SCENE:  Mitch BERG is running his snowblower down his sidewalk.  Avery LIBRELLE walks by, eating a granola bar.

LIBRELLE:  Why do you hate gay people?

BERG: (shuts off snow blower):  Huh?

LIBRELLE: (dribbling granola crumbs onto sidewalk) Why do you oppose gay marriage?  You’re a bigot!

BERG: Er, no.  As we’ve discussed over and over again, I favor civil unions on libertarian grounds.

LIBRELLE:  Hah.  Two people who love each other should be able to marry.

BERG: Right, but marriage isn’t about love.  Not entirely, anyway.  It’s pretty utilitarian, actually.  It’s about raising kids – and the notion of gay marriage devalues gender, which I think is a huge mistake, since gender is so hugely important in raising kids.  In our society, it’s also about taxes.  Personally, I think government should get out of the business of granting favors through the institution of marriage, but I think gay people should be able to sign contracts with each other.

LIBRELLE:  Pfft.  What are you afraid of?

BERG:  Er, yeah.  On the one hand, that question is an abusive strawman.  I’m not “afraid” of the notion of same sex marriage.  But I’m definitely worried about some of the potential consequences.

LIBRELLE:  (Spit-takes, blasting granola flakes all over the place) Huh?  What are you talking about?

BERG:  It is inevitable than once you legalize gay marriage, government will oppress any person, business or institution that disagrees with it.

LIBRELLE:  Hah!  People who support marriage equality are very sensitive to diversity of opinion, you paranoid teabagger!   And the First Amendment protects your observance of religion absolutely!

BERG:  Right, just like First Amendment absolutely protects my right to hold government accountable, or free association, or choice for my children, or the Second Amendment absolutely protects my right to keep and bear arms, the Fourth absolutely protects me from unreasonable searches and seizures, the Fifth absolutely grants me due process and the right to face my accuser in court, and the Tenth guarantees the enumeration of powers absolutely.

LIBRELLE:  What are you, a lawyer?  That’s just paranoid!

BERG:  So it’s your position that the full weight and power and budget of government isn’t going to descend upon anyone who doesn’t embrace gay marriage?

LIBRELLE:  Yep.  Paranoid paranoid paranoid.  Cray cray.

BERG:   Huh.  Good to know it’s just paranoia:

 Attorney General Bob Ferguson has filed a consumer protection lawsuit against a florist who refused to provide wedding flowers to a same-sex couple.

The complaint was filed in Benton County on Tuesday against Barronelle Stutzman, owner of Arlene’s Flowers and Gifts in Richland.

The lawsuit is in response to a March 1 incident where she refused service to longtime customer Robert Ingersoll. Stutzman did not return a call Tuesday night seeking comment. Ferguson had sent a letter on March 28 asking her to comply with the law, but said Stutzman’s attorneys responded Monday saying she would challenge any state action to enforce the law.

Washington state voters upheld a same-sex marriage law in November, and the lawtook effect in December. The state’s anti-discrimination laws were expanded in 2006 to include sexual orientation.

Ferguson seeks a permanent injunction requiring the store to comply with the state’s consumer protection laws and seeks at least $2,000 in fines.

LIBRELLE:  You’re a racist and you hate womyn!

BERG:  Right, I got that.  But the point is, the precendent is there; government squats on opponents of social policy!

LIBRELLE:  That’s Canada!

BERG:  Right.  But it’s the pattern all governments follow when they want to impose social policy.

LIBRELLE:  (throws granola wrapper on  BERG’s snow-covered lawn)  Why do you dance on the graves of the children of Newtown?

And SCENE

(SCENE:  MITCH is at the grocery store.  He meets Avery LIBRELLE, who is also out shopping)

LIBRELLE:  I’m so upset that the GOP in the Legislature has muddied the waters with their “Civil Union” proposal.

MITCH: Why’s that?

LIBRELLE:  Civil unions are nothing but separate but equal.

MITCH:  Yeah, that’s the cliché du jour for gay marriage supporters.  The idea that having an identical civil contract that confers exactly the same rights – in the eyes of the government, which is what we’re talking about here – is somehow like Plessy v. Ferguson Jim Crow-era absurdities is completely nuts.  From the perspective of government, it’s more like “Equal but Equal”.

LIBRELLE:  But the word “marriage” has a status to it that “civil unions” doesn’t.

MITCH:  And that remark shows what “gay marriage” proponents are really about.  It has little to do with “rights”, and lots to do, I suspect, with forcing society into accepting something that it, on its own, just does not.   The “status” of the word “marriage” is a matter of individual perspective and belief; is it government’s job to change that, for its own good?

LIBRELLE:  Sure!

MITCH:  Huh.  Anyway, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

LIBRELLE:  No kidding.  The GOP is wasting the legislature’s time with this bill, bringing it up after the deadline for policy bills.

MITCH:  Right.  No different than Representatives Paymar and Martens still flogging their gun grab legislation.  They can’t get committee hearings, but they can still bring up their bill as an amendment to another bill during floor debate.

LIBRELLE:  Well, that’s different.

MITCH:  Why?

LIBRELLE:  I don’t know. (takes a bunch of grapes from the produce stand, picks a few, starts eating) It just is.

MITCH:  OK.  Well, anyway – I think this means the GOP minority sees that there’s a fracture in the DFL caucus.  We know that outstate DFLers are feeling really nervous about this bill – that support for gay marriage, like gun grabs, is entirely focused in the Metro.  It’d be dumb for them, as a minority, not to propose the compromise; it shows the people that, contrary to the DFL and media’s narrative, there is a compromise.

LIBRELLE:  That’s so wrong.  We should not play games with civil rights.

MITCH:  Like Paymar and Martens and Latz are doing?

LIBRELLE:  Oh, that’s different.  That’s about the children.

MITCH:  So is marriage.

LIBRELLE (eating more grapes)  Well, the courts have ruled on this already.

MITCH:  Right – the courts ruled that civil unions interactions with existing laws, and the federal DOMA law, were a problem.  So the law needs to be written right, and adjustments need to be made to other laws, state and federal.  That’s what legislatures do; try to pass laws that pass legal muster.

LIBRELLE:  But eventually gay marriage is going to happen.  Young people all support it.

MITCH:  Maybe they do.  Young people also made Justin Bieber and Nicky Minaj stars.  More to the point?  Most “young people” have no idea what marriage really is.  But whatever, fine; maybe gay marriage is inevitable in the great scheme of things.  And truth be told, but for one thing, I don’t really care.

LIBRELLE:  (3/4 done with bunch of grapes) And that one thing is that you’re a bigot.

MITCH:  Er, no.  In fact, I guarantee I’ve put more on the line against genuine hatred of gays than you have or ever will.  But no, the one thing is that gay marriage is one more attack on the importance of gender – the idea that the sexes are different, and different for a reason, and that reason is that each gender has a vital role in raising the next generation of children.

LIBRELLE:  Gays can raise children just as well as breeders.  Sometimes better!

MITCH:  Right.  This isn’t a dig at gays’ motivations as adoptive parents; I think gay adoptive parents are a better idea than, say, single parents if that’s the choice, which it very rarely is.  And at the moment, I don’t doubt that gay parents are better parents than straight parents, as an average across all of society, if only because you have to be so superhuman-ly above average to qualify to adopt, whatever your affectional orientation.  In fact, that is one of the reasons I would like to see gay marriage – so that we can drop this absurd stereotype of the Magic Gay Couple, all superhuman in their loving wisdom.  I joke that Gays will have truly arrived as equals when you see a gay married couple on Cops, with a lady in a wife-beater T-shirt being dragged out to a squad car as her wife screams “I’ll be waitin’ for ya, Evangeline!  Ah love yewwww!”.

LIBRELLE:  That’s just weird (almost done with grapes)

MITCH:  Whatever – the point is, when society grows beyond the narrative it’s been fed this past few years, the idea that gay couples are actually better than straight couples, then maybe we can talk about equality.

LIBRELLE:  Oh, whatever.  Hey, didn’t you predict gay marriage would die in committee?

MITCH:  Yep.  I win some, I boot some.  I think gay marriage is worth more to the DFL as a wedge than as a few thousand married couples with nothing to be pissed off about other than…property taxes and business taxes and regulations that restrict entrepreneurship.

LIBRELLE:  Huh?  Well, you were wrong.

MITCH:  Really?  When did Governor Messinger Dayton sign the gay marriage bill into law?

LIBRELLE:  He hasn’t yet.

MITCH:  Huh.  OK.

LIBRELLE:  But they will pass it!  They have to!

MITCH: OK!  We’ll see!

LIBRELLE:  (finishes grapes, tosses stem into trash bucket)

MITCH:  Um – were you going to pay for those?

LIBRELLE:  Oh, it’s not shoplifting. It’s an undocumented meal.  The AP says so.

(And SCENE)

Back in February, 11-year-old Grace Evans testified in front of a Minnesota House committee against  gay marriage.

Now, let’s back up a minute:  I have supported civil unions – as well as getting government out of the business of administering and giving benefits for marriage – for quite a while.  I also note that the only really solid arguments for gay marriage come from libertarian conservatives.  Liberals, for the most part, appeal either to emotion (“shouldn’t two people who love each other be able to marry?”) or illogic (“we don’t have popularity contests over civil rights!”) or demands to fall in line with grouphink (“if you oppose gay marriage, you’re teh bigot!”).

One of the reasons I supported the Marriage Amendment – in a back-handed way – was that I thought it might force gay marriage supporters to come up with a rational argument, rather than more browbeating and emotional manipulation.  We found out in 2012 that money trumps reason.  So it goes.

And so today, the Minnesota left is still stuck on stupid, mixing “browbeating” for debate.  Which brings us back to Miss Evans’ testimony.  Lefties, naturally, took spittle-flecked umbrage:

One comment on YouTube called Grace Evans “an 11-year-old bigot.” Another said, “shame on you little girl, your speech was —.” Another comment on YouTube said, “What is sad is im (sic) certain this girl will grow up and support full marriage equality but yet she will be haunted by this.”

On the Facebook page for The Uptake, a Minnesota news [sic] website, someone posted a comment, “Stupid Indoctrinated Child.”

A comment posted on the local CBS affiliate website said, “Who ever (sic) spoon fed their child that script to read in front of everyone needs to check into a mental hospital. You are using your kids as pawns in your selfish game. Hopefully one day that child will grow up to think on their own, and then come to the realization that their parents did them a huge disservice by indoctrinating them into this school of hate.”

Say what you will about gay marriage; I have little problem with it legally (while noting that it does open the logical door to all sorts of forms of “marriage” that society abjures today, whether you like it or not), and understand the moral case.  I also disagree with the devaluation of the value of gender in parenting (which is a genuine threat to this society), and also know damn well that once it’s the law of the land there will be legal attacks on any institution that doesn’t support it; the First Amendment will “protect” dissenting groups and tradition-supporting churches about as well as the Second protects law-abiding shooters in Chicago, or Tenth guards the delegation of powers; exactly as much as the most-powerful clique at the Capitol and the skill of their exquisitely-expensive lawyers allows them to.

Now, this is one of those stories where there are really a couple of levels.

At the surface, this is a story about liberal hypocrisy; a Pennsylvania NAACP leader blames a rape victim for tempting a couple of football players into perfidy:

In shocking comments, the president of the Steubenville chapter of the NAACP places the blame for the rape case that has shocked the nation on the 16-year-old victim.

Royal Mayo, a lifelong resident of the Ohio city that gained national infamy following the rape of the girl by two Steubenville High School football players, says that attention should be focused on the role of the young woman, whom he calls the “alleged victim,” saying she was drunk and wanted to go out with one of the football players. He also claims that other teens involved in the incident were let off easy, because they were “well-connected.”

Yes, yes, I know – official for a liberal organization violates PC kashrut with great gusto, exposing the left’s deep-seated hypocrisies, yadda yadda.  An example of the left’s war on women.  Same as it ever was.

But I’m here to issue a challenge to conservatism’s assembled linguists, the movement’s neologic engineers.

These stories are with us always.  They are constant blog fodder, and have been ever since most people still thought “blog” was a sound associated with gas-station burritos.  And these stories almost always need to plod laboriously through explaining something along the lines of “if a Republican or conservative would have said this, the media and the left’s chanting-point-bots (ptr) would be howling for blood, but since it’s one of their own, they’re silent”.

We need to come up with a snappy, dismissive word or short phrase to wrap up that meaning.  If I were a lefty and this were twitter, I’d make it a hash tag with an acronym: “#IAROCWHSTTMATLCPBPTRWBHFBBSI1OTOTS”, but that’s almost worse than having to type out the explanation.

So set to it, real men of linguistic genius!  We need a single word or short phrase that goes Alinsky on this pattern, and does it with style!

Mention Irish rock megastars U2 to people, and the reactions you get will span the gamut.

To kids today, a generation after they first came out, it’s probably all about Bono – the peripatetic, bombastic lead singer who’s parlayed a magnificent singing voice and a global pop following into a second career as a global charity leader (and, it needs to be said, arch-capitalist).

To someone who came of age in the nineties?  I’d imagine U2 was to them what the Rolling Stones were to me growing up in the late seventies and early eighties; dissipated celebrities noodling with making sense of their megastardom, albeit with less drugs and model-banging, but with a lot more artistic pretension ladled on top.

To hipsters of all eras?  Once they left Dublin, they were trayf.

And U2 has been all of that to me, too (except maybe the hipster bit).

But mostly, U2 is the band that tied together two big strands in my own life.  And the main catalyst for this, their breakthrough album War, was released thirty years ago today.

And the strands it tied together for me, and with style, were faith and rock and roll.

(more…)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Science has spoken.  We must ban divorce, for the future health of the children.

You’re not a science denier, are you?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Silly Doakes.

Over the years on this blog, I’ve made certain observations about human behavior as manifested through online media, like blogs and Twitter.

I’ve captured and codifed some of these observations as “Berg’s Law“, a series of common observations that I’m pretty sure are universal.

One of the most commonly-invoked Laws is “Berg’s Seventh Law”, which states “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”.

I’ve rung up quite a number of occurrences of Berg’s 7th over the years. And I’ve found another.

Big-time.

(more…)

In the infamous, preachy, unctuous “Celebrities against Guns” ad last week…

…the “stars” involved participated in 53 consequence-free shootings in three minutes.

The likes of Chris Rock, Will Farrell and Cameron Diaz lecture the rest of us as the the body counts in their movies pile graphically up.

Not really safe for work.

Patrician Brit attacks American gun owners.

In related news, Nazis condemned George Patton, Al Capone ridiculed Elliot Ness, the Chinese Communists rattled off a list of charges against the Tienanmen Square demonstrators, and the Ku Klux Klan presented an alternative view of Martin Luther King.

Sean Higgins at the WashEx finds yet another case of a major-media “fact-checker” burying inconvenient facts to slander gun owners.

Washington Post Fact Check columnist Glenn Kessler gives Rep. Louis Gohmert, R-Texas, “three pinocchios” for claiming, as he did yesterday on Fox News Sunday, that so-called right-to-carry laws reduce crime. So, that’s settled then? There’s no evidence that the laws do that? Err, no … as Kessler’s own column indicates.

“When right-to-carry laws had a surge in popularity in the 1990s, a common liberal argument against them was that this would lead to an increase in gun violence. Stands to reason, right? More guns means more gun crime.”

“Except it didn’t happen. Gun violence overall has declined, horrible incidents like Friday’s notwithstanding. Economist John Lott has argued in his book, More Guns, Less Crime (written with David Mustard) that the concealed carry laws actually reduce crime. It was his work that Gohmert was presumably referencing.”

Well, among others.

Read the whole thing.  Sean Higgins at the WashEx shows where the WaPo left the whole “fact” thing behind.  It seems they find facts that conflict with a tidy narrative to be just too confusing.

Y’know, as the mainstream media slowly dies off, you’d think one of them might figure out that a feature that checks the facts of the MSM’s legions of biased, narrative-driven “fact-checkers” would be good business.

Unless the media, like the Democrats they support, are banking their entire future on the “low-information consumer”.

…as Dennis Prager said.

But Amitai Etzioni, writing in the Huffpo, truly truly is that stupid.

A quick look back in time:  last summer and fall, the “coalition” of groups that handle all the DFL’s messaging (it’s really more a syndicate than a coalition, but tomayto tomahto) ran a wildly successful campaign to scupper the Marriage Amendment.  It was wildly successful at the polls, playing a key role in taking down the Voter ID Amendment and the GOP majorities in both chambers of the Legislature.

The campaign’s key points went something like this:

• “We don’t vote on people’s civil rights!”  – In other words, the “Right” to marry is absolute, not subject to “popularity contests”.  That’s the phrase not a few Amendment opponents used, in fact.
• “People who love each other should be able to marry!” – Note the phrasing.  It wasn’t “people who love each other shouldn’t have to undo constitutional rigamarole to continue their legislative efforts”.  No.  “Marry” was the word they used.   Every single time.
• “They’re just like the rest of us!” – With the unmistakeable inference that they should have the same rights we have.

Since then?  Nothing but weasel words from the DFL.

So – all of you pro-gay marriage people who came out in droves to defeat the Amendment?   The DFL used you for your idealism, and is now sitting on their hands on the issue because…

…why?

Because they don’t want to use the political capital it’d take to legalize gay marriage.

Their complaint in 2006-2009 was that the governor would just veto it (which was a stupid excuse, if you truly believe in principle; pass it anyway, and get the other side’s votes on record, if you believe you’re right! The GOP did!).

But now the DFL has both chambers and the governor.

And yet they’re sandbagging.

So when are you gay marriage supporters going to realize that you were used?

That it was all talk?

That the DFL will never follow through on their implied promise?

Ever?

I hereby promise that when Scarlett Johannson and I start dating, I’ll let her drive the car half the time.

“But Merg”, you may say, “that’s an empty promise!  You and Scarlett will never ever ‘date’!”

“True!”, I’ll respond.  “Just like this “promise” from Governor Messinger Dayton!”:

When asked about legalizing same-sex marriage after Minnesotans defeated a constitutional amendment defining marriage as only between a man and a woman, Dayton said he would sign a bill if it comes to him. But he said he’s unsure if the Legislature is ready to consider the issue.

In other words – it’s an empty promise.  Tom Bakk started weaseling out of all of the DFL’s happy-talk about what a fundamental right marriage is, as we discussed last week.

Because if you’re paying attention to the Minnesota Left, marriage is about love…

…until it would hurt the DFL’s chances in the next round of elections.

“Love” is less important to the DFL than maintaining power.

All of you social liberals, and libertarians, and moderates, and people who bought the DFL/ABM/MU4AF’s gauzy message?  All of you instant celebrity drugstore-cowboy pseudo-liberty activists s who said that the only reason to oppose gay marriage was bigotry?  All of you gays who keep voting for the DFL?

You have, every last one of you, been hoodwinked.  You have been played for fools.  I am more likely to be trading driving duties with Scarlett Johannson than you are to see the DFL move to legalize gay marriage in the next two sessions. 

Especially all you gay Minnesotans.  You are of no value to the DFL as happy, married people.  Only as perpetually angry, socially influential votes they can count on.

And that, as they say, is all.

Yesterday, I noticed that even some of the brighter leftybloggers are figuring out – or drifting in that direction – that the DFL majority in the Legislature isn’t going to knock itself out to legalize gay marriage.

But there’s another angle to this.

The DFL (or, more accurately, the various non-profits that control the DFL’s entire messaging effort) created an unprecedented turnout against the Marriage Amendment.

The rhetoric was crude, zoomed in on the lowest common informational denominator; “Marriage is about Love!”   “Who are we to get in the way of Love between two people?!”  “Say no to hate!”

If you are a gay MInnesotan, who no doubt turned out in excess of 100% against the Amendment and for the DFL last month?

If you are one of the mass of Minnesotans who was inveigled into feeling warm fuzzy feelings about same-sex marriage by the parade of celebrities, washed-up ex-Republicans and model TV families?

If you’re one of those libertarians who figured “what can it hurt?”  Who believed that  the issue was truly about “no hate!”, and who didn’t wanted to be called a “bigot?”

Here’s the deal:  if the DFL doesn’t, on the first day of the session, put forth a repeal of Minnesota’s anti-gay-marriage law, and ram it through committee and to the Governor’s desk like Jared Allen chasing down a quarterback, then you were all played for suckers.   You and your vote were nothing more than pawns in the DFL’s political power grab.  And their inaction will mean that the DFL has no more use for you that for a used condom; you’ll get about the same treatment.

And if you are a DFLer – say, a DFL blogger or tweep – who doesn’t push, relentlessly, for the DFL to get the anti-gay marriage legislation repealed, and a gay marriage law enacted immedately, then you are not only aiding and abetting the DFL’s hypocrisy, but you are hypocrites yourselves.

So what’s it gonna be?

If you’re not complete hypocrites, you should have this done by March.

(more…)

Gay marriage is worth more to the DFL as a permanent wedge than it is as policy.

I predicted right after the election: defeating the Marriage Amendment, to the DFL, was about waving a bloody shirt to get out the vote; not  a prelude to doing anything to legalize gay marriage.

Legalization would galvanize conservative opposition to the DFL on an issue where the currently-rulling party doesn’t need the friction – and, more importantly, would deprive the DFL of one of its bloodiest waving shirts.

Some on the left – Sally Jo Sorenson at BSP, Aaron Rupar at the City Pages – are finally figuring out that the new DFL majority are talking out both sides of their mouths, although neither will, or knows to, put it in those terms yet.

So mark my words (and if you don’t, no worries; I’ll mark them for you); there will be no repeal of Minnesota’s statutory ban on gay marriage. Oh, there may be a token bill; Scott Dibble and Karen Clark will submit a proposal, which will die in DFL-controlled committee (with the DFL’s noise machine doing its best to paint it as “GOP obstructionism”).  By 2014, gay marriage will be exactly as illegal as if the Amendment had passed.  And by 2016, whatever the results of the 2014 House elections, the DFL-controlled Senate will have blocked it as well.

To:  NBC
From: Mitch Berg, guy counting down the days ’til pitchers and catchers report
Re:  “Sportscasters”

Dear NBC,

Yesterday, Bob Costas used your “sports” air time to babble an uninformed, utterly wrong anti-Second-Amendment screed.

Now, don’t get me started on sportscasters and sportswriters and “sports radio” people; for the most part, they are at the cutting edge of everything that’s wrong with America.  They glorify a sports culture that once at least paid lip service to the best our society had to  offer, but today mostly glorifies all that is base and stupid in our culture.  And let’s not kid ourselves; whatever they glorify, it’s all about making bank for the people that own the teams that give the Sports Media a market, which in turn allows you, NBC Sports, to make bank yourselves.

And when they get into politics?  Forget unions and welfare; sportswriters, sportscasters and the drooling baboons and chattering lemmings that take them seriously were the ones that badgered the Legislature into giving Zygi Wilf a billion-dollar spiff to his investment.  Just as they did in turn for the owners of the Twins, the Wild and the Woofies before them. Sports America is the biggest welfare state there is.

And now we have Bob Costas – a guy who wants to be his generation’s Frank DeFord so badly you can smell it on the wind – using your “sports” airtime to prate and gabble about the Second Amendment.   As if taking an troubled boy with a talent for running or blocking or tackling or catching a ball, glorifying his talent from the age of eight on, allowing him to grow into a rich, spoiled, entitled adult with no education or sense of perspective to feed the system that has made him, his team owners, Costas and all of you obscenely wealthy along the way, didn’t have a role in creating someone so unstable he thought he was justified in killing another human being.

Let’s put this another way; after a career spent making America’s sports industry (and, incidentally, himself) rich, what caliber of handgun did OJ Simpson use?

Or is there a Bob Costas riff against butcher knives out there that I’m not aware of?

Oh, yeah – I don’t watch NBC Sports, and haven’t for decades, so any threat to boycott will be an empty one.  But you get the picture.

That is all.

Apparently society can’t stop teenage children from drinking, drugs and having sex because, in the words of not a few cultural liberals…:

Dude, teenagers are going to drink, try drugs and have sex!

But not only can we apparently prevent them from smoking and drinking Big Gulps of pop, but it is s societal imperative to do so.

Do I have that right?

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Exit polling shows the Marriage Amendment was defeated by Baby Boomers, not by Gen X or Millennial voters.

Baby Boomers – the “Me” Generation – already changed America, and not for the better. They seem bent on continuing: tearing down traditional foundations of society and running up endless debt while preening their moral superiority for doing it.

Here’s the question: after the Baby Boomers are gone, can the nation recover? Or will they take it to the grave with them?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

I blame The Doors.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

I miss Pilgrims.

When I was a kid, we learned about Thanksgiving in school. We learned the Pilgrims came to America and made friends with the wise Indians who showed them how to plant fish heads with their corn. Later, the Pilgrims invited the Indians to come over for a turkey dinner as thanks for their help – the First Thanksgiving. We colored pictures of women in dresses and bonnets holding turkey platters, shirtless Indians wearing feathered headdresses, and men wearing tall black hats with buckles on the front and a blunderbuss over their shoulders. I always liked the sound of that: blunderbuss. I still want one. Every store on Main Street had a Pilgrim in the window and gave away a turkey prize. Nobody I knew watched football games – we rode in the station wagon to Grandma’s house to visit. Grandma said the same prayer before dinner every year until she died. Now my Mom prays it, exactly the same.

Okay, the story we learned was not complete or even particularly accurate. But it’s one of the few bits of American history every kid of my generation knew by heart, one of the few plots of common ground on which an entire nation stood together. Every family celebrated Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is disappearing. Menards has had Christmas stuff displayed for weeks. KOOL 108 is starting to sneak Christmas songs into the rotation in anticipation of going all-Christmas-all-the-time starting Black Friday – the day retailers put their ledgers in the black by selling so much stuff – which is the day after Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is no longer a major holiday. Thanksgiving is that little town nobody goes to anymore, now that the freeway goes around it on the way to Christmas.

Some of us remember. Some of us will make a point of taking our kids to that little town to visit Grandma, to share turkey, to say a prayer to thank God for the good things we have and for the good things yet to come. Some of us remember Pilgrims and why they were important.

I miss Pilgrims.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

As I’ve written (quite a few times, in fact), Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays.

But Joe’s right.  Why give thanks when you expect it all anyway?

One of the reasons the GOP has such a hard time selling “family values”, at least to the mass political market, is that those values have slowly changed over recent history.

Johnathan Fitzgerald in the DBeast chronicles the slow, steady drip of decay:

 The sitcoms from the 1980s and 90s were on the leading edge of this shift. What those cheesy shows with nontraditional family arrangements like Full House or Who’s the Boss were doing back then was preparing the American public for a radical redefinition of family in a safe—and comical—environment.

But the shift in the moral landscape goes back much further. Television in the 1950s portrayed a stringent vision of a traditional family—think Leave it to Beaver, I Love Lucy, or Father Knows Best—shows that one can easily imagine playing on repeat in the Romney living room. But it wasn’t long before new sitcoms appeared and began to show the cracks and break the model. In the 1960s, Bewitched, The Addams Family, and The Munsters maintained the traditional family model, but used nontraditional characters, a witch and an assortment of monsters, to change the formula. In shows like Family Affair, The Andy Griffith Show, and My Three Sons, single parents—because of death, not divorce—appeared for the first time.

And then the “family” became a vehicle for writers with agendas:..

In many ways, the 1970s revealed just how influential the primetime sitcom could be. In a recent review in The New York Times of the DVD box set of the popular 70s sitcom All in the Family, Neil Genzlinger noted that, “before All in the Family sitcoms were largely something to tune in for escape and reassurance. But as of Jan. 12, 1971, when All in the Family had its premiere on CBS as a midseason replacement, comedies suddenly had permission to be relevant.”

…as well as reflect the results of the agenda with a big happy face:

And in the 1980s and 90s, popular culture began to explore dysfunction in families, as in The Simpsons and Married With Children, both objects of consternation from the GOP at the time.

The whole thing is worth a read, not because it’s especially prescient – doy, it’s history – but as food for thought to explore the following question:

Conservatives ceded the culture war to liberals forty years ago.  How much has America suffered for it?

…it’s only Republicans that are corrosively racist.

Keep repeating it until the authorities instruct you to stop.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emaill:

Having lost “the most important election ever,” what should we expect? Not hysteria, but reasonable expectations, what’s coming next?

Marriage – the Hennepin County lawsuit will succeed. Gay marriage will be imposed on “equal protection” grounds. Immediately thereafter, Somali Muslim immigrants will file suit demanding plural marriages be recognized on the same grounds. The Archbishop should tell Catholic priests they are forbidden from performing civil marriages, they can perform religious marriages only, for which the parties must obtain a civil marriage elsewhere, to establish that the Church doesn’t discriminate against gays or Muslims and can’t be forced to perform marriages for them.

Elections – descendants of European Caucasians will continue to dwindle as a percentage of the population, being out-produced by births and immigration of minorities who bring the values of their former societies to ours, transforming our nation to theirs. Third-world election results will become standard.

Pistols – gun control advocates will push the UN Small Arms Treaty as an excuse to prohibit the sale of all pistols. President Obama will appoint Supreme Court justices who will decide the right to possess a pistol in the home for self-defense does not imply a right to acquire one or carry one outside the home or buy ammunition for one. The Court also will hold that crime detection and prevention requires every pistol owner to have the same government permission as a fully-automatic machine gun and uphold unlimited taxes on ammunition. Pistol owners should buy one or two pistols to turn in when the cops come, but hide one or two for use during natural disasters or riots, making sure to keep 9mm or .40 S&W pistols to ensure compatibility when theft from the military and law enforcement becomes the only source of ammunition.

Jobs – if you have one, do whatever it takes to keep it, there won’t be more created anytime soon. Expect your employer to drop your health insurance when the crowding-out effect of Obamacare makes the health insurance business unprofitable.

Foreign Policy – the United States will continue its ever-expanding bombing campaign in Africa but Muslim terrorists will continue to sting us, at home and abroad. The European Union will dissolve leaving its member states to fend for themselves. Several will default on their debts, elect new governments, adopt new currency and hope for the best. China will take the Spratley Islands oil fields from Japan and the United States will talk tough but do nothing to annoy our largest creditor.

Federal Budget – Democrats controlling Congress will raise tax rates on disfavored groups but the slow economy, declining workforce and Baby Boomer retirements will prevent tax rate increases from generating enough revenue to solve the Social Security, Medicare and Obamacare debt problems. The Federal Reserve Bank will continue to buy at least a trillion dollars per year of federal government debt, since no other creditor will touch it.

Money – The rising tide of un-payable federal debt will convince other nations the dollar is devalued to the point of being worthless. One nation will decline to accept dollars in payment for oil, causing a stampede of other nations to follow suit, and some other nation’s currency will be adopted as the international standard (probably the Swiss Franc or the German Mark after the Euro disappears).

Stocks – Wall Street fund managers will decline to buy worthless government bonds but domestic investment opportunities will lag as taxes increase and overseas investment opportunities will disappear when the dollar becomes worthless. Stock portfolios will collapse taking down the pension funds and retirement accounts that have invested in them. Retirees will not be forced to eat cat food – they’ll be forced to eat their cats, as food. Prudent people will learn to garden, hunt and can.

Electricity – Democrats will ban coal as fuel for power plants. America’s aging nuclear plants will shut down one by one as permits for repairs become impossible to obtain. Natural gas fired plants and wind farms will not be able to carry the load. Roving brown-outs will become common. Blackouts following natural disasters will take longer to recover. Radical home retrofits to use only the power generated by solar, geo-thermal or backyard windmills will be touted but too expensive for average homeowner. Homes in cold climates will be abandoned as people migrate South to survive.

Quality of Life – The price of gasoline will skyrocket when dollars can’t be used to purchase foreign oil and our own oil production is decades away because Democrats have blocked permits to produce it. The price of imported goods will skyrocket when dollars are worthless beyond our shores but domestic goods will not replace them, there being no remaining domestic production and startups too heavily burdened by regulations. Health care providers will fail because of low Obamacare reimbursement rates and facilities will be taken over by government in the manner of GM and Chrysler. Treatment for sick people will exhibit all the convenience, access and compassion of the DMV or the IRS.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

I’ll be working on my own predictions before too terribly long here.

They differ from Joe’s only in degree, really.

Let’s take a run back to 2008  The DFL controlled the legislature and everything else but the govenorship.

ME: “So, DFL – if you’re so hot for gay marriage, why don’t you pass a gay marriage bill?”

DFLers: “Because the Governor will veto it?

ME: “So?  Principle is principle!  If your voter base is so hot for gay marriage, why not put your stake in the sand, and make the GOP plant theirs?”

DFL:  “It’d be a waste of time”.

Fast forward to 2010:

ME:  “So, DFLers – see how the GOP pushes bills they believe in – everything from budget reforms to “Stand Your Ground” – so that the electorate knows who’s on what side of what issue, even though Governor Dayton is going to veto it?”

DFLers:  “Clearly you are a racist”.

Fast even further forward to Wednesday, when I pointed out to Minnesota Progressive Project ‘s Jeff Rosenberg that there was no chance on earth that the DFL was going to push gay marriage.  Partly because it’s worth more to them as a wedge.  Partly because they’ll take less electoral flak letting the courts do it.

Today?  I don’t wanna say “I told you so”.

No, I’ll let Jeff tell himself:

For those of us who want to see DFLers move decisively to approve equal marriage, there was disappointing news at a press conference held on Wednesday:

“Many Democrats, led by Gov. Mark Dayton, opposed the amendment. But on Wednesday they would not commit to overturning the law.

Senate DFL leader Tom Bakk of Cook said the state’s budget situation is so serious that he thinks any such policy decisions should be delayed. House DFL leader Paul Thissen of Minneapolis would not go that far, but agreed budget work must come first.

In a radio interview, even the most outspoken same-sex marriage opponent, openly gay Sen. Scott Dibble of Minneapolis, said he did not know if it was time to move forward with changing the law.”

Sorry, but saying that the budget must come first is a cop-out. The legislature can — and does — consider dozens of issues at one time. There will be over 110 DFLers in the legislature. Surely two or three of them can take some time to write the bill without taking away from work on the budget. Ater all, a bill to legalize same-sex marriage would probably only need to be a page or two long. It could be written, debated, and signed before the February economic forecast is available.

It could be six words long – “Son, you may kiss the groom” – and the DFL still won’t touch it.

Because gay marriage is worth a lot more to the DFL as a wedge issue than as a bunch of married gays.

The DFL – or, more realistically, the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, which does all the DFL’s thinking for it these days – needs to have lots of wedges to wave in front of the low-information, emotionally-manipulable audience that is its main source of voters.  And they’re going to need to conserve the ones they have, as the reality – “we just elected a high-tax, high-regulation bunch of government-worker-union stooges in the middle of a crap economy” – sinks in with Minnesotans.

Hey, Minnesotans!  Stop the hate!

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes to the Minnesota Bar Association:

To the Chairman:

The amendment to prevent gay marriage from being court-imposed on equal protection grounds, was defeated. Gay marriage is only a matter of time. Our statutes are mostly gender-neutral already, it won’t be hard to adapt to “spouse-spouse.” But after we substitute individual rights for Judeo-Christian tradition as our intellectual model for marriage, why should equal protection stop at two spouses?

A billion people live in plural marriages in Muslim nations. Minnesota has an active and growing Muslim population. Muslims in England and Canada have obtained government benefits for multiple wives on equal protection grounds. Why should equal protection stop at welfare benefits; why not all civil rights flowing from marriage, the same parade of horrors used to justify gay marriage?

Adapting the statutes for three spouses will be trickier than for two. Must the Senior Wife consent to adding a Junior Wife? Do the Junior Wife’s children receive less child support? When the Junior Wife divorces, does she get a third or only half of the Husband’s half? If one woman has two husbands, who pays child support? Who gets custody – the departing biological mother or the remaining primary caregiver?

Lawyers advise clients to make contingency plans; well, we should take our own advice. The Bar Association should establish a Plural Marriage Legislation Committee now, so we’re ready when the time comes. It’s only a matter of time.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

After all, why should be westerners be imposing our values on them?

And all those years we spent browbeating the H’mong out of child marriage?  What right did we have, really?

If two people – or five people, or one adult and a 13 year old girl – love each other, what right do we have to get in the way?

It’s about love, right?

Ever since the idea of the Marriage Amendment was broached, I’ve been deeply, intensely ambivalent about it.

On the one hand, I’m a libertarian-conservative.  Indeed, I’m a libertarian-conservative before I’m a Republican.  I think government should get out of the way of peoples’ rights.

And that means gay peoples’ rights, too.  One of the fundamental tenets of all conservatism, especially libertarian conservatism, is that we are all equal before the law. Or at least we should be.

But I’ve found many of the arguments against the Marriage Amendment to be intensely disohonest.

“If you don’t support gay marriage, you are a bigot”: Nope.  Not only do I support equal rights for gays, but I guarantee you I’ve put more on the line against genuine hatred of gays than you have, pretty much whoever you are.  (No, I’m not going into details).  Anyone using this ‘argument” – it’s not an argument, it’s just browbeating – needs to shut up, go down to the courthouse, and officially renounce their right to vote; they don’t deserve it.

“It’s about rights”!:  If only it were.

I support – and have always supported – civil unions, because they equalize gay couples’ civil rights. But when you suggest civil unions – which are (or can and should be made to be) exactly the same in terms of tax, probate and other legal rights as marriage – as a compromise, the fangs come out.  “It’s a second-class institution!”, they say – which completely upends the “it’s about rights” argument.  It’s not about rights, it’s about a status.

“It’s about love!”:  Now we’re getting somewhere, sort of.

Marriage is not about “love”.  Love is a vital part of a marriage, of course.  But saying marriage is “about two people loving each other” trivializes marriage.

Of course, the institution has become more and more trivialized over the past fifty years or so.  The cultural left has tried to give marriage, the institution, the death of a thousand cultural cuts over the past generation or two.  No-fault divorce has, over time, led to such a debasement of the institution that the term “starter marriage” is tossed about with a chuckle and a wink in polite society.  “But what about all the people who used to stay in miserable marriages for fifty years?”, the well-meaning cultural lefties respond.  No argument here – a miserable marriage is a terrible thing…

…for everyone but one participant.  The children.  One of the cultural left’s most self-indulgent conceits is that children are happier with divorced, “happy” parents than married miserable ones.  It is simply not true.  The children are happier if their miserable parents put on a happy face and sack up and focus on raising them rather than indulging their own happiness (barring real, serious abuse – which, Lifetime movies notwithstanding, is a minority).  It is a fact, and it is immutable, and ignoring it destroys children and turns them into miserable dysfunctional adults.  And about half of parents today aren’t up to the job.

While cultural critics of traditional marriage point out that marriage has taken many forms in many societies, and even evolved considerably in our own society, when you strip away all the variants, it always boils down to A Guy and A Gal getting together to try to have and raise children.  Sometimes more than one guy, more often more than one gal, but usually one of each, and with a gender-count invariably stuck at two.

And the fact that society sees marriage as something other than “the best place to raise children” that is perhaps the greatest symptom of the trivialization of the institution.  When gay marriage advocates say “you don’t need to have kids to be married” – they have a point.  The Catholic Church until recently wouldn’t marry people that didn’t procreate; in some protestant parts of Western Europe until fairly recently, an engaged couple wouldn’t marry until they were expecting.

The institution has become so trivialized that in many parts of the country, it’s becoming a formality for a minority; in some major Blue-state cities, most co-habiting couples are not married.  In some parts of the country – by no means all inner cities – most babies are born out of wedlock.

And all of us – cultural conservatives and liberal alike – have allowed it to happen.

“Why shouldn’t all these wondeful, loving gay families have the same status as conventional families?”:  This one’s a little better.  Given the epidemic of single-parent homes in this country, and the social pathologies it’s producing, I’ll say this; if a child has a choice between being adopted by a single parent or a gay couple, I’d say go with the couple; if nothing else, it’s a lot easier to raise kids when you can do one-on-one or double-team defense than if you have to play zone.

And somewhere in that statement is a backhanded reason I’d almost support gay marriage in and of itself; the way the argument’s been presented so far, every gay couple is a perfect, loving pair of superparents, as opposed to us nasty, dysfunctional, human breeders.  If you were to legalize gay marriage, at least gay couples would be liberated from their image as perfect superhumans; the TV show Cops would no doubt soon feature police responding to an impeccable Warehouse District loft to drag a drunk (and impeccably-coiffed) guy in a husband-beater T-shirt and boxers down to jail after a domestic disturbance, as the bloody-nosed partner yells “I love you, Derek!  I’ll be here when you get back” through his tears.

I’ll return from facetious-land now.

But here’s one big gnarly fact of human emotional development that the left – not just the gay marriage movement, but the entire cultural left (many of whom are as homophobic as the most caricatured southern baptist) – want to kill and bury; Gender matters.  There’s a reason that the social institution we call “marriage”, throughout human society, is always a mixed-doubles sport; because whatever you believe created humanity in all of our complexity – God, biochemistry, L. Ron Hubbard or remorseless fate – created us so that as the human mind develops emotionally, all other things equal, it is best served by having a male and a female parent.   There are vast swathes of studies showing that, all other things being equal, kids develop best emotionally with two parents, one of each gender.  Female parents – mothers – provide empathy and nurturing and show boys what women are supposed to be like; Fathers teach risk-tolerance and socialized aggressiveness and show their daughters what a guy is supposed to be, ideally (and yes, that’s in functional families, and yes, any individusal person and couple may be different).  Single-parent households produce children who lack one of those sets of traits in their upbringing.

Which isn’t to say that gay parents can’t do a good job; they just bring a double-helping of one set of tools to the table.

But that’s OK – it’s a non-issue; I support gay adoption, because it’s better than many of the alternatives.

That is why the left’s argument that a vote against gay marriage is like a vote for Jim Crow, for “Separate but Equal”, for slavery, is so very wrong.  Black and white men are biologically the same species; so are black and white women.  But men and women are, in fact, very very different – and they’ve very different for a reason.

Men and women, black and white, should all have equal rights under the law.  Even if their affectional orientation is toward the same sex.

———-

Dennis Prager had an excellent article in the National Review last week:

Proponents of same-sex marriage ask: Is keeping the definition of marriage as man-woman fair to gays? Opponents of same-sex marriage ask: Is same-sex marriage good for society?

Few on either side honestly address the question of the other side. Opponents of same-sex marriage rarely acknowledge how unfair the age-old man-woman definition is to gay couples. And proponents rarely, if ever, acknowledge that this unprecedented redefinition of marriage may not be good for society.

Prager cuts to the crux of the issue; it’s really two issues:

• Should gay couples have the same rights as straight ones?:  There’s no real moral case they shouldn’t have the same legal rights.  And in fact every single one of the rights that a couple can get by getting married – the ones that aren’t available one way or another right now – can be legislatied without needing to redefine marriage.  Every last one of them.
• Is it in society’s best interest allow marriage to be further re-defined?”: The dilution of what marriage is supposed to be – a vehicle not for “Love” or even “Happiness”, but for raising children as functionally and effectively and with as much emotional health as possible – is behind many of this society’s current ills.  Crime, addiction, the disintegration of the school system – all of them trace, more or less directly, to the disintegration of the Western idea of family.

And answering both of those questions honestly – if you take either of them seriously, and many of the partisans on both sides of the debate do not – is difficult.

If you accept that Marriage is supposed to be about creating and raising children, that gay couples deserve equality as citizens before the law, and that thousands of years of human development, and reams of studies, are correct in showing that children develop best – all other things being equal – by being raised by mixed-gender couples (while legally allowing that gay adoption is preferable to single-parenthood), then the conclusion is…:

• We need to socially de-trivialize marriage:  and I mean this in a radical way.  This means not only eliminating no-fault divorce, but also getting churches and secular authorities that perform weddings to more-aggressively dissuade couples from marrying when they shouldn’t, and yes, to maybe even quit marrying couples who have no intention of having kids, too.  In for a penny, in for a buck.
• We need to recognize that “marriage” – in the “institution in which children are raised” sense of the term – is no more a “right” than childbirth.  Men and women want to have kids, but biologically, only women can (but not without a starter).   Ditto with marriage as an institution intended for raising children.  It’s something anyone can want – but for the children, in most cases, all other things being equal, it should be a man and a woman.
• It’s time to enact civil unions, because not all couples will be mixed-gender, and they do raise kids, and absent the biological and emotional advantages of mixed-gender couples, many of them do a perfectly fine job of it.

———-

One thing that is not difficult, in our litigious society, foreseeing what’ll happen if gay marriage is legalized; any refusal to recognize it will be stomped flat in court.  Because Marriage is not the only institution that’s been trivialized; so has the right to free association.

Are you a baker that doesn’t want to bake a cake for a gay wedding?  A photographer that won’t photograph ’em?   And eventually and inevitably,, a church that refuses to perform ’em?  Bend over and grab your legal ankles; the ACLU and, likely as not, city/county/state “Human Rights” bureaucracy will no doubt come calling.

“But the First Amendment won’t allow that!” is a cop-out, not an answer.  The First Amendment will prevent these absues exactly as the Second Amendment protected the gun owners of New Orleans from gun confiscation, or the First Amendment protected Eugene Debs’ freedom of speech, or the Fourth Amendment prevents property forfeiture on accusation of a drug crime, or the Tenth prevents abuses of the Commerce Clause; only with hard work and costly legal action.

Let’s be honest; the Constitution only protects those that make it protect them, and have or create the power to make it protect them.

———-

So I’m probably going to vote for the Marriage Amendment.  Not because I don’t support equal rights for gays – Civil Unions do, in fact, confer equal rights, and I support them.  And not because I don’t think same-sex couples can’t raise kids – they can, although not as well as a mixed-gender couple, all other things being equal.

No, I’m going to vote for the Amendment because it’s one of many things our society needs to do to de-trivialize the notion of what marriage and family really are.  I believe society needs to get serious about the idea of what family is, and should be – and at the same time, give gay couples the rights they need to function in raising their own families (however they get them), and while protecting the First Amendment rights of free association of those who disagree with the idea of gay marriage from the inevitable depredations of the grievance industry.

So to some extent I’m going to hold my nose when I do it – but I’m voting for the Marriage Amendment.

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