The dangers of temporizing with passion

Temporize (verb): To act evasively in order to gain time, avoid argument, or postpone a decision. Washington Post, November 14: "The backlash against those who supported a ban on same-sex marriage continues to roil California and nearby states. Protests and vandalism of churches, boycotts of businesses and possibly related mailings of envelopes filled with white powder have followed the passage of Proposition 8, the ballot initiative to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriages."

Surely readers are familiar with many of the details of the lengthy Post article. The "gay" backlash against the popular will shows no signs of abating. For no matter how much we compromise with the homosexual lobby, it will not be satisfied with anything less than our full moral blessing.

We are in this mess today because we were willing to temporize with a passion that admits of no moderation. This error has its roots in the sexual revolution that hit with full force in the 1960s. The central idea was, "if it feels good, do it." The plain truth is that all manner of things which don’t feel good or are downright repulsive to most people, feel good to others.

Given society’s then generally heterosexual point of view, what felt good at first was the pleasure of sexual intercourse with members of the opposite sex. However, those who accept the pleasure principle have no real quarrel with those who derive pleasure from members of the same sex. "Hey, man, if that’s your thing, go ahead."

The first victim of the sexual revolution, of course, was marriages, strained by men and women trying to "find themselves," or to regain the pleasure that somehow had gone out of their marriages. Accompanying but also enabling the sexual revolution was the invention of the birth control pill, which made it possible to avoid pregnancy, the primary argument against sex outside of marriage.

Just as the sexual revolution unhinged relations between the sexes, so did it change the practice of homosexuality. Previously the province of "intellectuals" in rebellion against the allegedly confining mores of bourgeois society, homosexuality became more popular and, hence, more vulgar. The broader public’s impression of that practice soon became dominated by news of bathhouse orgies and the spread of the HIV-AIDS virus.

Along the way, the personal became the political. If these liberated urges were to be freed from social or political limitations, their practitioners needed to organize and to importune friendly politicians to make speeches and pass laws on their behalf.

Governor Jerry Moonbeam Brown of California (1975-83) persuaded the legislature to remove laws against the practice of sodomy, one of those "blue laws" which were honored more in the breach than in the observance anyway.

When the AIDS crisis developed in the early 1980s, elite opinion was already poised to ignore the overwhelming evidence linking homosexuals’ reckless behavior to the disease and to maintain the fiction that it was as likely to spread by heterosexual contact as it was by homosexual means.

Having for all practical purposes put homosexuality on the same moral footing as love between the sexes, it was but a small step to the establishment of civil unions. Knowing that the vast majority of Americans understood marriage to be the union of a man and a woman, the advocates of "domestic partnerships" paused at a halfway house that was marriage in all but name.

I am convinced that civil unions were designed to prepare the public mind for what it could not accept back in 2000, when Californians voted overwhelmingly to preserve marriage, just as all of mankind had understood it for millennia. But then along came, first, the Massachusetts, then the California and Connecticut supreme courts, to decree that the "right" of same-sex marriage was entitled to the equal protection of the laws. Anything less would be unfair to this oppressed minority.

In short, the path to the present state in which angry mobs (and zealous lawyers) demand what no society in its right mind has any reason to grant, began with the intellectual and moral errors that characterized the sexual revolution. Nothing less than revisiting and rethinking those errors will suffice to avoid a chaotic future for us and our children.

He who says A must say B. If we have a right to do "whatever turns us on," there is no objection to same-sex marriage. If, on the other hand, same-sex marriage is wrong, its premise must be also.

Obama vs. the Constitution

A recently revealed 2001 Chicago radio interview is very telling as to the intent and political philosophy of Barack Obama. The dissimulation of some in the Main Stream Media would have Americans focus on the semantics of “redistributive change” in this interview. They would also have us think that Obama’s detractors have taken his words out of context.

So take Obama’s words in full context. It is clear that Obama does not think much of the US Constitution.

Although the Warren Court did not, Obama certainly would like to “break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution.” He just thinks there are better ways to do it than through the courts. Even so, Obama thinks “Any three of us sitting here could come up with a rational for bringing about economic change through the courts.” But he admits that to do so would be problematic.

To “order changes that cost money” runs into “separation of powers issues” between the Judicial and Legislative Branches. That’s the least of the constitutional impediments for Obama.

Rather than respect America’s deliberate constitutional barriers to Socialism, Obama doesn’t have any problem with using “political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.” Communist thugs everywhere would be proud. What Obama proposes would shred the Constitution and is clearly in violation of his US Senate Oath, as it surely is with regards to the Presidential Oath of Office. It is also an act of tyranny and violence.

Cutting through Obama’s rhetoric, he feels that with sufficient socialist legislators and executives (“politic”) who don’t mind violating their oath of office (“break free … the Constitution”) and with an adequate Marxist mob (“community organizing and activities on the ground”) you can unconstitutionally “bring about redistributive change.”

America’s Constitution was deliberately designed to LIMIT what the Federal government can “do to” the American people. It is an anti-Socialism and anti-Marxism restriction upon the Federal government. But it isn’t worth the paper it is written on if dishonest people occupy all three branches of government.

The Declaration of Independence, which founded the United States of America, requires such a Constitution, as well as a republican form of government (not a democracy) whose sole purpose is to secure (not give or take) individual rights. Government’s purpose is to protect the smallest minority there is, the individual, from government tyranny.

In America, these individual rights are inalienably bestowed by the Creator, not government. This is not an opinion. The Organic Legal Documents of America, enumerated in US Code, clearly state this.

That the Left, in both the Democratic and Republican parties, through ignorance or willful disdain, ignores these facts should alarm all Americans. To be sure, both Republicans and Democrats have violated their Oath of Office in not insignificant ways these last 75 years, as is evidenced by the unconstitutional growth of the Administrative State.

In the context of Obama, though, this isn’t politics as usual; but rather a quantum leap in the subversion of the Constitution.

It is understandable that Obama/Biden take exception to their Marxist tag because of the growing awareness it reflects:

• Obama’s childhood mentor was Frank Marshall Davis, Communist enemy of America;

• Obama wrote in his memoir of his college days that "I chose my friends carefully ... The Marxist professors;”

• Obama’s ally Ayers proclaimed in 2002 "I am a Marxist;"

• Illinois State Senator Alice Palmer, who hand-picked Obama as her successor, was an official of one of the KGB-funded Communist Party USA’s front groups, the U.S. Peace Council. I t is no coincidence that many key years of Obama’s life, with the complicity of the MSM, have been kept undisclosed; that the Marxists whom Obama has spent a lifetime allying himself with have been kept out of the spotlight. Together they seek to “break” the Constitution in a spectacular way.

Like Salvador Allende, Hugo Chavez and many other Marxists, the chosen strategy of Obama and his cohorts is to use a presidential electoral run to subvert a nation. Perpetrators of such subversion do not want to call attention to their intentions.

The fact that in contemporary presidential elections the Communist Party USA does not field a candidate but backs the Democratic Party candidate should speak volumes as to the convergence of the principles of these two parties. It also begs the question as to what happened to the Democratic Party.

It is to the shame of the MSM that the American public has such a meager record on Obama and his cohorts with which to assess his candidacy. That shame is compounded by the fact that it took a children’s book illustrator to dig up this 2001 interview.

Race & the Constitution: Remedial 101

While the mortgage mess gets sorted out, let's circle back to an important moment the other day when Whoopi Goldberg the celebrity and John McCain the presidential candidate both displayed abysmal ignorance of how durably the U.S. Constitution has fulfilled its declared purpose "to establish justice" for over 220 years now. Appearing on ABC's "The View," McCain said he'd appoint judges "who interpret the Constitution of the United States the way our Founding Fathers envisioned," to which panelist Goldberg flippantly retorted: “Should I be worried about being a slave, about being returned to slavery? Because certain things happened in the Constitution that you had to change.”

McCain then conceded, heaven help him: “I understand that point. That’s an excellent point.” The video is here; notice from the applause that many in the audience seemed to think it an excellent point as well.

Ross Kaminsky took Mac to the woodshed, but good, for his constitutional and historical illiteracy on PoliticsWest.com a couple of days later. Excellent post. What Ross didn't do, and what I haven't read anywhere, is suggest an actual answer, suitable for the moment on live TV, that the GOP candidate should have given. As a onetime speechwriter, let me give it a try.

Thanks for asking that. I know it's a question in many people's minds, as a result of confusion spread by historians, educators, and politicians who don't know better. But here are the facts.

It is only because of the Constitution and judges who were faithful to it that black Americans are free and equal citizens today

The Constitution enabled the northern states to battle the southern states, first politically and then militarily, at the cost of half a million white people's lives, until slavery was ended and blacks were emancipated. After that victory, the Constitution was strengthened from a document that disapproved slavery into one that forever disallows slavery.

The Constitution is also what Dr. King, Justice Marshall, and Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson used to finally end segregation and guarantee civil rights for all.

Going forward, the Constitution and courts faithful to it are the best protection our country has for securing majority rule and minority rights in a free society. You and I should be grateful for that, and vigilant about it.

The last thing we want in America today is public officials who ignore the Constitution like the judges who denied black citizenship with the Dred Scott decision, the slave state governments who seceded and went to war, or the southern governors who resisted school desegregation.

That's what I want to prevent by appointing judges who will keep their oath to the Constitution without fail.

And by the way, Whoopi, those Dred Scott judges and secessionist states and Jim Crow governors were all Democrats, all of them. The Democratic Party has had a really shameful record on racial equality until very recently.

It was my party, the Republicans, who freed the slaves, led the way on school desegregation, and passed the first civil rights bill of modern times. Our country's historic ideal of liberty and justice for all, the envy of the world for over 200 years, is safest in Republican hands for this new century.

The above argument is less developed and documented than Ross's fine piece on Sept. 15, but it's plausible, I think, as something a real politician with his civic compass in working order could have said under those real circumstances in which McCain found himself on Sept. 12. Too bad he didn't; this now becomes one more reinforcement of the Big Lie that our country was founded on hypocrisy, amorality, and racism.

The best refutation for that lie that I know of is a pair of books in which massive, conclusive evidence is presented for the case which I've made here and which Ross made in his earlier post. Those books, both by colleagues of mine at the Claremont Institute, are Vindicating the Founders by Thomas G. West and Vindicating Lincoln by Thomas Krannawitter. Buy them, read them. Maybe buy extras to send Mr. McCain. They'd be wasted, I'm afraid, if sent to Ms. Goldberg.

Flat no on Ref O

Without question Colorado's constitution has suffered from various inconsistent amendments. The primary argument in favor of the so-called SAFE Amendment is that we need some solution to thetraffic jam of Amendment 23, TABOR, and the Gallagher Amendment. That's Exhibit A, although it's hard to actually find an Exhibit B.

Now, the Democrats, with considerable Republican support in the state Senate (8 of 15 Republicans supported the bill), are trying to use this vague dissatisfaction to pass Referendum O, a constitutional amendment making it harder to, well, pass constitutional amendments.

Referendum O would:

1) Increase the signature requirement by 7,000. Currently, constitutional amendments require 5% of the last vote for Secretary of State. Referendum O would require 6% of the last vote for Governor.

2) Push the deadline back to April from August. Petitions campaigns would have to start before the legislature met, and wrap up before adjournment. For all practical purposes, anything passed by the legislature wouldn't be subject to an Amendment over-turn for over a year. Any effort to pass anything could be derailed by a plea to wait and led the legislature deal with it. And if you believe that...

3) Require that at least 8% of signatures come from each Congressional district. Initially, it would have required 8%.

Here's where we need to do some math. With roughly 93,500 signatures needed, that means that about 7,500 valid signatures would be required from each Congressional district. Realistically, we'd need 15,000 since up to half may get invalidated by the Secretary of State. This won't affect signature gathering in Denver, Colorado Springs, or Boulder (CD-1, CD-5, or CD-2), and probably wouldn't affect CD-6 very much, as it's becoming urbanized, or at least, suburbanized. But take a look at the population distribution in CD-3 and CD-4.

CD-3 has liberal Pueblo, and more-liberal-than-conservative Grand Junction. The population - especially the more Republican population - is much lower density, much more spread out. And it's not even like Grand Junction is that large. According to the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder, at the last municipal elections, there were roughly 21,000 registered voters in Grand Junction.

So this, just like Amendment 27 -- the notorious campaign finance measure voted into the state constitution in 2002, more draconian than McCain-Feingold -- places a premium on organization and money to pay for signature-gatherers, especially for more conservative amendments. Especially as proponents will no longer be able to rely on popular anger over legislative action.

While the Democrats were in a perpetual minority, they made spectacularly effective use of the initiative amendment process, passing Amendment 23, which has helped hamstring the budget, and Amendment 27, which has placed a premium on big money and union organization in campaigns. Now that they are in the majority, the modern-day "progressives" find no end of fault with the only meaningful check the citizens have on a runaway legislature backed by a governor and a compliant State Supreme Court.

This is what the Democratic party is exceptionally good at: using power to perpetuate power.

When Coloradoans passed Amendment 27, they probably didn't realize that in their desperation for "reform," they were actually voting for a Trojan Horse.

This time, there are no excuses.

SF Mayor flunks civics

"They don’t like our Constitution," asserted Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco. That incredible remark, uttered on television the other day by the chief executive of "Baghdad by the Bay," referred to the supporters of real marriage, who qualified a constitutional amendment for this November’s general election ballot to reaffirm what the voters decided with Proposition 22 in 2000. Suddenly, the California Constitution that never—repeat, never—protected any "right" by persons of the same sex to marry each other becomes "our Constitution." How did this happen and what does it mean? There are no more intense and full-fledged opponents of constitutional government than liberal politicians like Gavin Newsom. The purpose of a written constitution is to check the exercise of political power by the government and the abuse of liberty by the citizens. Just as every legislator, executive and judge is obliged to uphold our Constitution and laws, so too is every citizen. Constitutional government is all about restraining passions.

But there is no evidence that Mayor Newsom believes this. The same man who solemnly intones that "our Constitution" is not liked by those who disagree with him about marriage, has publicly stated that he will not comply with any federal legislation that criminalizes efforts to help illegal immigrants.

Such defiance is not out of character for Newsom, who began the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage by defying openly state laws which restricted marriage to one man and one woman. Remember all those "gay marriages" at San Francisco City Hall that had to be nullified because they were illegal? "Our Constitution" then had not the slightest connection with same-sex marriage, but somehow the Mayor knew all along that it did.

The question for us is whether Newsom "knew"—in a theoretical or a practical sense—that the ultimate outcome of his then lawless actions would be a State Supreme Court decision giving a fantastical interpretation of the Constitution’s equal protection clause. That is, was he merely another "idealist" who believed so strongly in his judgment that he was willing to defy the law? Or did he have inside knowledge of the Court’s deliberations and intended decision?

One difficulty with the first possibility is that Newsom is a government official, just like those southern politicians who appealed to "states’ rights" for 60 years before the Civil War to defend slavery, or to impose racial segregation for a century afterwards. The claim of civil disobedience seems a sham when one government official is simply defying another set of government officials.

The merits of civil disobedience aside, the only proper name for Mayor Newsom’s planned defiance of federal laws on illegal immigration, and his already demonstrated disregard for state laws on marriage, is lawlessness. For the same man piously to invoke "our Constitution" now that the state’s highest court has reached the same pernicious decision that he has, is enough to engender outrage in any law-abiding citizen.

Newsom’s public embrace of "our Constitution" following a history of lawless behavior should also make us very suspicious. What does "our Constitution" really mean? The old one that upholds the rights of all citizens to do what the law permits or does not forbid? Or is it the new one that invents rights whenever a majority of the Supreme Court reaches that conclusion? What did Newsom know and when did he know it? We are unlikely ever to know.

Our republican government is as wary of judicial tyranny as it is of legislative or judicial tyranny. Abraham Lincoln was severely critical of a United States Supreme Court decision which held that Congress had no power to restrict slavery in federal territories and that black persons had no rights which white persons were bound to respect. While not challenging the ruling between the parties in Dred Scott v. Sanford, (1857) Lincoln refused to accept the Court’s ruling as the last word on the subject. As he said in his First Inaugural Address (1861):

"[I]f the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal."

The citizens of this state who seek to overturn the decision of our highest court to defy thousands of years of sound practice, based on "the laws of nature and of nature’s God," are acting in the spirit and following the good example of our nation’s sixteenth president. They understand, as he did, that the people—not the mayors, not the judges, not even the legislators—are the sovereign rulers.

Unlike Mayor Newsom or the California Supreme Court, these citizens understand that the Constitution is based on what Thomas Jefferson correctly referred to as the "moral law." The whims of mayors and judges cannot be permitted to corrupt marriages and families.