attitude that, 'Oh well, we've got to do something, and even though I know this goes against the Constitution, the courts can figure it out in the end.'

I also didn't like that they knowingly and intentionally wrote this law to directly attack a specific group of people. That is regrettable, and won't be forgotten soon. However, in regards to that, he had my favorite line of the entire letter:

[This bill's] take-it-back-with-a-tax solution should die in the Senate and be relegated to the dust bins, just further evidence that the Senate is adult supervision for the House.

Indeed.

I'm not going to harp on it any more this time, but I will wait and see what comes down the pipe. If another senseless bill gets passed with similar attitudes (act-first-to-look-busy), then I will bring it back up. For now, I will assume the lesson is noted and learned and he will try to do better in the future, appreciative that in the end his viewpoint steered toward a more rational and reasonable direction.

One Lump Or Two?

Well, tomorrow is Tax Day. The day when some of us have to grudgingly write a check to the government(s) to atone for a lack of taxation the prior year. It's also the day when thousands of Americans across the country will get out of their comfy chairs and attend various Tax Day Tea Parties. My wife and I will be two of them, and will be attending the one in Atlanta.

Over the past few weeks, as this movement has gathered steam, I've noticed the decidedly absent reporting of these events by pretty much every major media outlet. Of course, as one would expect, Fox News has been covering them heavily. Several of their talk show hosts will actually be attending a Tea Party themselves. I think the other outlets basically decided to ignore the whole concept hoping it would go away.

Well, it didn't.

So, without being able to avoid the issue any longer, they have increased their reporting of the protests over the past week or so.

Boy have they ever.

The only problem is that they just don't seem to get it. Part of that is the fault of the attendees themselves, displaying signs at the Tea Parties held earlier this year. These were sporadic and disjointed, lacking the full cohesiveness of the movement's events tomorrow. Most of these had attendees holding signs blasting Obama specifically, blaming Democrats for everything bad, or some other misguided notion they felt compelled to shout. I think it's because of these actions that the major media outlets and the left in general have dismissed these rallys as right-wing events designed to target Obama and his party, mostly as a way to vent their frustration at losing the election last November.

What a ridiculous notion.

Don't get me wrong; those people will still be there, and those voices will still be shouting. However, over the past weeks as this has grown into a full-fledged movement, the message has been clarified and solidified. Just as the media outlets finally decide to cover it, they cling to the exact wrong things, misunderstanding the message these protests are supposed to send.

If you're still on the fence, not knowing what to think, allow me to educate you.

These protests, while they are on Tax Day, are not primarily about taxes. April 15th was chosen for several reasons, most of which revolve around spending, not taxation specifically. The problem is that the government can only get money from three places: taxes, debt, or printing. All three present very negative outcomes for the average citizen, the taxes hit home the most. Besides, April 15th seemed to be a good date on the calendar that sat far enough in the future for the movement to have enough time to get coordinated and focused.

The left (and other media outlets) just do not get it. They claim this is about taxes and are quick to point out that, uh oh, no taxes have technically been raised yet. They also jump to the conclusion that this is solely about Obama and the perceived notion that the people in the right are just sore losers, just itching at the chance to complain about the current administration any time they can.

This is NOT about those things. This is about us, the People, protesting what we believe is an injustice, just as the people from the Boston Tea Party felt the British taxes were an injustice. This is about not wanting our children to have to cover debts that we are incurring and have been incurring for nearly a decade. This is about knowing that the only way the government is going to get out of this debt (if such a thing is even possible) is by raising taxes to unholy levels or by printing as much money as they can get away with. This is about a Congress that takes it upon themselves to selectively punish corporate executives (i.e. AIG bonus recipients) that followed the letter of their law, while ignoring other execs that did the same thing (Fannie/Freddie bonuses). This is about suffering through the last six months of goverment bailouts of companies deemed 'too big to fail', without letting the market sort it out. This is about a government that graciously bails out the auto companies with money it doesn't have, then dictates to those companies how they should run their business. This is about a federal government who grows larger and larger while making the state goverments' roles in their own affairs smaller and smaller. This is about Congressmen who continue to inject earmarks and unnecessary spending into every bill they write. This is about a government who signals they will print money to pay for programs because nobody will lend it any more money, thus devaluing our currency bit by bit. This is about BOTH parties straying from the values that made our country so unique in the beginning. This is about officials who think that The Constitution is a dated document and should be ignored because the conditions of that past day no longer exist, rather than seek to amend it as was originally intended.

This is not about taxes.

This is about just how far we've gotten from where our Founding Fathers wanted us to be.

This is Step 1 of the effort to get us there again.

Weekly Whiskey Tango Foxtrot - Vol. I

This is the first of what will hopefully be a weekly blog post on things throughout the week that just made me think, WTF?!? Maybe it'll do the same for you.

Apparently, it has now been decided it'll be cool to publicly show porn on a public university campus. BYOT, I'd imagine.

The tobacco tax passed back in January went into effect this week, raising federal taxes on cigarettes from $0.39 to $1.01, chewing tobacco from $0.195/lb to $0.50/lb, and, get this, loose tobacco from $1.10/lb to almost TWENTY FIVE DOLLARS/lb. ($24.78/lb). Now, I'm a huge opponent of tobacco in every form, but HOLY CRAP. That cigarette tax is the single largest increase ever, and is more than ALL prior increases combined! The kicker is that these taxes are designed to pay for SCHIP - which is a federal program that provides funds for child health insurance (uninsured children). As an aside - this is designed to cover kids whose family makes too much for Medicaid, but are still uninsured. So what's the point of having a Medicaid limit then? Anyway, what's ridiculous about this is that funding for SCHIP was expanded and these taxes are designed to cover that expansion...only the real effect will be that smoking will decrease but the spending most definitely will not, so rest assured that we'll see another tax on something else to cover the shortfalls in the projected revenues. So much for that promise that "nobody under $250,000 would see one penny of tax increase." Maybe they didn't know that most smokers are in that bracket...?

There was [GASP] another Obama nominee reported to have tax...er...problems. Thankfully, the Senate panel overseeing her hearing avoided the issue altogether. I mean, after all, once you find out a couple nominees have tax problems, what's the big deal with one more?

Obama gave the Queen an iPod. AN IPOD. Oh, how American! Man, he's on a roll with the gift-giving thing. The only thing he hasn't yet given is a subscription to Netflix and pack of hot dogs.

An ever-so-slight error in a White House fact has now been debunked and corrected. Apparently, 90% of guns used to commit crimes in Mexico do NOT come from the U.S. In truth, it's only 90% of the guns that are possibly U.S. in origin are actually U.S. guns. The fact is that only 17% of guns used in Mexico to commit crimes actually come from the U.S. Gee, that's, like, WAY off. Oops.

The U.S. House passed the Pay for Performance Act of 2009, yet another in a string of efforts to dictate American executive salaries rather than letting the business handle it. Look, putting a criminal like Ken Lay behind bars for breaking the law is completely acceptable and is why we have laws to begin with, but having a government body determine whether or not an executive should be paid X or Y is just ridiculous. Are they greedy? Yes! Do they get paid too much? That's up to the shareholders! Sports athletes get paid a lot too - are we going to dictate their salaries by government decree too?

Hmm...what else happened?

Oh yeah.

The U.S. Government did what, until recently, would have been unthinkable. They actually fired a private sector CEO. This, as I said yesterday, takes us one step closer to fascism. Deal with the devil, and you're gonna get burned. GM and Chrysler should never have accepted Government bailout money, and I applaud Ford for not taking any (so far).

Fascism, Here We Come

The other day, Obama fired the CEO of GM. Yep, a sitting president actually dictated that a public company's head would step down. Did GM ask for this? You bet. The day they decided to deal with the devil, they should have known that they'd get burned. The Government is giving the money, but dictating exactly how it can be used. Alone, that concept isn't all that far-fetched; after all, if somebody wanted money from me, then I would want to know what they were going to do with it. I wouldn't force them to spend one way or another, but I would certainly withhold funds if they were going to do something I didn't agree with.

The difference between me and the government is that I can't just create money out of thin air. If I could, then I could go around and give people tons of money just to do with it what I wanted them to do with it. If I could print money, then I could go to the struggling automakers and say, "Look, I can help you out, but I want you to start making nothing but hybrids". (Just wait...)

Do you see how immoral this is? The Government can make as much money as it needs to in order to establish and direct its agenda. So what if the majority of Americans don't buy Hybrids, the Government can now force you to buy them. So what if the financial sector is a mess and people were profiting by selling nothing but prettied-up crappy mortgages? With unlimited money anything can be directed fixed.

The U.S. Government is acting like a loan shark and counterfeiter rolled into one. Oh, sure, it's real money; it's just that it is backed by NOTHING. Plus, it has the not-so-cool side effect of reducing the value of the pre-existing dollars (i.e. inflation).

On top of the GM deal, Chrysler is being forced to merge with Fiat in order to also keep receiving funds. As my title suggests, it's just two more steps closer to fascism.

No, I'm not comparing Obama to Hitler and Mussolini. If you look around, you'll see that the word 'fascism' has come to be identified primarily with those two, when in fact it merely provided the building blocks for their radical viewpoints and agendas. You don't have to be a radical nationalist (Mussolini) to be a fascist, and you certainly don't have to be racist (Hitler) to support a fascist state. The definition of fascism is:

A governmental system with strong centralized power, permitting no opposition or criticism, controlling all affairs of the nation (industrial, commercial, etc.)"

Doesn't sound so dissimilar to our direction now, does it? I'm NOT saying we're there...yet. I'm saying that with moves like the GM firing, we move a little closer toward that end.

Read these statements, and see if you spot any parallels between them and the voiced viewpoints of some of our elected officials:

We ask that the government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunities for employment and earning a living.

The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within its confines and for the good of all.

Therefore, we demand:...an end to the power of the financial interests.

We demand profit sharing in big business.

We demand a broad extension of care for the aged.

We demand...the greatest possible consideration of small business in the purchases of the national, state and municipal governments.

In order to make possible to every capable and industrious [citizen] the attainment of higher education and thus the achievement of a post of leadership, the government must provide an all-around enlargement of our entire system of public education...We demand the education at government expense of gifted children of poor parents...

The government must undertake the improvement of public health -- by the greatest possible support for all clubs concerned with the physical education of youth.

[We] combat the...materialistic spirit within and without us, and are convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of The Common Good Before the Individual Good .

Sound familiar? I'll bet you've heard some of these very things over the years in our country. The thing is that these are not new concepts, though the source for these statements might surprise you.

They come directly from the Nazi party platform, adopted in 1920.

There's no doubt that Hitler was an evil man promoting evil actions. There's also no doubt that Obama is NOT an evil man like Hitler. However, there are striking similarities between the values and principles of the fascist movement in 1920 and the values and principles of some of our people and politicians today.

I'm sure our founding fathers are reeling from dizziness after having rolled over in their graves countless times over the past decades as we slowly eroded their own values and principles away.