Wednesday, November 03, 2010

Smaller Government

Well, Republicans, you aren't "in charge," exactly, but you have the House back, and you've made gains in the Senate.  You all claim you're going for "smaller government."  OK, put up or shut up.  Let's see you get government off our backs in two significant ways:

Repeal DOMA.  Who marries whom is none of the government's goddamn business.

Repeal "don't ask, don't tell" and let the military sort itself out.  We're losing valuable servicemen and women for no better reason than their sexual orientation.

Get the government out of the bedroom.  If you do that, I may believe that you actually will reduce the size of government.  But I have to see it happen first. 

17 comments:

  1. Sorry, hedera, I have to disagree with you here.

    I'm against same sex parentage. Yeah, I know all the arguments, and all the history, and all the evidence. But psychology tells us that absent parents (either the father OR the mother) is a recipe for abnormality. Two mommies or two daddies is not good karma.

    Which is why the legitimation of same sex marriage is problematic. If we could have Gay marriage without Gay parentage, I'd say go ahead. I was abused as a child (female teacher) and as a teenager (adult Gays). The 5% of the population which is "born" different should confine itself to its own kind. Raising children shouldn't be a part of that.

    With respect to soldiering. Killing, and training to kill, is a pretty awful business to begin with. Of the total population of soldiers, the numbers of those whose lives or careers have been significantly hurt by the "don't ask/don't tell" policy is miniscule. Those Gays and Lesbians who join the service because they A) think it's cool to be with your sex objects or B) the military life conforms to some vision of y our sexual identity--don't strike me as a valid pretexts for being permitted to act out openly. Fraternization was always a problem, and now it's gotten much worse with women side by side with the men. And so we add open mono-sexuality to the mix. People who have to labor alongside each other and sleep and shower and eat with each other 24 hours a day, is already a kind of enforced comradery. How is openly permitting stuff like this better than what we now have? There's an advantage to having rules and prohibitions which transcends liberalization of behavior as an ideal state in itself. Tolerance is not an encouragement.

    And it's all about killing and being killed.

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  2. I should add that studies show that the rampant hostile sexuality found in prisons clearly is analogous to the kinds of behaviors caused under conditions that individuals in armies experience. Both are "unreal" forced environments, highly stressful, where people are unlikely to behave in ways that they would under "normal" conditions. This doesn't make what they do "better" or "normal" or tolerable. It's simply one of the unfortunate consequences of what we think of as necessary evils (prisons and armies). But opportunistic mono-sexuality shouldn't be added to that list.

    Word verification: gasms


    !!!!!!!!!!

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  3. Curtis, this isn't the first time we've disagreed, and it won't be the last.

    Those word verification strings are sometimes really spooky!

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  4. I think we should go a step further, and mandate immediate remarriage for any widows/widowers and divorcees with children. Single parenthood will not be allowed, and any women lacking a husband at the time of a child's birth will be assigned one.

    Additionally, since the only purpose of marriage is procreation and the raising of children in a normal, healthy heterosexual environment, marriages involving infertile members or indiividuals beyong childbearing years will not be permitted. Additionally, any married couples failing to have children by the end of their childbearing years will have their marriages dissolved and will be retroactively charged for any additional taxes that they would have paid as single filers.

    With regards to Don't Ask Don't Tell, it is elementary to deduce the status of homosexuals based on their inability to discuss their sexual activities and their refusal to engage in the normal, healthy activities such as those demonstrated by the heroes of Tailhook. Therefore, DADT should be expanded to cover all service members regardless of sexuality. Further, any flagrant sexual activity (such as "dating") or display of secondary sexual trophies (wedding rings, pictures of children) will be similarly prohibited and grounds for immediate dismissal.

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  5. D.B. Echo, You just made my day. Have you thought about running for office?

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  6. Anonymous8:27 PM

    Curtis,

    I am watching a lesbian and her partner raise an adopted brother and sister of Brazilian/Salvadoran parentage. Ain't nothin', and I do mean nothin', wrong with those kids or that household. Is is a normal, healthy household with two kids who have rules, love, and superb guidance. It ain't the orientation, it ain't the presence or absence of a parent of a particular sex, it is the people doing the raising. Those two mommies are good karma, and those two foster kids won the lottery when they were adopted by the single mom whose mother was living in the household, and whose mother had adopted her from foster care.

    I doubt you would write without basis, Curtis, but it ain't the world I'm seeing.

    hedera, I love your second paragraph. I was composing right along with you as I read it.

    David on the Edge, aka Anonymous David

    Let me tell you about the rural black kid, raised by a grandmother, who came to my community college as an apparent academic hopeless case. Anecdotal, to be sure, but aren't we all ultimately anecdotes. Or let me tell about a cousin raised in fits and starts by the collective (I have a lot of relatives).

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  7. Anonymous8:41 PM

    Oh, and Hillary was correct. In each case I referred to, there was/is a village, an embracing, nurturing village. Almost forgot. Two very dear friends going back to my childhood in the 50s in the small, unincorporated community of Goldenrod, Florida were raised by their mother, a divorcee. The only male presence in the family was their mother's alcoholic father, hardly some kind of role model, but he did no harm and they loved him because he was their grandfather.

    I also watched an alcoholic father and mother raise two of my childhood friends and their two sisters. One sister is a solid member of the community. The other became a prostitute. The two boys grew up to be blue collar people who are still friends, me the "professor." they the auto mechanic and the maintenance worker who became a maintenance director at UCF. Still blue collar to the core, but his karma is fine. So is the other's. Only the younger sister was a disaster. Three out of four out of a potentially disastrous childhood isn't bad. There is plenty of room for explaining why they didn't all turn out bad, to be sure, and it did involve to some extent a village and a set of shared values that were part of the air we breathed. But that doesn't explain the younger sister.

    Mostly, I have to take great exception to the narrowness of your notion of what constitutes good karma, Curtis.

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  8. Okay, D.B.:

    I can always recognize a reverse bigot by the degree of sarcasm employed in the assertion. Let's take your points one by one.

    "I think we should go a step further, and mandate immediate remarriage for any widows/widowers and divorcees with children. Single parenthood will not be allowed, and any women lacking a husband at the time of a child's birth will be assigned one."

    We know that the institution of marriage is not perfect, and that accidents and arrangements of many kinds do occur. Extended households, death and divorce, abandonment and distant employment, all these kinds of things complicate the classic nuclear family concept. The point isn't that they do occur, but what attitude (and policy) we might employ to "help" the heterosexual nuclear family as an institution. The family has come under all kinds of pressures, but that doesn't suggest that such problems should be interpreted as pretexts either for making the nuclear family more difficult, or watering down the original concept. Marriage as an institution is just fine, and reasonable people have no problem with civil unions. It's where marriage "authorizes" Gay child-rearing that the problem arises.

    "Additionally, since the only purpose of marriage is procreation and the raising of children in a normal, healthy heterosexual environment, marriages involving infertile members or indiividuals beyong childbearing years will not be permitted. Additionally, any married couples failing to have children by the end of their childbearing years will have their marriages dissolved and will be retroactively charged for any additional taxes that they would have paid as single filers."

    D.B.: You'd have made a very good Nazi. Perhaps you could have volunteered for the scientific research facilities at the death camps where "doctors" subjected "patients" to various kinds of torture, just to see what the actual limits really are! Marriage is a very nice institution, originally conceived as a social unit to facilitate child-rearing, and the control of sexual interaction. It's evolved, both culturally and legally, into a more limited form. You imply, by sarcasm, that heterosexuality is "abnormal." Notions of normality aside, the usually accepted numbers put the mono-sexual community at between 5-8% of the total population. It may not be "abnormal" to be part of that 5-8% componant, but that doesn't make the other 93-95% abnormal, by anyone's definition. Infertility is a real problem with real solutions. But Gay parentage is an indulgence, not caused by any physical problem. It creates a new set of problems, none of which it solves. Homosexuality is a deviation from a norm, probably a perfectly normal deviation, but toleration difference does not imply glorification, or unbridled gratification. Some people are born with proclivities which we would not wish to encourage; but being born with them doesn't make them desirable.

    End Part I

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  9. Part II

    "With regards to Don't Ask Don't Tell, it is elementary to deduce the status of homosexuals based on their inability to discuss their sexual activities and their refusal to engage in the normal, healthy activities such as those demonstrated by the heroes of Tailhook. Therefore, DADT should be expanded to cover all service members regardless of sexuality. Further, any flagrant sexual activity (such as "dating") or display of secondary sexual trophies (wedding rings, pictures of children) will be similarly prohibited and grounds for immediate dismissal."

    Public marriages exist as a demonstration of society's (or religion's) official opinion regarding the marriage institution as the preferred mode of co-habitation and legal commitment. Society can and does decide what constitutes a legal marriage. Expanding the definition involves several collateral "rights" and privileges. My problem is with the automatic inclusion of the "right" raise children. Society may encourage certain institutions, and do its best to assist when they fail in various ways. That's a remedial strategy. But encouraging the expansion of Gay families is wrong for several reasons. We can't address those reasons in a short blog comment-stream, and I'm fairly certain you wouldn't be interested in doing so at length, even if that were possible. (By the way, "With regards to..." isn't English. You mean "with regard to" or "in regard to".)

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  10. Dear Anon:

    To address part of your comment:

    "I am watching a lesbian and her partner raise an adopted brother and sister of Brazilian/Salvadoran parentage. Ain't nothin', and I do mean nothin', wrong with those kids or that household. Is is a normal, healthy household with two kids who have rules, love, and superb guidance. It ain't the orientation, it ain't the presence or absence of a parent of a particular sex, it is the people doing the raising. Those two mommies are good karma, and those two foster kids won the lottery when they were adopted by the single mom whose mother was living in the household, and whose mother had adopted her from foster care."

    The point of your story isn't that mono-sexual parenthood is somehow either to be preferred, or presents an ideal condition. It exists as a remedial, gratuitously convenient alternative to what we know is a more natural and convenient concept. Orphanhood--and I speak with some knowledge, since I was also adopted--is a failure of the system, or an accident. We can put children into orphanages, or they can be "farmed out" to households of various kinds. I have no doubt that two children reared in a mono-sexual household may be a superior alternative to life in an orphanage, or--heaven forbid--growing up on the street. But, again, that doesn't mean that Gay parentage is a desirable alternative to the heterosexual nuclear family. Those two South American orphans "ought" to have been raised in their own family, but that condition broke down, for whatever reason. Holding up the remedial alternative as a model of the concept is illogical. Those two children will grow up without the predominant archetypes of behavior and identity. They will "think of" mono-sexuality as an ideal institution, even though it constitutes a tiny percentage of the norm. Your trivial analysis "Ain't nothin wrong with that" ignores an avalanche of behavioral and psychological research about the topic. Why not check it out, instead of basing your opinions on anecdotal evidence such as your "next door neighbors"?

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  11. Curtis, I believe you may want to research "sarcasm" and "satire." I'm a reverse-bigot AND a Nazi? Wild. What am I reversely-bigoted about? Are you suggesting that I am a homosexual bigoted against heterosexual marriage? While there are some who might rub their chins and say "Well, that would explain his track record with dating," it would also make being a Nazi somewhat problematic, since they roasted homosexuals with as much gusto as they did Jews and gypsies.

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  12. DB, I thought Curtis was a bit hasty in invoking Godwin's Law so soon into the conversation.

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  13. Your sardonic post had a bitter ring, and the deadpan "marriages involving infertile members or indiividuals beyong childbearing years will not be permitted" was spookily reminiscent of Nazi directives (if you've ever read them). Rather than address the issues related to Gay parentage directly, you take the passive-aggressive route and attack straight marriage as an institution. If marriage is so horrible, why do Gays want to practice it?

    You may feel very cozy about marriage, indeed you may be a practicing heterosexual yourself. That really isn't the point.

    I've never "dated" a man, having been faithfully married, now, for over 40 years.

    If your opinions are worth expressing in public, they should be worth expressing without hiding behind anonymous identities. Out of the closet, anon!

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  14. I don't think I've ever resorted to calling anyone a Nazi, though I've often noticed that people will evoke (not invoke) Nazi propaganda techniques in an attempt to distort or divert an argument--and in those cases, I think it's perfectly reasonable to call them on it. Goebbels was indeed an evil genius. I think that is what D.B. was doing here. He may be evil, but certainly not a genius.

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  15. I'm trying to figure out the difference between calling someone a Nazi and saying "D.B.: You'd have made a very good Nazi."

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  16. Seattle Dan:

    Okay, let's drop the Nazi reference.

    Let's just say D.B. possesses a vicious sense of social engineering, and leave it at that. His remark was made in the heat of the moment, as was mine. But his provocation still strikes me as evasive. If you seek the benefits of the marriage compact, presumably you don't go out of your way to point out all of its deficiencies, as part of an argument in favor of extending the privilege to same-sexers. It's a maneuver I find labored and contradictory.

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  17. I let this drop because I'd had enough; but one thing fascinates me about this thread. It misses the entire point of my post, which was NOT that homosexuality is a good thing. I was trying to make the point that Republicans are very selective in the areas in which they want to reduce the size of government, and that this is hypocritical. Nobody got it. I guess I'd better revisit my writing style.

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