Showing posts with label same-sex marriage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label same-sex marriage. Show all posts

Monday, July 02, 2018

Cause du Jour


Why is it that only liberals seem to have causes that they will stage emotive protests for: legalize marijuana, "women's reproductive rights," equal pay, transgender bathrooms, black lives matter, dump Trump Women's March, safe spaces, #MeToo, down with Civil War monuments, save the planet, bam guns, no tax cuts, open borders, same sex marriage, evil white privilege, eliminate ICE? The list goes on and on and on. As soon as the emotion drains out of one cause, another one steps in to take it's place. Do not these fulminaters have anything else to do with their empty lives? Must our media always have a weekend protest or boycott or diatribe to headline? It all seems very artificial and superficial to this observer.

Are these real grassroots protests or is this a lot of AstroTurf ... ginned-up crowds comprised mostly of many Soros-paid actors ... or  rent-a-mobs? (There are agencies which will actually rent you a spittle-flecked mob for any cause you want. How cynical can you get?)

The free-speech, save the whales and free-love activists of our youth seem so much more tame and naive than the cause du jour gauntlets we are forced to endure these days. What's next? "Green cards  for all the jihadists'  children?" Spare me!

Monday, May 30, 2016

The Cultural Entropy of the Liberal Mind

The easiest definition of "entropy" is "lack of order or distinctions." For those of a scientific mind and who want a more precise definition please go to my meanderings on this subject in my naive science blog: Junkier Science. But for this current exercise in fuzzy thinking let us stay with "lack of order or distinctions." "Cultural entropy" would therefore be social sameness or winding down.

Reading another blog yesterday I was struck by the bright line that might be drawn between liberal and conservative thought ... how one can almost predict the stance that these two political persuasions will take on any subject ... for instance Brexit. Why does the Left want Britain to stay in the European Union and the Right want it to leave? (I will deal more with this later.) The answer that dawned on me then was one's predilection for order versus disorder. Conservatives cherish distinctions or order and Liberals, disorder or even chaos. Then I realized that this distinction might be carried over to many of the modern-day debates ... some of which I will try to inspect here.

The Yin and Yang of the human experience suggest that an individual is never fully liberal or fully conservative.... but that the preponderance of ones preference might be predetermined by the political wiring of one's brain. How this wiring gets accomplished is beyond the scope of this discussion, but, I suspect that it is a tribal phenomenon ... and not necessarily genetic. So, let us start in this investigation of the cultural entropy of the liberal mind.

Race Relations -- When I was but a lad, my family was briefly living within a liberal household in Washington, DC. The doyenne of this enclave had a notion of how race relations would eventually sort themselves out. She believed that, at sometime in the distant future, all mankind would become, due to crossbreeding, a light coffee brown color ... racial entropy ... at which point there would be no distinction between the races and thus no strife. This struck me, even as a child, as idealistic and rather improbable. Was this the beginning of my conservative brain wiring?

Globalism vs. Nationalism -- This Washington doyenne was also a big proponent of world government ... political entropy ... as, it seems, are most liberals. This brings us back to Brexit. The European Union was an early liberal step in that direction ... misguided as it was. To me, and most conservatives, giving up any part of one's national sovereignty to some unelected Brussels bureaucrats is the height of insanity. The consequences of this insanity are finally being realized in the mass movements of mostly Muslim immigrants through the opened borders of old Europe. And the current election in the United States pits globalism versus nationalism. Hellery Clinton, in the world-government tradition of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, promises to erase our national borders within her first hundred days as president ... whereas Donald Trump will build a "beautiful high wall" to stop illegal immigration. (An interesting paradox -- is a worldwide caliphate a liberal or conservative notion?)

Economic Equality -- Socialism and Communism are manifestations of economic entropy. The uber-left want all economic strata to be extinguished ... except for the ruling class that is. To everyone according to one's needs creates fiscal chaos as we have repeatedly seen ... the latest example being Venezuela. Politicians, such as Bernie Sanders, keep establishing rights beyond "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" which too often infringe on these three "natural" rights. Now, higher education, universal health care, automatic citizenship, etc. are our new supposed "free"doms. Such political disorganizations as Communism and Socialism, not surprisingly, most always are the ultimate objectives of the liberal left.

There are numerous other examples of cultural entropy: transgenderism (the unwillingness to distinguish between the sexes), same-sex marriage (the forced sameness of all family units), the liberal dipoles of  "Diversity and Inclusion" (a naive attempt to create a smoothie of all our American subcultures), global warming (an irrational fear of normal climate extremes), and even that old lefty experiment, Esperanto (an attempt to erase all language differences). I am sure that there are numerous other examples of how liberals come down on things differently from us conservatives, but that would be a PHD thesis that no bevy of Ivy League professors would permit.

Therefore, I will stop this righty rambling and return to more palatable social endeavors ... such as thinking about a non-controversial third-party candidate.

Friday, June 26, 2015

Obama Fatigue


I am in a bit of a funk over the Obama administration's two recent victories ... obtaining fast track trade authority from the Senate (the precursor to greater power for it to pursue its world government agenda) and its SCOTUS victory permitting Obamacare subsidies for states not providing health-care exchanges. This fatigue is exacerbated by the vindictive war on our South by this administration and the national media.

President Obama obviously has a great many scalps hanging from his belt ... particularly considering his obvious incompetence and indifference to popular opinion. He has lived a bit of a charmed life ... hopping from ice floe to ice floe ahead of the pursuing racist hounds (yes, Sheldon, this is sarcasm.)

To add to my ennui, the Supreme Court has just legalized same-sex marriage. Once again I am on the wrong side of history. I guess the millennials (that group who can't name our vice president) now totally rule.

Friday, March 29, 2013

Follow the Money



The other day Rob Reiner (remember “Meathead” in that old TV series, All in the Family) said that same-sex marriage was a “civil right” and that such decisions “should not be left to the will of the people.”  What?  First of all, same-sex marriage (or its equivalent) might be the proper thing to do, but it clearly is not a “civil right.”  This effectively is a semantic contortion to entice those younger voters, who can’t think their way out of a paper bag, into supporting this proposition.  Saying that suppressing gay marriage is the equivalent of Jim Crow laws makes no sense whatsoever.  To be brutally honest, the legalizing of gay marriage is primarily an economic issue.  Here is a listing of the considerable benefits that accrue to “married” couples… please click on: Nolo Listing to see a fairly complete list.  Looking through these 32 benefits, I count 21 being financial and 11 being what I call social benefits.  These benefits have been gifted to “married” heterosexual couples by our society in return for the implicit promise to procreate and to "civilize" their issue ... an expensive proposition both financially and emotionally.  This social contract is not as frequently entered into by same-sex partners.

We should not kid ourselves into believing that same-sex marriage is an issue of social justice.  The social benefits that are most often noted by proponents of same-sex marriage are hospital visitation rights and making burial arrangements.  These can be granted in a trice.  However the financial benefits are far-reaching and disproportionate … often running into the tens of thousands of dollars per year.  Same-sex married partners could benefit from the same favorable inheritance laws and government benefits (joint federal tax return filings, claiming a spousal exemption from estate taxes or collecting Social Security survivor’s benefits, etc.) as heterosexual partners.  So, while the Obama administration is, with one hand, attempting to raise more revenue by closing tax loopholes … it is, with the other hand, opening up the generous federal coffers to millions of potential Democrat voters.

So, the Supreme Court has (because of its charter) not much delved into the economic implications of same-sex marriage.  But, lurking behind the ersatz curtain of “social justice” is this elephant in the room ... the far more important economic issues.  And, weighing their decisions in these matters, the nine black robes should eschew Meathead's advice and instead listen to the counsel that was proffered by Deep Throat during the Watergate investigation and “follow the money.”  Maybe the proper solution would be to eliminate the financial benefits from heterosexual marriage?  Now, wouldn't that be the Solomonic solution?

Afterward:  For another slant on this issue see: The Diplomad Blog 

After Afterward: Actually the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) case in the Supreme Court does have, as its base, an economic issue ... a $363,000 estate tax on Edie Windsor which she would not have to pay if the government recognized her Canadian marriage to Thea Spyer ... see the details: HERE  (A real heart-string strummer.)