Defense of Marriage

Would some candidate for public office PLEASE summon up the spinal fortitude to firmly tell the pundits, the advocates and the voters:

It is time to stop politicizing marriage!

True enough, that will offend almost everyone who has strong political opinions about what we need to do to expand marriage, defend marriage, etc. etc. etc. But it will go down in history as a profile in courage. What marriage most needs to be defended from is politics.

It is up to what passes for "liberals" these days to firmly inform couples of the same gender, who have made life-long monogamous commitments to each other, that their right to privacy and personal choice does not also entitle them to the applause, approbation, and enthusiastic cheers of their fellow citizens. Feel free to advocate, but if you don't get an immediate round of applause, or a license, well, life isn't always fair.

It is up to those who pass themselves off as "conservatives" to break the news to scripturally committed Christians (Protestant and Roman, Greek and Coptic Orthodox), Jews, Muslims, probably Hindus, possibly Buddhists, who feel in their hearts that a sacred bond is under sacriligious attack, that this is not a particularly high priority for any level of government, that an overwhelming majority of Americans are and remain heterosexual, and the best way to defend marriage is to practice it. Sorry, no more amendments and drum-beating in election platforms.

Everything our little hearts desire is not a constitutional right, and everything sacred does not make good civil law. Every question on the minds of lawyers and columnists does not automatically become a good test of the character of candidates for public office. Common sense will probably lead us to something like James Watkins's Orange Solution, in due time.

There is no constitutional reason why any state, if the voters should elect a legislature willing to do so, should not issue marriage licenses to couples of the same sex, or for that matter to men who are enamoured of their cars. There is also no constitutional reason why a state must do so. If a majority of voters don't care to give official recognition to every private activity their fellow citizens are engaged in, they don't have to. In any case, what the state legislature may choose to do is not, and constitutionally cannot be, binding on any church.

The Supreme Court of Massachusetts, incidentally, was utterly wrong in finding that equal protection of the laws requires the state to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Four justices out of seven reasoned that there is a class of people called heterosexual, and a class of people called homosexual, and these two classes are treated unequally. These classes are legal fictions. Every so-called heterosexual, and every so-called homosexual, is either a man, or a woman. The term "homosexual" would have no meaning if this were not so. Some men have different desires than other men, and some women have different desires than other women. That doesn't mean the state has to license every desire any given individual has. What the state licenses (in this case, the union of a man and a woman) must be available to every man and woman. Equal protection requires no more. I do not want or need a hunting license, but I have the same right to apply for one as any other citizen. I like to cultivate a garden, but I have not demanded a hunting license to establish my civil equality with deer hunters.

If so-called liberals have the courage to say, no expanding the definition of marriage is not a vital political issue of our time, if they are willing to disappoint a constituency that has, after all, come to think they have an entitlement to hear their hopes favorably commented upon at election time, that will be one step forward.

If so-called conservatives have the courage to say, no, passing constitutional amendments and throwing roadblocks in the path of "the homosexual agenda" is not a priority for any branch of government, if they too are willing to disappoint a constitutency that also claims an entitlement to hear their hit list prominently recited at political conventions, that will be another step forward.

Let marriage be marriage. Let moral lessons issue from the pulpit. Some of those pulpits are in churches where every born-again Christian responding to the altar call has a homosexual partner. Other pulpits are in churches which deny that such people could possibly be Christians, let alone born-again. Perhaps there IS some reason God doesn't particularly approve, and again, James Watkins appears to have some valuable insights. This is all none of the government's business. Let those churches that choose to bless same-sex marriages do so, and let those churches that choose to denounce it as blasphemy also do so. God will judge.

Also, let the states sort out state law on the subject. The definition of marriage is no business of the president of the United States, except for his or her own of course, nor of the congress. This is still a federal republic. Those matters reserved to the states should not even be an issue in federal elections. Marriage is a matter reserved to the states. If Massachusetts and Louisiana don't agree, there is no reason they have to.

Solid Reasons Not to Vote for Hillary

After moving into the White House with her husband the president, Hillary Rodham Clinton published a book, called It Takes A Village, and Other Lessons Children Teach Us. The book was used as a foil by Senator Bob Dole at the 1996 Republican national convention. He said, with about as much passion as Dole ever mustered, "It doesn't take a village to raise a child, it takes a family to raise a child." Dole was wrong.

A strong nuclear family is central to raising a child, but not sufficient. It takes a whole network of adults, some relatives, some not. It takes, not only mom and dad, but also the neighbor down the block who gives a young man inspiration, the teacher who encourages a young girl, mentors at church or in sports, as well as aunts and uncles and cousins.

Clinton was also wrong. Her book very explicitly says that in the modern world, the role of village in raising a child is filled by government. Nobody who believes that, much less published it, is qualified to hold the position of President of the United States. In fact, this is precisely the folly of George W. Bush's so-called "No Child Left Behind" bureaucracy.

The village necessary to raise a child is anything but government. It is a network of spontaneous human interactions too complex and too unpredictable to ever be defined by law, administered by a cabinet agency, or reduced to the cold hard numbers of a budget. "Here kid, we're issuing you your mentor for the year." Is it worth offering a subsidy to elderly widowers who fix bicycles for free? Should we require that they get certification from the Department of Social Services? How about a B.A. in child development?

Our government, whether led by Republicans or Democrats, has gotten itself far too deeply into the work of private, voluntary organizations. Unlike commercial corporations, which exist by government license, and often control the economic base of millions of helpless individuals and families, voluntary organizations are an expression of First Amendment rights to speak freely, associate freely, and advocate freely. The village that it takes to raise a child is not even a voluntary organization, it is the freely chosen acts of private individuals.

Remember Hillary Clinton's health care plan? We're living with it now. No, it didn't pass into legislation. Those "Harry and Louise" ads prevented any such thing. But, private HMOs and PPOs proceeded to take over the health care industry, forcing individual private medical practices to knuckle under for fear of losing patients, and gave us exactly the cold, heartless bureaucracy that Harry and Louise warned us against. So government isn't the problem. Private enterprise funding Harry and Louise ads can be just as much the problem as government. But Hillary Clinton probably is not the solution.

Judicial Elections

The best way to win an election against a judge running for re-election is to call them soft on crime.

Crime, of course, is not the real motive for anyone who pumps money into a judicial election. People who are subject to significant hazard of mugging, rape, drive-by shootings, extortion, daily intimidation on the street, do not have the money to buy multiple TV ads in major markets. Besides, the criminal defendants may be their second cousins.

The big money in judicial races comes from wealthy business leagues, who don't want to be accountable to the law. Of course, they can't tell the voters that. If any of us saw a TV commercial announcing "Judge Simon F. McGillicutty requires manufacturers who sell children's toys lined with lead paint to reimburse families for medical costs," naturally the good judge would be re-elected by a landslide.

Instead, the commercials say things like "Simon McGillicutty sentenced a convicted killer to less than half the maximum term allowed by law." Never mind that this was a case of vehicular homicide while intoxicated, with a sentence of twenty years rather than forty. Never mind the two dozen first degree intentional homicides where the sentence was life plus forty years.

It is not the job of any judge to be soft on crime, nor is it their job to be tough on crime, it is their job to examine each individual case according to the law and the facts, delivering justice every time. One day it might be the vicious psychopath who raped and murdered your daughter. The next case might be your saintly grandmother, up for trial as a drug king-pin because a real drug dealer cut a deal for a low sentence and named grandma as his supplier. All it takes is a little perjury, and grandma is sentenced to life in prison.

But we don't personally know the candidates, so we run like sheep, herded by colorful TV commercials.

The cold hard question is not, why are these rich people (with money to burn on judicial campaigns) so mean and nasty? Bullies are bullies. If they had a conscience, and acted on it, we wouldn't need so many laws to protect consumers, employees, children, the folks downstream from the pollution... The real question is, why do judges running for re-election cringe so defensively in the face of these bullies?

Professional campaign managers seem to believe that the only antidote to "soft on crime" bullying is more of the same. For example, somebody working for Justice Louis Butler's re-election campaign for the Wisconsin Supreme Court thought it would be cool to put on TV that Justice Butler voted against criminal defendants 97% of the time. That probably just played into the hands of his challenger. It sends a message that the challenger's campaign is asking the right questions, so obviously the man who asked the question is the one to vote for. It also suggests, ah-hah, Justice Butler has something to hide here. He doth protest too much!

The same thing happened in 2006 in the race for Wisconsin attorney general, between J.B. Van Hollen and Kathleen Falk. One has to sympathize with Van Hollen. He got into the Republican primary expecting to challenge an incumbent attorney general who had taken an arrest for DUI, in a state car, while serving as attorney general. Darn, the Democratic voters dumped her for a fresh clean face, and he had to find some other excuse for himself.

He ran one commercial after another, showing a distorted, black and white photo of Falk, walking in slow motion, while the most obnoxious narration that a male voice is capable of called her unqualified because she had never been a district attorney. Its the phony "tough on crime" issue again. (From the sound of these commercials, there is one guy in a studio somewhere who has made his living for the past thirty years doing nothing but making this kind of commercial. It's always the same nasty voice-over.)

What did Falk's campaign do? They dug up some obscure case of Van Hollen's where a convicted killer had briefly won an appeal over some misconduct by Van Hollen. It was a desperate, weak, knee-jerk move, and it backfired for reasons that should have been obvious. First, it confirmed Van Hollen's phony issue, which became the central point of the campaign. Second, since the felon did eventually get sentenced to life in prison, it was easily kicked back in Falk's face by a follow-up commercial.

All Kathleen Falk needed to do was come on her own commercials, in person, in living color, smiling like she did at the Labor Day parade the previous September, just be her own lively, vivacious self on camera, and talk a little about the experience she DID have as an assistant attorney general, talk about what the attorney general's job IS (they don't go into court to argue in front of juries), and talk about what she did hope to accomplish in the office. She could have won by a landslide.

As Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, even before he really figured out what he was going to do about the Depression, before he was even committed to a minimum wage law or a National Labor Relations Act, when he was still relying on a viciously anti-union retired general to get economic recovery rolling, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

The only thing we have to fear from fear-mongering candidates for judge, or attorney general, is the paralysis of assuming that their way is the winning way, and the only way to beat them is to one-up them with sleaze. When everything on the airways is garbage, the sloppiest garbage eater is going to win the election. How about a bold burst of light in the darkness to get attention?