gay marriage debate

‘Gay marriage’ is a major political and social issue today, and like possibly all political and social issues, how the issue is framed can or will determine the outcome of the debate.  The media, politicians, and activists emphasize that this is an issue of equality, fairness, and human rights. 

But this is not about equality, fairness, human rights, or gay rights.  It is about the rights of children, the right of a child to have and be raised by its biological father and mother.  Children often grow up today in single parent homes or with adoptive parents, but nobody has been calling that equal to the biological two parent family.

But with ‘gay marriage,’ society will remove a biological parent from a child’s life and call this new family equal or just as good as the two biological parent family.  What gives society or any person the right to say for an unborn child that this child does not need or have a right to one of its natural parents?  And we are supposed to call this good, right, just, equal, and fair? I’m sorry, but it’s not.

With ‘gay marriage’ we are saying as a society that parents don’t really matter.  We can remove one from a child’s life, and we are supposed to say that the child’s life is as good or better than if it had both of its natural parents.  Nobody has that right.

When a President Lies

We hear now that the President lied about his views on ‘gay marriage’ during his Presidential campaign.  It was feared that he could not have won if he didn’t.

We found out earlier  after the Affordable Care Act was passed, that he lied about that as well in his efforts to get it passed. In fact, he lied about it over and over again. 

And yet the public and the press seem to take this with yawning indifference, attributing this to politicians being politicians, promising us the moon to win our votes, but nobody really expecting them to deliver on those promises.

Yet just this week Brian Williams, a TV news personality was suspended for six months without pay for lying, I mean misreporting, about a personal event that happened over ten years ago.   I would think we would hold the leader of the free world to a higher standard, or at least the same standard as any other person whose position is based on trust.

I want to know what else he might be lying about.  Might some lies have graver consequences than these already past? 

What if he is lying about his determination that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon?  After all, all nations are equal, right; all nations are exceptional.  Why should only non-Muslim nations have the bomb?  Isn’t it only fair that at least one Muslim nation has it?  Better that all nations be more equal in fact than that some nations have power to bully over others.

What if he is lying about his pledge to degrade and destroy ISIS?   What if his talk is just bluster to appease the angry American masses?  We have had over 2,000 airstrikes against ISIS but less than 10,000 of them have been killed.  These are not numbers that we expect from airstrikes.  News reports say that 20,000 foreign fighters have joined ISIS in recent months.  So after all our bombing ISIS now has more soldiers than before we started bombing them.  

What if all of his speeches are half-truths, exaggerations, misrepresentations, overselling, political hyperbole, things we used to just call lying, just so he can sell us an America which is a shadow of our past; where the new normal is average, where in the past we used to lead the world in everything.   Now we just blend in so as not to look better than anyone else.

We are told that all politicians lie.  Get used to it.  I say, lie to me all you want. But as soon as I find out you are lying to me, I will never trust you again. President Obama has lied to us over and over again.  I can never trust him again.  I would impeach him.  I can’t have a President that I can’t trust.  I wish everybody else would see things the same way.

short thoughts on various topics

The Herald printed a long rambling letter (January 31) touching on all kinds of things, but things that need to be answered.

Universal health care is a tradeoff between prosperity and security.  We are already so far in debt, this would push us over the cliff.

These are responses to a long rambling letter to the Daily Herald (January 31) that the paper must have liked, because they printed it.  Each thought corresponds to a point made in that letter.  

The Affordable Care Act will add another trillion dollars to our federal debt in a few years.  People aren’t paying enough attention to our debt, but they should.

Before, those with health insurance were paying for the uninsured through higher premiums and medical costs.  Now they are paying for the newly insured by paying toward their insurance premiums. 

More people are in poverty because the government encourages dependence on it and makes it harder for companies to do business.  They also sent millions of good jobs overseas under the name of Fair Trade.

The Bush recession was caused by Democrats who kept pushing banks to give mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them.

The layoffs were caused by government panic, declaring a crisis that made people react the way they do in a crisis. 

The national debt is not on a downward trend.  We would have had to have a budget surplus to do that.  The debt continues to grow with no end in sight.  The downward trend refers to the deficit which is only down because of the massive deficits we ran for Obamas’s first 5 years in office.

Unemployment is down primarily because the government doesn’t count people who have stopped looking for work.  And that number is at an all-time high.

The Democrats took the House and the Senate in 2007.  They deserve more credit for our problems than Bush.  Bush is not the brightest bulb in the room, but Democrats don’t know how to handle money.

The Founders considered being an “armed” nation an advantage over being unarmed.  Guns are a protection against government.  Read history. 

An assault rifle is simply a semi-automatic rifle.  Ask the shop owners from the Los Angeles riots if they really needed one.

There are many examples of self-defense appearing all the time where a semi—automatic weapon was a real help.  You won’t see too many of these on the network news.

Most or all mass gun shooting occur in gun free zones.  The Colorado shooter went to the one theater that was gun free rather than the other five theaters showing the same movie.

Tearing out pages in biology books can only refer to objections against evolution being taught as fact.  Anyone who still believes it is hasn’t been keeping up with the science, only the parts that supported his preferred beliefs.

Religion is a person’s worldview that includes a belief in God.  To exclude God from school or government is practical atheism.  If there is a God, it is utter foolishness to leave Him out of school or government.

The value of religion is not diminished by the fact that there are so many.  I can’t think of anything more important than figuring out which one is right.  If none, I need to know that.  If one is true, you better find out which one it is.  And you don’t think people in school should ask those questions?  When will they ever have the time and the setting for discussing and debating these issues?

Don’t’ give up on religion because you think it’s too hard to figure out.  Anything worthwhile takes effort.  The truth about God may take a lot of effort.  You don’t think that’s important?

more on the question of whether the United States is or was a Christian nation

Those who want to prove that the United States is not and was not intended to be a Christian nation often cite The Treaty of Tripoli.  This was a treaty with the Muslim nations bordering the western Mediterranean Sea in the late 1700s.  Tripoli later declared war on the United States shortly after this treaty was ratified.

The one sentence in this treaty that is offered as proof of this reads: “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion, . . . it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

Muslim nations along the Mediterranean were seizing merchant ships for ransom.  They were particularly focused on the Christian nations as retribution for past grievances going back even hundreds of years.  This had been going on for a while, and at that time our leaders had resigned themselves to simply paying the ransom, hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Under Jefferson’s Presidency, we finally sent our navy there and ended this nonsense.

In making this treaty, our government wanted to assure these countries that we did not and would not in the future use religion as a pretext for hostilities between the countries.  When you consider the parties to this treaty, you can understand better the wording of this treaty. 

The Christian religion or the Bible do not teach or describe a representative government.  The only government in the Bible with instructions as to how it should work was a theocracy, where God directly ruled the nation.  Some instructions were also given for the time when the people would choose to have a king over them.  But there is nothing in the Bible or any Church teaching that showed what a Republic should look like or how it would work, unlike the Muslim nations where the Koran was the guide for their government. 

However, the United States government, while not based on the Christian religion is certainly dependent on it.  How?  A limited government, as the Federalist Papers described and explained our government, requires a citizenry self-motivated for good.  As John Adams put it:  “. . . we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

When people vote for their leaders, they soon learn that they can vote themselves money and benefits. When given the choice, people often find they would rather have the government take care of them than taking care of themselves.

Political leaders are tempted to use their power for personal gain, especially getting and staying in office by promising and providing goodies for people.

A limited government needs a moral, independent, and caring citizenry. 

A moral people doesn’t need or want an ever expanding government to keep making more rules, regulations, and laws that require more police and courts and prisons to keep everybody in line, safe, and compliant.

An independent people doesn’t need or want government assistance, financial or otherwise, people who believe in hard work and self-reliance.

And a caring people willingly and eagerly seeks to provide for the needs of others, eliminating the need for government programs, and since these are all at the grass roots level, eliminating waste and fraud.  Christians are taught to love their neighbors and not merely to tolerate (put up with, ignore) them.  There used to be hundreds of Christian societies devoted to every kind of social problem in the land, all run without public money.

People who try so hard to defend and promote a secular country want to remove the very things that made our country great in the first place.  The only alternative is a government that keeps taking more and more money from those who have it to support more and more people who have become dependent on it.  And as Margaret Thatcher said: it doesn’t work, because “you always run out of other people’s money.”