Unconstitutional? Posh. Good luck with your lawsuit, TEA Party peoples. The architect of the last great conservative victory has spoken, and he’s on Obama’s side.
Listen up, proles. It’s time you let your rulers rule. For your part, just eat your Cheez-its and then, come November, pull the lever for whatever GOP candidate you’re told to pull the lever for.
Ethanol subsidies / global warming regulations / individual mandate in which the government can tell you exactly what to buy? That’s the new conservatism, baby! At least, if we want to win!
Who’s with me?
Charge!
Newt has been off of my list for a while. I’m glad that the Huckster (heh) decided not to run. Here’s hoping that the lesser of the evils might actually be good.
Newt who?
Like I needed another reason to say, “Fuck Newt Gingrich”
Newt backed Scozzafava in NY-23, AND the she lost and backed the Democrat out of spite. Newt deserves to be forgotten not promoted.
So, when Newt pulls 8% in the first couple of primaries, will we start hearing renewed MSM reports of how the Republican Party has been hijacked by “extremists”…?
I did like his food stamp president comment. Which he defended. But, Newt ain’t completely right in the head.
Of course Newt is not “off” my list because he was never “on” it.
Again: Newt is a social conservative masquerading as a conservative. I actually think “social conservative” should be relegated to oxymoron status because it doesn’t mean either. It means someone who feels more comfortable with the conservative mainstream than they do with liberals, yet are comfortable with insisting on the same level of government intervention and intrusiveness that liberals do, only in areas that liberals have assigned to be off-limits.
I think it’s just fine to have values. Admirable. It just doesn’t work, nor is it conservative, to attempt to force those values on other people via legislation.
I consider myself a social conservative Slart, and reject your assertion I’m “comfortable with insisting on the same level of government intervention and intrusiveness that liberals do”.
Because, for example, I oppose same sex marriage, or government funded abortion on demand for 13 year olds without parental knowledge, doesn’t mean I want to strip homosexuals or 13 year olds of their civil liberties.
I’m not convinced he’s any kind of conservative. He started out with ideas that were conservative compared to the congressional GOP leadership in the early 1990s, but when he became Speaker and discovered the joys of being a celebrity, he slipped anchor and has been adrift ever since.
Dear Mr. Gingrich:
Take a big bite.
Respectfully,
SmokeVanThorn
Do you support legislation opposing same sex marriage?
“Do you support legislation opposing same sex marriage?”
I support the Defense of Marriage Act constitutionally enacted by Congress. Do you?
As opposed to what other kinds of enactment?
No. I say let ’em have gay marriage. They just can’t get married in my church.
“As opposed to what other kinds of enactment?”
Californias prop 8. Legally passed by the voters, twice, and blocked by activist judges.
“I say let ‘em have gay marriage.”
There has never been such a thing before, so as the one agitating for it now, it seems a little hypocritical to say social conservatives are the ones trying to impose their values on you…
Or worse, that they really aren’t even conservative.
Oh. You’re not implying that Congress can unconstitutionally enact laws. Good to know.
And everyone knows that things not having been done before is a perfectly legitimate excuse for not doing them now. Right?
Sorry, what? What on Earth gave you the idea that I’m agitating for gay marriage? I think gays can stay unmarried if they want to.
See, I have this issue with the conflict between the government should be small and the government should be the arbiter of LBascom’s personal morality.
Substitute “Newt Gingrich” for LBascom, if that was too personal for you.
Prove it.
Just sayin’.
“See, I have this issue with the conflict between the government should be small and the government should be the arbiter of LBascom’s personal morality.”
It ain’t about my morality, it’s about conservatives. Conservatives want the founders vision of a constitutionally limited(as opposed to “small”) representative government. If you can get a duly elected congress to pass legislation forcing the states to recognized gay marriage, and get a duly elected president to sign it, well, I guess I don’t have much to say. But to say I’m not a conservative because I will vote for a representative that will vote against such legislation is absurd. And kinda insulting.
It’s the means that matter, and it seems it’s always those opposed to social conservatives that stoop to extra constitutional means to impose their morality.
“Prove it.”
Hard to prove a negative. Hows about you show me when same sex marriage has ever been recognized in the USA.
Utah wasn’t even allowed into the union until they outlawed polygamy. But, I guess I’m not a conservative because I thought that a good call.
I have a hard time framing gay marriage as a morality issue. Two guys living together and doing who cares what is the morality involved, not what they want to call their arrangement. That we don’t advocate jail for gays for living together adheres to conservative demands for a ‘smaller government.’ That
That we should redefine a word that has been in use as a specifically defined standard to include what it hasn’t ever, I have a problem with. Marriage should be between man/woman and civil union should be the newly coined term to describe the other whether it be man/man woman/woman or woman/dog. The attempt to redefine is antithical to conservatism, not because of the act of living together, but because of the disregard it does to the standardization of language as fixed and necessary for clarity. ‘Gay’ has been misappropriated by these same folks and woe be to anyone who calls a group of straight marines out for a night on the town as having a ‘gay old time.’
It’s a shame that the push for redefining the process has been given cover under the ruse of morality, when it is not the moral issue that is the problem. If it was, the push back would be for punishment for the lifesyle. Morality has reward/punishment concepts which are not at play in the ‘gay marriage’ issue. If you want to discuss the attempt at forced acceptance for gay lifestyles by including it in the definition of marriage, I’m all ears. Otherwise, leave the ‘morality’ arguments out of the discussion until such point in time that conservatives are pushing for punishment for living la vida gay.
Or I should have said, show me when same sex marriage has ever been recognized
inthroughout the USA.And, ISTM, a quick edit of all laws relating to marriage ‘benefits’ could be done to include the phrasing ‘or civil unions’ and pretty much mitigate the arguments that married folks have benefits that civilly unioned gays don’t enjoy. Problem solved. Except that isn’t good enough for them, so it makes you wonder exactly what they are pining for.
Sometimes ‘separate but equal’ really is balancing the scale. It’s of a piece of the old arguments to do away with gender classifications. Men and women are equal and some stupid push to do away with the gender words as signifiers does not change the reality that men and women can be equal and can also be not ‘the same.’
Would you be a conservative if you voted for a representative that would in turn vote to enact some kind of social medicine scheme?
I’m not seeing where you’re coming from, here, that you’re conservative because you would vote for more government meddling.
Me, I think that the government should either get out of the business of marriage altogether, in terms of laws and such, or bestow the rights that automatically come with marriage on any couple that enters into a marriage-like contract.
Commingling the sacrament and the law was a bad idea to begin with.
“I’m not seeing where you’re coming from, here, that you’re conservative because you would vote for more government meddling.”
No, you aren’t seeing.
A law codifying long-standing practice doesn’t strike me as all that NotConservative™. It may be NotLibertarian™, however. It’s best to avoid mixing those up.
That wasn’t even a tiny bit persuasive.
At one time it was long-standing practice to own other human beings. At other times, it was long-standing practice that wives didn’t share property ownership with their husbands. At still other times, women didn’t get to vote.
So: long-standing practice, I submit, is not an adequate discriminator for whether a principle is aligned with conservative or not.
Shifting gears, wikipedia has social conservatives defined thus:
That sounds like you, LBascom. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, it’s a mostly free country, and you can be that way if you want, right up until someone passes a law against it. The problem with social conservatism is you’re trying to foist preservation of your cultural norms on people who don’t want those cultural norms.
Just preserve them yourself, and pass them on to your children. That’s what I do.
“That wasn’t even a tiny bit persuasive.”
Yeah, I lost all interest in persuading you that I am indeed a conservative.
Carry on…
You’re also mixing up Conservative&trade and AlwaysGood™.
Ok, then. I don’t really care whether you think you are or not, or whether you actually are, until such time as you step into a position where you have a great deal of influence on laws & such. As I said, it’s a free country, or is at least in some relative sense.
I’d appreciate it if you’ll decode that for me, McGehee. I wouldn’t want a witty retort to go unappreciated by one of us.
;), in case the good-naturedness of the above doesn’t communicate.
Conservatism in America today involves the balancing of three fundamental values:
1.) Laws should defend long-standing practice
2.) Where long-standing practice is unconstitutional, the Constitution shall prevail.
3.) Where the Constitution sanctions evil institutions, the Constitution must be amended.
Slavery was a long-standing practice that was constitutional until after the Civil War, but it was an evil institution — thus we got the 13th Amendment.
Traditional marriage is neither unconstitutional nor evil; if there are undesirable consequences to how it is practiced at present, those consequences can be alleviated while still defending the institution itself.
Slart, it strikes me as ironic that you’re defending the effort to re-define marriage by trying to re-define conservatism. There are strong arguments to be made in favor of same-sex marriage, but the unconservatism of opposing it isn’t one of them.
Jinx! You owe me a Coke.
I think it’s quaint that we argue about the government’s role in defining social arrangements, when it’s obvious that the government ain’t gonna be around to define shit within a few years.
Except for that equal-protection thing, totally constitutional.
Look, I don’t give a flying fuck if you invent an entirely new word for it. “Civic unions” is as food as anything else, for the purposes of discussion. But what’s been done is to grant special privileges to opposite-sex partners that haven’t been granted to same-sex partners. I’m all for preserving the religious/cultural institution of marriage and family according to our cultural (mostly) norm. I’m just not all that clear on how the government can get away with granting special access and privilege to one kind of relationship and not others. Seems clearly unconstitutional to me.
Where this argument runs aground, I think, is where we start using the long-standing practice argument to justify how it’s totally constitutional, and vice versa. Because I think that’s what is being done.
Again: I am just fine with taking the government out of the marriage-sanctioning business altogether. I don’t need the federal government’s blessing on my marriage.
“food” should, obviously, have been “good”.
PIMF fail.
Guff. If they have civil unions (which I and most SSM opponents support) there’s only one “privilege” that’s denied.
I think it would do everyone a world of good if the legal document from the courthouse used terminology different than that used at the church. I understand that having the County issue “Marriage Licenses” was a convenient shortcut in a simpler age, but those days are gone. States cannot force religious people to recognize gay marriage as a ‘real’ marriage, nor can they deny gays the right to the legal benefits of what we’ve called marriage up ’til now. Best just to divorce the two meanings.
Call the legal arrangement a civic union, a life partnership, a beneficial symbiosis, or a mutual shackling — just stay away from anything to do with religious sacraments. Sure, it’s the lexical equivalent of Mommy taking away a toy that the kids won’t quit fighting over, but I think it’s fairly well established that that’s pretty much the situation we’re in.
Which one is denied?
I’d be curious to hear from LBascom (and also Newt) how he feels about civil unions. Also, if civil unions are teh cool, how come they’re not breaking out all over?
Newt seems uncharacteristically vague on this subject, when questioned.
ISWYDT.
And I’m just cool with that. But I think there are some religious sects that do grant gay marriage some standing (not mine). I don’t think you can keep a church from executing a civil union, once they’re legalized. Neither do I think you can force a church to perform a civil union if it runs counter to its beliefs. My church flat out does not marry anyone unless one or both of the participants belongs to the synod, so we’re on pretty solid ground on this issue.
“I’m just not all that clear on how the government can get away with granting special access and privilege to one kind of relationship and not others. “
The one kind of relationship given privilege is the one that best produces future generations of socially successful citizens. Note I said “best produces”. Children raised in a stable marriage are greatly advantaged over those that aren’t. It may be unfair, but it just is. And so I do believe the government has a role in protecting that important institution.
“I’d be curious to hear from LBascom (and also Newt) how he feels about civil unions”
I’m cool with civil unions. Free citizens can enter into whatever contract they wish. Heterosexual room mates can have a civil union if they want, I don’t care. But it ain’t a marriage.
“Also, if civil unions are teh cool, how come they’re not breaking out all over?”
I don’t know, maybe because the gay movement is not really interested in civil unions or being married, but about their agenda of forcing acceptance of their lifestyle?
I missed this:
“Conservatism in America today involves the balancing of three fundamental values:”
As I define myself, as a modern American conservative, it involves fidelity to our founding documents and principles. Inalienable rights, individual liberty, and for the government to establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, according to the Constitution.
I consider myself a social conservative because I oppose efforts to affect social change through extra constitutional means.
That’s cool. But where does it say in the Constitution that we can make different rules for different people? Oh, I know: nowhere. You’re saying we can make exceptions, if we have reasons that sound good. See also: Kelo.
Also: producing future generations of socially successful citizens is neither in the hard pile, nor would it be in any way affected by gay marriage, civil unions, or the like. We don’t need to subsidize it.
Poh-tay-toh, poh-tah-toh.
Yes, I’m sure the gay mafia is behind this with their hidden agenda. This is crazy talk, dude. For the most part, gays just want to be left alone to live their lives just like the rest of us. If anyone’s forcing lifestyle rules, it’s social conservatives.
Just consider that for a second, imagining you’re someone else.
I consider myself an asocial conservative because I oppose efforts to impose a uniform morality on a populace with widely varying mores.
This is crazy talk, dude.
Slart, I’ve been mostly sympathetic to your side of the argument ’til now, but I’ll part ways with you on this one. I agree with you that for the most part, gays just want to live their lives in peace; I think that holds true for just about any social subgroup one chooses to name. But I also think it’s true that there are noisy activists in the various subcultures with agendas to push, and in the last decade or so, the political gays have gone out of their way to force acceptance of gay marriage not just as a legal arrangement, but as a fully realized marriage on the same plane as traditional marriage.
I don’t know how or exactly when it happened, but at some point, my gay friends went from professing the stupidity and backwardness of those who practiced traditional marriage, to professing the stupidity and backwardness of those who would deny them such. Maybe it’s just my cohort growing up and deciding it would be nice to settle down, but I get the impression that it’s something more than that. I can’t help suspecting that the agenda-setters (what’s the queer equivalent of “race hustler”?) are playing a deft game of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
It would hardly be the first time that a noisy socio-political group decided to rub the Christianists’ noses in it.
Isn’t forcing gay marriage on an unwilling public (It was defeated twice by constitutional means in freaking California!) imposing your morality on the populace?
And there are not different rules for different people. A gay man can marry a gay woman if they want to be married.
As Ric Locke said(paraphrasing), the issue is like vegans demanding congress deem cows a vegetable so they can eat a hamburger.
I don’t think you can keep a church from executing a civil union, once they’re legalized.
But the whole point of divorcing (glad you noticed) the legal arrangement from the sacrament is to make such an occurrence nonsensical. The civil union would be strictly a courthouse affair; a church wouldn’t want to execute a civil union any more than it would want to issue a dog license or a building permit.
Separate the sacrament and the legal contract entirely. Gays can call themselves married, and traditionalists can say “no you’re not,” and the arguments will continue, but they’ll have no ramifications in law. Given time, it’ll be as contentious as my conspicuous cheesesteak lunches on Fridays in Lent.
I have no doubt that’s true. I equally have no doubt that there are gays who want marriage because they want their relationships de-illegitimatized, if I can slapdash a word together like that. To what extent is the drive for legalized gay marriage driven by the former of these, versus the latter? Dunno. Don’t care. The end of slavery undoubtedly also had some with covert agendas pushing for it; that didn’t make it an unworthy goal, or one to be avoided.
Sure. But you’re equally controlled by someone if you blindly resist what they’re doing, as you are if you’re blindly going along. Is my take on it, anyway. If it’s not really what they want, then it’ll quickly become tiresome, and no one will do it anymore (because, can you imagine marrying some woman you didn’t want to be married to, just to spite a whole bunch of complete strangers? I can’t) and we’ll be back to status quo.
Likewise, one could have rules permitting white couples marrying and black couples marrying, but not black and white mixed couples. What could possibly be wrong with that? I’m sure that there are groups of people who think that’s perfectly ok.
The other, less nice side of that is: imagine you’re a gay man, in a committed relationship with another man, and someone tells you that. Does it sound peachy? Does it sound like your happily ever after? Does it sound like you’re getting equal treatment under the law?
Really, that kind of argument crumbles when you get that who you’re talking about are other people, who mostly have the same kind of wishes and desires as you do.
I mostly agree with this, but IIRC there’s both sacrament AND legal-contract aspects to marriage that are currently served by one service and one process, in church weddings. So: if you create something called a “civil union”, eventually it will become the case that ministers or pastors in churches that support gay marriage will obtain credentials to execute them, and will do so in a religious ceremony.
My first marriage was by a JOP, so no sacrament. My mother had the reverse: she found a minister willing to marry her in a religious ceremony without filing the paperwork. So, she got the sacrament, but without the tax and insurance ramifications.
I personally don’t care if gays get married and call it “marriage”. That they call it that doesn’t mean it’s what I have. It doesn’t do anything to diminish what I have, any more than a JOP wedding diminishes what I have.
On topic[s]
Takes one to know one.
“I equally have no doubt that there are gays who want marriage because they want their relationships de-illegitimatized, “
You said that was crazy talk.
And dude, your arguments comparing slavery to what makes a legitimate marriage is a serious over reach.
Like any comparison of things, there can be in-kind comparisons as well as in-scope. It wasn’t my intention to liken you to a slaver for political inclinations. If you took it that way, know that it wasn’t intended that way.