While Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s collapse during his speech at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Federalist Society got a lot coverage, the speech itself has not gotten a blip… So, I encourage all of you to read it in full.. but I will post a short part of it here to capture your interest:
As the end of this Administration draws near, you would expect to hear broad praise for this success at keeping our Nation safe. Instead, I am afraid what we hear is a chorus with a rather more dissonant refrain. Instead of appreciation, or even a fair appraisal, of the Administration’s accomplishments, we have heard relentless criticism of the very policies that have helped keep us safe. We have seen this in the media, we have seen this in the Congress, and we have heard it from the legal academy as well.
In some measure, those criticisms rest on a very dangerous form of amnesia that views the success of our counterterrorism efforts as something that undermines the justification for continuing them. In an odd way, we have become victims of our own success. In the eyes of these critics, if Al Qaeda has not struck our homeland for seven years, then perhaps it never posed much of a threat after all and we didn’t need these counterterrorism policies.
Supporters of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) are confident that President-elect Barack Obama will reverse the Bush administration’s 2002 decision to stop the $40 million it received in U.S. funding. The policy was instated because of UNFPA’s support for China’s one-child policy, which includes coercive abortion practices.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D – N.Y.) said the funding will be approved by the Democratic majority Congress. Her comments came while speaking Wednesday at a press conference at the National Press Club where the 2008 U.N. report on world population was released.
“You know the president will have to do nothing,” said Maloney. “He will just have to let the will of Congress go through. One of the changes is that UNFPA will be funded,” CNSNews.com reports.
The Bush administration in 2002 had stopped funding the organization, citing the Kemp-Kasten Amendment which prohibits funds from being available to organizations or programs determined to be supporting or participating in coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization programs.
In July of 2008, Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte announced that for the sixth year in a row, the government had determined that “UNFPA provides support for and participates in the management of the Chinese government’s program of coercive abortion and involuntary sterilization.”
And I know that all of you, my fellow Americans, are delighted that in some small way we, too, will be involved in forced abortions and sterlizations in China. When we think about the poor, frightened woman being forced to have an abortion, we can take real pride in being Americans, can’t we?
Oh, the joys of a liberal, Democratic Administration - with such advances in the battle for equality for women and death for children, can federally funded abortion on demand be far behind?
A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.
“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force,” Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. “I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”
Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.
“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,” Broun said. “When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.”
Obama’s comments about a national security force came during a speech in Colorado about building a new civil service corps. Among other things, he called for expanding the nation’s foreign service and doubling the size of the Peace Corps “to renew our diplomacy.”
“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set,” Obama said in July. “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”
In Germany it was, of course, the Sturmabteilung, in Italy it was the Fascisti, while in Russia it was Military Revolutionary Committee and Red Guards. The commonality is a paramilitary organization outside the control of the normal authorities and owing its allegiance to a political faction. We don’t want such things in America. Ever.
What Obama proposes - civilian national service - is actually a negation of service and of volunteerism. Lured by grants and subjected to peer pressure, the kids who will be sucked into such a program will be easy pawns for whomever commands the organization - and we can just imagine what sort of kook leftists dregs of the “community organizer” world will be placed in charge of such an organization. The safety valve for America is that such a grouping will almost certainly disintegrate into a cash machine for various connected liberal and leftwing politicians and groups - but the worry is that it might be used to intimidate opponents of leftwing opinion. Just the sight of a paramilitary force cruising through a neighborhood will intimidate those who don’t agree with the commanders of the force…no one has to be locked up or even harmed, for the most part. And, of course, if anyone takes forceful exception to paramilitary goons patrolling the local neighborhood, that person will be immediately classed as a criminal.
Provide government funds for the Scouts. Shell out cash for Big Brothers and Big Sisters. Open the floodgates for money for various religious youth organizations. But don’t, even for a moment, have a youth organization directly funded and controlled by the federal government - in that direction lies tyranny, and civil war.
While I disagree with the concept of gay marriage, B. Daniel Blatt over at Pajamas Media explains what gay activists will have to do to have a chance of actually winning the political fight over it:
…proponents of Proposition 8 began their campaign by pointing out that judges and politicians were trying to force gay marriage on the citizens of California. In their first television ad, they pointed out that four judges on the California Supreme Court “ignored four million voters,” the approximate tally of citizens who, in 2000, voted in favor of Proposition 22, which defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Those four justices explicitly overturned that initiative in their May decision.
That same ad showed San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom saying that gay marriage would happen “whether you like it or not.” The campaign thus made it appear that citizens were being left out of the process.
Other ads suggested that Proposition 8’s failure would lead to schools teaching gay marriage and prevent parents from allowing their children to opt out of such instruction. A “yes” vote would return sovereignty over such matters to the people.
Whenever state courts mandate recognition of gay marriage, it leads to a backlash at the ballot box. By November 2004, not even a year after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (the Bay State’s highest court) handed down the Goodridge decision finding it unconstitutional under the state constitution to limit marriage to different-sex couples, voters in thirteen states enacted constitutional provisions defining marriage by its traditional definition: the union of one man and one woman.
This year, after the California and Connecticut Supreme Courts handed down rulings similar to Goodridge, voters in Florida and Arizona joined those in California and amended their state constitutions.
Following the passage of Proposition 8, Jonathan Rauch, author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, wrote that gay marriage advocates need to rethink “the wisdom of mindlessly pushing lawsuits through the courts without adequately preparing the public.” Since state courts began mandating gay marriage, thirty states have amended their constitutions to define marriage so as to prohibit recognition of same-sex unions as marriage.
Our liberal friends, of course, rely upon judicial tyranny to impose their views - elect liberal executives who appoint liberal judges and then file lawsuits to impose new laws which would never pass muster with the people or which would involve long, expensive fights in the public square. The success of Roe in enshrining abortion in our laws has been the model - abortion on demand commands only a small minority of support, but it is the standard which the left holds to and they’ve got a Supreme Court ruling on their side about it. It is also handy to use judges as they can bypass the more local political bodies - State supreme courts to overturn city and county laws, federal supreme court to overturn State laws. This is a negation of America.
In point of fact, I’m not particularly concerned if the people of San Francisco wish to recognize as a “marriage” the union of two men or two women…or, for that matter, three men and three women, if that is what floats their boat. I don’t live in San Francisco and while I love my fellow Americans in that city and will fight to defend them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, its not for me to tell them how to live - just as it isn’t for them to tell me how to live. Within the framework of our sublime constitution, we’re supposed to have vast differences between the States and localities on how business is done. Think of the United States as a host of local and State political laboratories where various experiments in democratic governance are conducted, with the most successful experiments making it to the national level. This is what we really should be shooting for.
The problem with the left is that it seeks to impose itself everywhere - its not good enough if gays in San Francisco are married…Salt Lake City must do so, too. Its not good enough for abortion to be legal in Santa Monica, it must also be legal in Boise. Its not good enough to have a porno store down the street in New York City, there must also be one down the street in Billings. This is not the way it is supposed to be - as long as an American is free to hold his property, speak his mind and come and go as he pleases, he’s as free as any person needs to be…the rest of it is a matter of local desire. Some localities are ok with freewheeling immorality, some places aren’t…and each should respect the basic desires of the other.
If gay marriage is ever to come to the United States, it will have to come in a piecemeal fashion - States and localities, after extensive political argument, will have to decide for themselves what they wish to do. My bet is that most will opt for some sort of civil unions to allow gay couples - and other non-traditional family-like relationships - to pool their lives and resources free from outside interference (which, by the way, is a core American value)…but it has to be the people deciding. If the gay marriage advocates continue down the route of judicial tyranny, it will eventually provoke the ultimate backlash, an amendment to the federal constitution forbidding gay marriage.
Obama will call on citizens of all ages to serve America, by developing a plan to require 50 hours of community service in middle school and high school and 100 hours of community service in college every year.
There once was a nation where the government called upon people to work for free on government projects - and reports are that throughout the USSR people did just that…amazing what you can accomplish when you are a socialist who leads a great nation. However, I believe that the President-Elect might want to pay heed to a rather dusty, old document:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. (emphasis added)
If you are requiring a kid to do community service as part of his “free and compulsory” primary education, then I think that fits right into the definition of “involuntary servitude”. The shocking thing is that our liberal friends - starting with Barack Obama - simply will not recognize this as a threat to freedom. For our liberal friends, “freedom” seems to mean merely the freedom to get laid, smoke dope, dress like a freak and not have anyone know what porno sites they visit - in the liberal mind, there is no incompatibility between liberty and requiring someone to do government work.
Its going to be a long four years of fighting for freedom, fellow conservatives - get ready for it!
UPDATE: It appears that from this point forward I will have to save a screen shot each time I quote an Obama website - what I have quoted is a “copy and paste” from what I found on Obama’s website, and I wasn’t the only person who quoted that. It has been changed now - naturally, the Obamaniacs are saying that I’m lying…as if I didn’t think anyone would click the link I provided to prove what I was saying.
We might want to stake out a fighting position against this crackbrained, totalitarian Obama idea:
Obama’s service plan is just as troubling. He wants to mandate 50 hours of community service per year for middle and high school students. And he’s offering a $4,000 federal-funded tuition credit in exchange for 100 hours per year from college students. For most students, the latter will become a mandatory part of getting a degree, as colleges will merely raise their tuition to compensate for the vouchers.
So who gets to decide what constitutes “community service”? Who gets to decide which causes and organizations will be credit-worthy, and which ones won’t?
Something tells me that you’d be more likely to get one of Obama’s vouchers by going door to door for one of ACORN’s living wage campaigns than, say, volunteering for a libertarian nonprofit organization that advocates against things like government-mandated community service.
Volunteerism is good, but government sponsored and group-intimidated activities are the negation of volunteerism. We should encourage our young people to get out there and pitch in, but only encourage - it is their right to not participate and suffer no societal consequences.
The thing about enforced virtue is that it isn’t virtue at all - in Saudi Arabia, they have some sort of police force which goes around ensuring that everyone is being virtuous…which means, of course, that no one in Saudi Arabia has a clue about virtue because you can only do right when you are free to do wrong. God gave us free will for a reason, and we must do as much as we can to leave the will as free as possible. Obama’s plan is collectivist, Bolshevik nonsense, and we should stop it.
I think we can say that the constitution reflected a enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day and that the Framers had that same blind spot. I don’t think the two views are contradictory to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this county that continues to this day.
And he also believes that the Supreme Court should decide what the government must do for you (as defined by Obama and other lefties, of course):
The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf.
The man believes that the Founders got it wrong - that they didn’t set up a system Obama would prefer; a system, that is, where redistribution is the name of the game. Obama wants a government which decides the outcomes of life - and it must be kept in mind that if a government is going to “fix” the outcomes, it cannot allow people to be free. Obama is a socialist through and through, even if he refuses the label - but, then again, most socialists in the United States refuse that label, too, and insist we call them “progressives”.
Americans: do we want a President who thinks that the Founders got it wrong? Do we want a President who sees the coercive club of government as a magic wand to make us all happy? If we do, then Obama will be elected next week - if, on the other hand, we prefer to actually remain American, then we’ll vote for McCain.
Dozens of incentive schemes have been uncovered which allow GPs to profit by slashing the number of patients they refer for hospital care.
Under one scheme, GPs stand to gain £59 for every patient not referred to hospital, if they cut an average referral rate by between two and eight per cent.
Torbay care trust in Devon will pay up to £15,000 to the average-sized GP practice if it hits a swathe of targets, including reducing hospital referrals.
NHS managers say referral rates, which rose 16 per cent nationwide during the first quarter of this year, have to be cut to save money. They claim many patients can receive equally good care from community NHS staff, such as physiotherapists and nurses.
But critics fear that patients could suffer if GPs’ decisions are swayed by the prospect of a cash bonus.
A leading surgeon said that patients’ cancers had already gone undiagnosed after they were denied specialist care under two such “referral management” schemes.
Orthopaedic surgeon Stephen Cannon, former president of the British Orthopaedic Association and a consultant surgeon at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, described the cases as an “absolutely terrible” warning that decisions by non-specialist doctors could have devastating consequences.
He said: “I recently encountered two cases in which patients referred to physiotherapists later turned out to have a malignant tumour. If they had been sent to a consultant the outcome may have been very different.
“In one case a young man was referred to a physiotherapist because of sudden knee pain. Had he come to a specialist the symptoms should have been recognised and he should have been urgently referred to an oncologist. In this case, after the delays, the outcome was amputation. It was devastating for the patient and his family.”
If we could find a way to staff a national health service entirely with Saints, we’d be ok - but as we’re going to staff any health service with human beings, we’re going to have to deal with the fact that human beings will act, well, like humans.
Think of it like this: the bureaucrat in charge of budget matters wants to find a way to cut costs because the government is pleased when costs are kept low and money is freed up for new initiatives which make it look like things are constantly advancing - now, the bureaucrat can cut costs by cutting bureaucracy, or by cutting services to patients. Which way do you think the bureaucrat will go? Cutting the bureaucracy means you’ll have a bunch of people you work with shouting at you and threatening to go out on strike, which will make your elected bosses look bad, and they won’t like you as a result…cutting patient care means that people you don’t know won’t receive treatments you don’t know about with results you’ll never be made aware of. Its a no-brainer - unless the bureaucrat is a Saint along the lines of Francis of Assisi…and just as soon as the socialized medicine people find thousands of Saint Francises to staff our health care system then I’ll find it in my heart to support such a scheme.
This same level of accountability needs to be demanded of every member of Congress and/or the Senate who was complicit and willful in forming the policies that led us to largest government takeover of a private sector in our nation’s history:
As I’ve stated before, it’s not just the CEO’s who need to be perp-walked and frog-marched.
Barney Frank and Co. presided over a travesty of fiscal mismanagement of such exponential proportions so as to make Enron look like farting in church by comparison.
We need to hold our elected officials to a higher standard. To not hold them to account for their malfiesance would be to say, in so many words, that we have ceased to live in a land of the people, by the people, and for the people; and have rather moved on to a "brave new world" of the elites, by the elites, and for the elites.
God help us if we continue to allow these "good deeds" to go unpunished.
COBURN: We have a patient with cancer, and they have secondary pneumonia because of the cancer and we’re going to treat the pneumonia. But we’re not going to fix the cancer. We’re gonna ignore the cancer. Let me tell you what the cancer is. The cancer is Congresses for years upon years have totally ignored the Constitution of the United States and taken to us areas where we have no business being. There is no way you can justify in the US Constitution that the country ought to be the source of mortgages for homeowners in this country, and yet Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac control 70% of the mortgages in this country.
[SNIP]
If anybody in America is mad about this situation, there’s only one place they need to direct their anger, and it’s right in the Congress of the United States. What we’re going to do is we’re going to continue to treat the symptoms rather than directly go after the cause that has created the greatest financial risk and peril this country has ever seen. We’re not going after the cause. The cause is get back within the bounds of the Constitution that very specifically says where we have business working and where we don’t. We decided that we would ignore the wisdom of our founders and create systems that are outside the enumerated powers that were given to us because we know better, we know better. We don’t know better, it is obvious.
[SNIP]
This body continues to spend more, authorize more, and create bigger and more intrusive government, limiting the power of the great American experiment to in fact supply an increased standard of living. We’re in tough times, but they’re going to get tougher until the American people hold this body accountable to live within the rules set out in a very wise, a very providential way that served this country well. We ignore this book, this Constitution at our peril, we are reaping exactly what we have sown.
Indeed. The Senate has opened a Pandora’s box full of enough socialism to put our Constitution and all it stands for into a death throe.
It is my hope that there are enough Tom Coborns in the U.S. House to shut the door to this insidious box before it’s too late.
Since the failure of the rescue bill, i have been privately imploring friends on The Hill to provide a viable alternative. Looks like they are crafting just that.
I like a lot of the provisions under consideration. I wonder if it could pass without “Christmas Tree” add-ons from the Left. Here are key provisions:
* Require the Treasury Department to guarantee, at up to 100 percent, bank losses resulting from failed mortgage-backed securities originated prior to the plan’s enactment. Such insurance, supporters say, would provide immediate value to the securities and a foundation for which they could then be sold. The Treasury Department would finance that insurance by assessing a premium on outstanding mortgage-backed securities.
* Allow companies to carry back losses arising in tax years ending in 2007, 2008, or 2009 back five years, generating a tax refund and immediate capital
* Allow a “repatriation window” for profits earned by U.S. firms overseas. Such repatriation amounts would not be taxed if invested in distressed debt (as defined by Treasury) for at least one year.
* Allow banks to treat losses on shares of preferred stock in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as ordinary losses, not as capital losses
* Suspend the capital gains tax rate for two years
* Limit backing of high-risk loans by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
* Schedule Fannie and Freddie for privatization
* Suspend “mark-to-market” accounting until the SEC can issue new guidelines that will allow firms to mark these assets to their true economic value
* Stabilize the dollar by repealing the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, which alternative bailout supporters say diverts the Federal Reserve’s attention from long-term price stability to short-term economic growth
* Require the Treasury to write rules prohibiting excessive compensation or golden parachutes to executives of failed companies
* Task the SEC with regular, annual audit reports of entities the federal government has brought under conservatorship or now owns
If the bill comes up with the above provisions, I bet the bill passes overwhelmingly. AND the stock market would shoot straight up. Go John McCain!
Catholics need to wake up when it comes to politics, and stop leaving “God in the pew,” says a Vatican aide.
Bishop Giampaolo Crepaldi, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said this today when he addressed a conference organized by Retinopera, a network of Italian organizations that promote the Church’s social teachings.
The meeting, under way in Assisi, is reflecting on the idea of the common good and, according to its organizers, seeks “to consider development understood as a moral question.”
Bishop Crepaldi said Benedict XVI’s call in Cagliari, Sardinia, earlier this month for “the birth of a new generation of Christians involved in society and politics” was addressed to the Christian communities “who, as far as the formation new generations involved in society and politics is concerned, seem to be falling asleep.”
The bishop explained the need for Catholic laity involved in politics in the context of the “the idea, perhaps unexpressed, that secularization is an unstoppable process, a kind of ‘destiny’ of the West if not the entire planet.”
“Secularization, as God’s ejection from the world to the point that he ceases to speak to it, is not the destiny of modernity,” the bishop remarked.
The prelate noted this is precisely “the principal challenge” that Pope John Paul II faced, and that Benedict XVI is currently confronting. “We must confidently join them as real protagonists, and not see ourselves as tired bit players in a script recited by others.”
We can surrender the field to the secularists, or we can get out there and do battle for what we know is right. The crisis we face today isn’t really economic, but moral…only in a demoralized society which is sunk in despair could we get a situation where politicians connive with corporate bosses to defraud the American people…and then these same people blame those who fought against them, and demand that the people defrauded pony up to fix the problem. It is we, the believers, who have allowed this to happen - because we’ve been asleep at the switch, and afraid to tell the truth to those who are destroying our civilization.
The great battle here in the United States is, of course, the upcoming election - and its not really about Barack Obama. He’s a nobody - the problem is that he’s such a weak, ill-informed and morally confused man that those who seek to destroy Judeo-Christian civilization will find him easy to manipulate for their own ends. If we Christians refuse the battle - or temporize in our judgments - then we’ll get an Obama who will agree to appoint the most kook left judges imaginable…not because Obama wants kook left judges, but because he doesn’t know any better, and corrupt advisors will prevail upon him to make the appointments. You think Roe is horrific? Wait until an Obama-appointee decides that people have a right to euthanize their aged parents, or that taxpayers must pay for abortions…its coming, if we just sit back and allow it to happen.
Get out there and fight - as Obama put it to his troops, get in their faces and let them know how you feel…call them on their lies, each and every time they say them; tell them they are doing evil, even if they don’t recognize it. With mercy and love mixed with firmness and determination, lets carry the battle to them, and defeat them for the benefit of our civilization.
The liberal side of the aisle is wasting no time in casting the CEO’s as the bad guys and then attempting to tie the GOP to the CEO’s. This is clever politics and we can’t complain about the Democrats trying this - even though they are far more connected to said CEO’s than we are. What we GOPers need to do is get out in front of this and get the people on our side. I propose the following, with acknoweldgement to Nevada Pundit, from whom I have ripped off part of the ideas:
Golden Parachutes
There is nothing quite so absurd or aggravating for Joe and Jane Average than to see the CEO of a failed or deeply troubled corporation getting out of Dodge with millions of dollars in bonuses and other compensation. The flimsy-as-all-get-out corporate justification for the huge executive compensation is that if the CEO’s, etc don’t feel ownership for the corporation they won’t ensure it performs at peak efficiency. This is utter BS, but lets take them at their word - and rather than going the Big Government, Democrat route of capping CEO compensation, lets enact a law which allows a corporation to pay its executives whatever it wishes, but such compensation decreases 5 percentage points for each 1 percentage point of stock valuation lost in any given fiscal year beyond a 10% reduction (10% can happen for all sorts of reasons outside the control of the executives - but once you get past that loss, you’re starting to get into CEO Bonehead territory).
Corporate Bankruptcy
Everyone with who’s title includes “chief”, “president”, “senior”, “executive” or “chairman” gets compensated at $25 per hour for each hour worked during the fiscal year the corporation filed bankruptcy. Nothing else.
Corporate Layoffs
For each 10 workers laid off the people with the titles noted in “Corporate Bankruptcy” lose one tenth of one percent of their annual compensation for the fiscal year in which the layoffs occured. A corporate boss can layoff workers all he wants, as long as he feels the pain.
Worker Benefits
Cut them all you want, bosses - as long as you lose them, too and, additionally, lose your bonus for the year in which you make the benefit cut, as well as the two years following it. Have a care when passing out the bennies, ’cause cutting back on them will be painful.
These proposals will retain the free market principle, allow generous compensation to corporate executives who score big profits while keeping workers on the payroll, discourage outsourcing of American jobs and encourage corporate executives to seek other routes than bankruptcy when the going gets rough. In addition to this, there’s the simple justice in ensuring that when a corporation falters, everyone from top to bottom takes a hit, not just the worker bees. And, finally, these are nicely populist proposals which will make the American people stand up and cheer without any appeal to envy or hatred, as the Democrats routinely do with their class warfare nonsense.
The fundamental principle missing in corporate America - and its also missing in government-bureaucrat America - is a connection with the concerns of average Americans; there is a lack of empathy for those who are effected by a corporate downsize or a pettifogging bureaucratic regulation. In addition to what I’ve proposed here, government employees should only get pay increases tied to the growth in personal income, less government transfers, amongst the American people - regulate us into stagflation and you’ll only be hurting yourselves, bureaucrats. Bill Clinton said he felt our pain - which was nonsense as he was insulated from any pain other than the self-inflicted wounds of his immoral actions. I say: lets make everyone feel the pain, and while we won’t eliminate pain, we’ll at least get people who will think carefully before they cause any.
I found Sarah Palin’s answer to Charles Gibson’s question on homosexuality satisfactory (though not ideal) in large part because of my basic political philosophy. I don’t think someone’s sexuality should be a matter of government concern.
I don’t need the government to affirm my sexuality. I just expect the government to leave me alone so I can affirm it in my own way.
And how did Governor Palin answer the question? Thusly:
GIBSON: Homosexuality, genetic or learned?
PALIN: Oh, I don’t — I don’t know, but I’m not one to judge and, you know, I’m from a family and from a community with many, many members of many diverse backgrounds and I’m not going to judge someone on whether they believe that homosexuality is a choice or genetic. I’m not going to judge them.
This was yet another question from Gibson where Palin could reasonably have asked, “in what sense, Charlie?”. It is an open question as to whether or not homosexuality is genetic (with the Catholic position being neutral on that assertion, but noting that some people do have a “deep seated” attraction for members of the same sex), but there is no question that in order to do something homosexual, it must be learned, as all voluntary human acts must be learned. Just because a young man might find his heart racing at the sight of another young man doesn’t mean he’ll immediately leap to the homosexual act - no more than a heterosexual young man instantly knows what to do about his first strong sexual attraction to a young woman.
As for me, I also do not judge on this matter - people who are gay assert strongly that they have “always” felt that way; I can’t gainsay them, as I can’t peer into their souls and discover the rock-solid truth of the matter. On the other hand, there are cases out there of men and women living entirely gay for a while, and then switching over to living heterosexual - such things don’t, of course, demonstrate that genetic is invalid nor that choice is valid…all they show is that a person can do what he wishes, including ignore a strong sexual urge in favor of some other act or way of living (you know, like a good monk or nun who eschews sexual activity of any type).
The crucial thing here is to not judge - and that cuts both ways; the non-homosexual must not judge the homosexual as bad, the homosexual must not judge the person who asserts Christian teaching on homosexuality as a bigot. God will figure this one out for us. Supposing a gay friend didn’t know my views on homosexual sex and then asked me, I’d tell him - but I’d also add that there are bigger fish to fry and, furthermore, in the grand scheme of things carnal sins are generally less dangerous for the immortal soul than sins against the Spirit. Naturally, a homosexual person who puts his sexual appetites above all other things is at risk of damnation - but so, too, is the man who puts his money, his possessions or his power above all things. Sarah Palin, a true Christian who has promised us she’ll keep a servant’s heart understands this very well - and even if she prays ten times a day for homosexuals to cease homosexuality, it doesn’t change the fact that our gay brothers and sisters are, indeed, our brothers and sisters and they are to be loved and respected at all times.
And as Palin attempts to show this love, so she has managed - at least with Gay Patriot - to secure a measure of respect one would think no gay person would even bestow upon an Evangelical Christian. One down, many millions to go…but each journey does start with the first step.
