Tit for Tat on Preferered Legislation

If liberals can refuse to defend laws that they don’t like, then conservatives can refuse to fund those that they deem undesirable. 

As most who follow politics well know, on the issue of marriage, twice recently, liberals refused to honor the law when it comes to marriage. Of course, as we also know, such efforts were successful.

Particularly troubling was the case involving California’s Proposition 8. Because the state of California refused to defend Prop 8 in court, it was left up to plaintiffs without legal “standing” to do so. Because of this lack of “standing” (the plaintiffs didn't have the right to be a party to the case because they hadn't suffered any specific harm) in federal court, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the case and directed the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to vacate their decision in the matter.

This in effect upheld the district courts decision to strike down Prop 8. Since the state of California still refuses to defend what was passed by their citizens, same-sex marriages were allowed to resume in California. In other words, California officials scanned the political landscape and deemed it now safe to simply ignore the law.

Other states are taking notice. Earlier this month, the Attorney General of the state of Pennsylvania, Kathleen Kane, announced that her office would not defend her state’s ban (since 1996) on recognizing same-sex marriages.

Liberals across the country seem to be perfectly content with this approach. However, they will howl like rabid dogs whenever it is proposed that the House GOP may consider a similar approach when it comes to funding Obamacare. As some conservative pundits have recently noted, most notably Rush Limbaugh, there are republicans that are also balking at the proposition of not funding Obamacare.

As Heritage Action for America has noted, “The most viable approach to stop the implementation of Obamacare is a complete and total defunding of the law by Congress. Fortunately, Rep. Tom Graves (R-GA) [my representative until the recent redistricting] and Sen. Cruz have introduced the Defund Obamacare Act of 2013.”

As Heritage has also noted, once Obamacare is fully implemented, the politics of this debate will change. Open enrollment begins October 1, 2013 with the massive subsidies beginning on January 1, 2014. As Heritage also notes, without the legislation mentioned above, the next best opportunity to defund Obamacare comes this September when Congress must pass the Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund the federal government.

Senator Cruz and other senators, along with a growing number of Representatives, have pledged not to vote for a CR that funds any part of Obamacare. This is a political fight that conservatives can win. Obamacare is more unpopular than same-sex marriage is popular. Some members of the GOP need to be reminded that defeating Obamacare was the biggest reason most of them were elected to Congress.

(See this column on American Thinker.)

Copyright 2013, Trevor Grant Thomas

At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason

Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World

tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com

Too Many Trayvons

One of the most dangerous things to be in America today is a young black male. Contrary to what the race pimps and publicity prostitutes (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, et al) would have you to believe, this has very little (if anything at all) to do with racism. Permit me an informative illustration.

As I similarly noted years ago, between the years 1882 and 1968 the Tuskegee Institute reports that 3,446 blacks were lynched in the United States. According to FBI data, in 2010 alone there were 6,470 blacks murdered in the U.S. According to the same data, when the race of the homicidal offender is known, over 90% of the time, blacks are victims of blacks.

The vast majority of these victims are young black males. Shockingly, the CDC reveals that, for U.S. black males ages 15 to 34 the leading cause of death is homicide. What’s more, for American black males who die between the ages of 15 and 19, over half of such deaths are the result of homicide. Only 11% of whites in the same age group die due to homicide.

In April of 2012, writing about “black-on-black violence,” liberal black columnist DeWayne Wickham rightly asked, “Where’s the outrage?” He noted that, “More blacks were murdered in the USA in 2009 alone than all the U.S. troops killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to date.”

Wickham concludes, “But this painful truth hasn't produced the kind of sustained national outrage that [Trayvon] Martin's death at the hands of a white Hispanic [oh well, as I said, Wickham is a liberal] has generated. Why such a parsing of contempt? Maybe the people who've taken to the streets to protest Martin's killing don't care as much about the loss of other black lives because those killings don't register on the racial conflict meter.” Exactly.

Too many in America are (literally) invested in keeping the American “racial conflict meter” in perpetual distressed mode. Since Trayvon Martin’s tragic death, nearly 500 blacks have been murdered in Chicago alone. Have you heard the calls for action or justice? Where is the media?

The sad truth is, when one examines the real causes for the dreadful plight of so many young blacks in America, the conclusions don’t fit the preferred liberal narratives (along with racism, it’s guns). When it comes to Chicago, Lee Habeeb of National Review and I almost agree: Chicago doesn’t have a gun problem or a racism problem; it has a father problem.

Of course, the problem of absent fathers is not Chicago’s alone. It is played out all across America. You almost certainly know the numbers by now (I myself have told you several times before.), but here they are again: over 70% of all births among black Americans are out of wedlock. It should be needless to say, but evidently it can’t be said enough: this is a disaster, not only for the black community, but for America itself.

Of course, significant numbers of out of wedlock births among any group of people is a disaster for any community. But given the extremely high rates of homicide and out of wedlock births in the American black community, the relationship between the two dirty deeds goes beyond mere correlation.

What’s worse, the rampant sexuality and violence that has led to such tragic outcomes is not only frequently ignored, but often celebrated. The entertainment industry, peddling misogyny, violence, and crime, has been all too willing to pick up where absent fathers have left off. Thus, many young black males who are without their most significant role model look to emulate the attitudes and actions of those most pleasing to their eyes.

It is noteworthy that Trayvon Martin’s parents had long been divorced. While many accounts point out that Mr. Martin was a significant part of his son’s life and that Trayvon’s mother is a serious follower of Jesus Christ, the statistics bear out what good moral sense already tells us: teenage children without a father at home are, among other things, much more likely to participate in violent activity, and much more likely (4 times) to be victims of violence.

The truth is for children of any skin color, the presence of a loving biological mother and father in the home does more than anything else in the earthly realm to reduce poverty, crime, violence, and sexual promiscuity, along with improving education outcomes.

Until the race pimps decide that the breakdown of the family is a much more serious problem in America than is racism, I’m afraid that the tragedy that befell the Martin family will continue to play out at alarming rates.

P.S. This column was completed prior to President Obama’s July 19 speech on the Martin/Zimmerman case. In his entire speech, in which he often spoke of race, laws, and “programs” (government solutions of course), there was not one mention of the tragic breakdown of the family as the “context” for why “Trayvon Martin was probably statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else.”

Copyright 2013, Trevor Grant Thomas

At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason

Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World

tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com

Meet Today’s Liberals (and the political party that they own):

They boo God, “Hail Satan,” stand for infanticide (and then pat themselves on the back for it!), and assault those (physically and verbally) who disagree with them. Furthermore, when confronted with the truth, they declare it “too controversial.”

What will be the next new low for the Democratic Party?

The Gay "Marriage" Charade

After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the liberal pundits predictably cheered the ruling. With few exceptions, such pundits were very consistent (see here, here, here, here, here, and the Huffington Post, which dedicated a whole page) in one particular and notable aspect of this issue: it was “gay marriage” and not “same-sex marriage.”

Apparently it has escaped many liberals that, when one redefines marriage to include man/man and woman/woman unions, homosexuality never has to enter into the picture. Of course, for liberals this is really all about homosexuality. As I have noted before, marriage is just the means to a more sinister end for the homosexual movement. This is about sex and about legitimizing, through the American judicial system, a sexual lifestyle many Americans find immoral.

This is also about vengeance. Once the homosexual movement has the full protection of the law behind it (which it pretty much does now in about a dozen states), institutions with moral or religious objections to homosexual behavior will be attacked, not just with protests, but with the full legal force of the state. Churches, schools, hospitals, businesses, and the like will be targeted. Of course, in the liberal led states where homosexuality has obtained significant legal protection, this is already occurring.

Individuals who speak out against homosexuality will also be accused, and perhaps fined or arrested, for engaging in “hate speech.” This also is already occurring in other parts of the world where liberalism is more entrenched.

Liberals have become so consumed with forcing the legitimization of homosexual behavior down the throats (sorry!) of the American people that they have become blind to the unintended consequences of their legal actions. Let me provide you with a delicious scenario: legalized “same-sex” marriage—which is what we really have—renders the federal estate tax impotent.

Under current federal tax law, an individual can leave any amount of money to a spouse without generating estate tax. Thus, a small business owner or a farmer, wealthy or not, just prior to his or her death can “marry” a “partner” for no other reason than simply to avoid having his estate taxed (further) by the federal government.

What’s more, once the redefining of marriage is taken to its logical conclusion—unless, of course, the left wants to “discriminate” and limit the definition of “marriage”—and polygamous and incestuous relationships are given the legal protection of marriage, then a wealthy small business owner or farmer, nearing the end of his life, will be able to “marry” his son or daughter (no matter if either party is already married) for no other reason than to avoid paying additional federal taxes. Thank you, Justice Kennedy!

For conservatives, and other Americans still capable of actually feeling shame, there will be no shame or stigma in participating in such marriages, because the relationships will have absolutely nothing to do with sex and are all about “love” (loving to stick it to the feds, that is), and “love is love,” right libs?

For liberals, whether such relationships are sexual should have no bearing. I mean, what protest can a true liberal raise against any kind of sexual relationship between consenting adults? Upon what moral standard would they rely? After all, we would not want to “demean” a couple whose “moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects.”

Also, there would be no violation of God’s law either, because as anyone who truthfully understands Scripture knows, marriage can only exist as union of one man and one woman. Thus, all that would be occurring is taking legal advantage of the folly produced by liberal logic. I suppose liberals could always change their “marriage” laws and require that same-sex “marriages” occur only with those actually engaging in homosexual activity, but that would require the government to enter the bedroom, and we know liberals don’t want that! (How wickedly ironic would that be? We go from laws against sodomy to those requiring it!)

Of course, liberals would howl at conservatives “marrying” simply to reduce their tax burden, but the law says nothing about such relationships being sexual. As Fred Kopp noted in American Thinker nearly two years ago, “When applying for a marriage license, there is no box to check, no oath to take, no questions about a person's sexual proclivity.  Ironically, the very heart of the ‘gay marriage’ movement -- homosexuality -- gets nary a mention on the marriage application.”

Also, near countless number of times, liberals have gone out of their way to make the case that it matters not whether a marital relationship is capable of producing children, so, again, surely it would matter not whether a marital relationship had anything to do with sex at all.

Therefore, two widowed sisters (one with children and one without) could “marry” so that the estate of the childless widow could be passed on the children of the other with a significantly reduced tax burden.

When multiples are allowed to marry—and make no mistake about it, polygamists celebrated the Supreme Court ruling on DOMA as well—these scenarios become even more crazy and complicated. No matter, though, the legal logic stands.

In fact, homosexuals are already taking similar “crazy” steps in states where same-sex marriage is not recognized. While writing this column, a link appeared on Drudge to an ABC news piece about a homosexual man (65 years old) who adopted his partner (73 years old) to avoid paying Pennsylvania's inheritance tax.

A perversion (something with which most liberals have no problem) of adoption no doubt, but evidently legal, nonetheless. Thus, if gays can adopt to game the system, then straights can “marry” to do the same.

(See this column on American Thinker.)

Copyright 2013, Trevor Grant Thomas

At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason

Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World

tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com