The most effective of all morality-based arguments for same-sex marriage, the one that persuades more people than any other argument, is the one that equates opposition to same-sex marriage with the old opposition to interracial marriage.
The argument, repeated so often that it sounds incontestable, is this: Just as parts of American society once had immoral laws that forbade whites and blacks from marrying, so, today, society continues to have immoral laws forbidding men from marrying men and women from marrying women. And just as decent people overthrew the former, decent people must overthrow the latter.
Thanks in large part to widespread higher education -- the higher the educational level, the more one is likely to hold this view -- vast numbers of Americans believe in this equation of sex (gender) and race.
But the equation is false.
First, there is no comparison between sex and race.
There are enormous differences between men and women, but there are no differences between people of different races. Men and women are inherently different, but blacks and whites (and yellows and browns) are inherently the same. Therefore, any imposed separation by race can never be moral or even rational; on the other hand, separation by sex can be both morally desirable and rational. Separate bathrooms for men and women is moral and rational; separate bathrooms for blacks and whites is not.
The second reason the parallel between opposing same-sex marriage and opposing interracial marriage is invalid is that opposition to marriage between races is a moral aberration while opposition to marrying a person of the same sex is the moral norm. In other words, none of the moral bases of American society, whether religious or secular, opposed interracial marriage -- not Judaism, not Christianity, not Judeo-Christian values, not deism, not humanism, not the Enlightenment. Yes, there were religious and secular individuals who opposed interracial marriage, but by opposing interracial marriage, they were advocating something against all Judeo-Christian and secular norms, all of which saw nothing wrong in members of different races intermarrying (members of different religions was a different matter)The most effective of all morality-based arguments for same-sex marriage, the one that persuades more people than any other argument, is the one that equates opposition to same-sex marriage with the old opposition to interracial marriage.
The argument, repeated so often that it sounds incontestable, is this: Just as parts of American society once had immoral laws that forbade whites and blacks from marrying, so, today, society continues to have immoral laws forbidding men from marrying men and women from marrying women. And just as decent people overthrew the former, decent people must overthrow the latter.
Thanks in large part to widespread higher education -- the higher the educational level, the more one is likely to hold this view -- vast numbers of Americans believe in this equation of sex (gender) and race.
But the equation is false.
First, there is no comparison between sex and race.
There are enormous differences between men and women, but there are no differences between people of different races. Men and women are inherently different, but blacks and whites (and yellows and browns) are inherently the same. Therefore, any imposed separation by race can never be moral or even rational; on the other hand, separation by sex can be both morally desirable and rational. Separate bathrooms for men and women is moral and rational; separate bathrooms for blacks and whites is not.
The second reason the parallel between opposing same-sex marriage and opposing interracial marriage is invalid is that opposition to marriage between races is a moral aberration while opposition to marrying a person of the same sex is the moral norm. In other words, none of the moral bases of American society, whether religious or secular, opposed interracial marriage -- not Judaism, not Christianity, not Judeo-Christian values, not deism, not humanism, not the Enlightenment. Yes, there were religious and secular individuals who opposed interracial marriage, but by opposing interracial marriage, they were advocating something against all Judeo-Christian and secular norms, all of which saw nothing wrong in members of different races intermarrying (members of different religions was a different matter)What groups overall support Obama besides the obvious
Feminists
Gay lobby
Environmental
Educational
Pro-aborts
Big
Leftists/Marxists
18-29 age group
Arab- Muslim
Black & ethnic groups including Jewish
immigration
What groups overall support McCain
Evangelical, Christian
Catholic
Second amendment groups
pro-life
Blue collar workers
Retirees , over 65
Military & veterans
Home school, school voucher groups
Law & order, pro-death penalty
Hockey moms
White male middle class
Folks, this is huge! It is now a SCANDAL, the repercussions of which are TEN or more times the impact of the Enron Scandal!
We need to write to the editors of our newspapers and publicize this every way possible. Of course, we need to trace the money path through Dodd, Frank and company, directly to the anointed one.
Also, count me among those few here who want to thank the House Republicans for taking a bold stand against what had been a stampede on a scale I have never before witnessed on matters of huge consequence. Conservatism is ...the foundation of the civil society. The liberal uses crises, real or manufactured, to expand the power of government at the expense of the individual and private property. He has spent, in earnest, 70 years evading the Constitution's limits on governmental power. If conservatives don't stand up to this, who will? If they don't offer serious alternatives that address the current circumstances AND defend the founding principles, who will? The House Republicans have done both. And I, for one, thank them.
Incidentally, if you want to buy a home or car today you can. And if your credit is decent, you can get loans at a good rate. Last week we were told that if a deal was not struck by last Friday, our economy would collapse. It has not. That is not to say the evidence of economic troubles or worse should be ignored. It is to say that now is a time for reasoned decisions based on tried and true principles, not for abandoning them. I notice that the socialist, who, for the last 30 years, has insisted that private institutions make risky loans based on non-economic factors, still has not abandoned his policies. Socialism does not work. We shouldn't support more of it.
Sen. Obama’s former top foreign affairs advisor, Robert Malley, recently had to resign his role in the Obama campaign due to holding meetings with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Mr. Malley’s favorable views of Hamas have been widely known for years. Malley had written extensively, sometimes co-writing articles with the late Yasser Arafat’s advisor Hussein Agha, blaming Israel, not Arafat, for the failure of the Camp David talks.
Had Malley’s views on (and meetings with) Hamas not been unveiled, who knows where Mr. Malley would have ended up in a potential Obama administration? Perhaps he would have been the Secretary of State. This is a sad and frightening possibility, or probability, because Sen. Obama is the least-vetted man in U.S. political history.CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (CNN) -- Congress has balked at the Bush administration's proposed $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. Under this plan, the Treasury would have bought the "troubled assets" of financial institutions in an attempt to avoid economic meltdown.
This bailout was a terrible idea. Here's why.
The current mess would never have occurred in the absence of ill-conceived federal policies. The federal government chartered Fannie Mae in 1938 and Freddie Mac in 1970; these two mortgage lending institutions are at the center of the crisis. The government implicitly promised these institutions that it would make good on their debts, so Fannie and Freddie took on huge amounts of excessive risk.
Worse, beginning in 1977 and even more in the 1990s and the early part of this century, Congress pushed mortgage lenders and Fannie/Freddie to expand subprime lending. The industry was happy to oblige, given the implicit promise of federal backing, and subprime lending soared.
This subprime lending was more than a minor relaxation of existing credit guidelines. This lending was a wholesale abandonment of reasonable lending practices in which borrowers with poor credit characteristics got mortgages they were ill-equipped to handle.
Once housing prices declined and economic conditions worsened, defaults and delinquencies soared, leaving the industry holding large amounts of severely depreciated mortgage assets.
The fact that government bears such a huge responsibility for the current mess means any response should eliminate the conditions that created this situation in the first place, not attempt to fix bad government with more government.
The obvious alternative to a bailout is letting troubled financial institutions declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcy means that shareholders typically get wiped out and the creditors own the company.
Bankruptcy does not mean the company disappears; it is just owned by someone new (as has occurred with several airlines). Bankruptcy punishes those who took excessive risks while preserving those aspects of a businesses that remain profitable.
In contrast, a bailout transfers enormous wealth from taxpayers to those who knowingly engaged in risky subprime lending. Thus, the bailout encourages companies to take large, imprudent risks and count on getting bailed out by government. This "moral hazard" generates enormous distortions in an economy's allocation of its financial resources.
...Talk of Armageddon, however, is ridiculous scare-mongering. If financial institutions cannot make productive loans, a profit opportunity exists for someone else. This might not happen instantly, but it will happen.
Juastnotice this at Rush Limbaugh's website tonight| "Banks already overexposed by these shaky loans were pushed still further in the wrong direction when government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began buying up their bad loans and offering them for sale on world markets," and by the way, speaking of that, Obama did it again in the debate (which we're going to get to). He said that our reputation in the world, I think everybody would agree, is not what it once was. He said it in Berlin', he said it to a seven-year-old kid asking him why he wants to be president. Frankly, I am fed up with it. Because, folks, if you want to know our reputation around the world -- to the extent that it is -- is in disrepair, you might take a look at the fact that a bunch of foreign banks were lied to by US institutions who said these subprime loans were AAA paper. You can buy 'em up. Do you know we're bailing out foreign banks that do business on the United States on this basis because they bought up some of these assets? So all this talk about how our image in the world has been dinged or damaged, let me tell you: to the extent that that's true, people in financial institutions around the world are saying, "What have you done to us? You've made us take on this worthless garbage paper. What have you done to us? What are you doing to your financial system?" It ain't about Iraq. It ain't about the war on terror. So there is Obama running around talking about how we've lost our esteem. That aggravates me like you cannot believe. We're going to analyze the debate as things shake out as the program unfolds before your very eyes. Of course Obama is as close to ACORN as anybody can be, closer to ACORN than anybody ever seeking the presidency. And ACORN went out and put their own pressure on these banks and lending institutions, political correctness pressure -- take it, you know, whatever it is -- to spread this misery far and wide under the terms and definitions of things like affordable housing. I think there's something more devious than that going on. We know several things institutionally. We know that the left wants as large a government as possible. We also know the left wants as many citizens in this country depending on government, not just for their needs but for their wants as well, but particularly their needs. We also know that owning a home in this country has been one of the most desirable things people have had. Many people, most people work themselves to the bone to be able to save up for a down payment, to be able to qualify -- and all of a sudden, the Democrats and the Clinton administration came along and said, "Why make it so hard on people? It's unfair. Let's just get 'em into homes. Let's threaten the lending institutions to loan 'em money they can't pay back. As long as home prices keep going up, this is not going to be a problem. It will be fine." Well, everything goes up goes down eventually. It's galled gravity. It's called supply and demand. It's called economic cycles, and we're where we are. So now the bailout is about making sure that all these people whose votes have been bought stay bought. |
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I smell a stinking fish! This is very unusual. Again, had mcCain been found with this, it will be all over the news!
The Barack Obama campaign has raised a whopping $426.9 million -- nearly twice that of John McCain's campaign, according to new campaign finance report.
But because of Obama’s high expenses during the hotly contested Democratic primary season and an early decision to forgo public campaign money and the spending limits it imposes, all that cash has not translated into a financial advantage -- at least, not yet.
The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee began September with $95 million in cash, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
Unlike the McCain campaign, which has made its complete donor database available online, the Obama campaign has not identified donors for nearly half the amount he has raised, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).
Federal law does not require the campaigns to identify donors who give less than $200 during the election cycle. However, it does require that campaigns calculate running totals for each donor and report them once they go beyond the $200 mark.
Surprisingly, the great majority of Obama donors never break the $200 threshold.
The FEC has compiled a separate database of potentially questionable overseas donations that contains more than 11,500 contributions totaling $33.8 million. More than 520 listed their “state” as “IR,” often an abbreviation of Iran. Another 63 listed it as “UK,” the United Kingdom.
More than 1,400 of the overseas entries clearly were U.S. diplomats or military personnel, who gave an APO address overseas. Their total contributions came to just $201,680.
But others came from places as far afield as Abu Dhabi, Addis Ababa, Beijing, Fallujah..."
Concerns about foreign fundraising have been raised by other anecdotal accounts of illegal activities.
In June, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi gave a public speech praising Obama, claiming foreign nationals were donating to his campaign.
“All the people in the Arab and Islamic world and in Africa applauded this man,” the Libyan leader said. “They welcomed him and prayed for him and for his success, and they may have even been involved in legitimate contribution campaigns to enable him to win the American presidency..."
Though Gadhafi asserted that fundraising from Arab and African nations were “legitimate,” the fact is that U.S. federal law bans any foreigner from donating to a U.S. election campaign.
Kenneth R. Timmerman, News MaxPhilip J. Berg filed a response this afternoon to the motion for dismissal filed last week in Berg vs. Obama by Senator Obama and the Democratic National Committee. The response "PLAINTIFF’S OPPOSITION AND BRIEF IN SUPPORT THEREOF TO DEFENDANT’S, BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA AND THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE’S, MOTION TO DISMISS PLAINTIFF’S COMPLAINT PURSUANT TO RULE 12(b)(1) and 12(b)(6)" asserts that, the defendants' argument to the contrary, Mr. Berg has standing to pursue the case.
Mr. Berg provides precedents which he argues establish his standing and petitions the Court to deny dismissal and order the defendants to produce the documents in the previously requested discovery.
The conclusion of Mr. Berg's brief reads:
Plaintiff served discovery in way of Admissions and Request for Production of Documents, on Defendants on September 15, 2008 and has attempted to obtain verification of Obama’s eligibility through Subpoenas to the Government entities and the Hospital’s in Hawaii. To date, Plaintiff has not received the requested discovery from the Defendants and two (2) of the locations, which subpoenas were served upon, refused to honor the subpoena. For the above aforementioned reasons, Plaintiff respectfully request Defendants Barack Hussein Obama and the Democratic National Committee’s Motion to Dismiss pursuant to F.R.C.P. 12(b)(1) and 12(b)(6) be denied and order immediate discovery, including but not limited to: 1) a certified copy of Obama’s “vault” (original long version) Birth Certificate; and (2) a certified copy of Obama’s Certificate of Citizenship; and (3) a certified copy of the Oath of Allegiance taken by Obama taken at the age of majority. If the Court is inclined to grant Defendants motion, Plaintiff respectfully requests the opportunity to amend his Complaint pursuant to the findings of this Honorable Court. The complete filing is attached. Due to a problem with the Electronic Filing System, the filing was made via fax and will appear in PACER later this evening or on Tuesday.
| Ayes | Noes | PRES | NV | |
| Democratic | 140 | 95 | ||
| Republican | 65 | 133 | 1 | |
| Independent | ||||
| TOTALS | 205 | 228 | | 1 |
| Ackerman Allen Andrews Arcuri Bachus Baird Baldwin Bean Berman Berry Bishop (GA) Bishop (NY) Blunt Boehner Bonner Bono Mack Boozman Boren Boswell Boucher Boyd (FL) Brady (PA) Brady (TX) Brown (SC) Brown, Corrine Calvert Camp (MI) Campbell (CA) Cannon Cantor Capps Capuano Cardoza Carnahan Castle Clarke Clyburn Cohen Cole (OK) Cooper Costa Cramer Crenshaw Crowley Cubin Davis (AL) Davis (CA) Davis (IL) Davis, Tom DeGette DeLauro Dicks Dingell Donnelly Doyle Dreier Edwards (TX) Ehlers Ellison Ellsworth Emanuel Emerson Engel Eshoo Etheridge Everett Farr Fattah Ferguson | Fossella Foster Frank (MA) Gilchrest Gonzalez Gordon Granger Gutierrez Hall (NY) Hare Harman Hastings (FL) Herger Higgins Hinojosa Hobson Holt Honda Hooley Hoyer Inglis (SC) Israel Johnson, E. B. Kanjorski Kennedy Kildee Kind King (NY) Kirk Klein (FL) Kline (MN) LaHood Langevin Larsen (WA) Larson (CT) Levin Lewis (CA) Lewis (KY) Loebsack Lofgren, Zoe Lowey Lungren, Daniel E. Mahoney (FL) Maloney (NY) Markey Marshall Matsui McCarthy (NY) McCollum (MN) McCrery McDermott McGovern McHugh McKeon McNerney McNulty Meek (FL) Meeks (NY) Melancon Miller (NC) Miller, Gary Miller, George Mollohan Moore (KS) Moore (WI) Moran (VA) Murphy (CT) Murphy, Patrick Murtha | Nadler Neal (MA) Oberstar Obey Olver Pallone Pelosi Perlmutter Peterson (PA) Pickering Pomeroy Porter Price (NC) Pryce (OH) Putnam Radanovich Rahall Rangel Regula Reyes Reynolds Richardson Rogers (AL) Rogers (KY) Ross Ruppersberger Ryan (OH) Ryan (WI) Sarbanes Saxton Schakowsky Schwartz Sessions Sestak Shays Simpson Sires Skelton Slaughter Smith (TX) Smith (WA) Snyder Souder Space Speier Spratt Tancredo Tanner Tauscher Towns Tsongas Upton Van Hollen Velázquez Walden (OR) Walsh (NY) Wasserman Schultz Waters Watt Waxman Weiner Weldon (FL) Wexler Wilson (NM) Wilson (OH) Wilson (SC) Wolf |
| Abercrombie Aderholt Akin Alexander Altmire Baca Bachmann Barrett (SC) Barrow Bartlett (MD) Barton (TX) Becerra Berkley Biggert Bilbray Bilirakis Bishop (UT) Blackburn Blumenauer Boustany Boyda (KS) Braley (IA) Broun (GA) Brown-Waite, Ginny Buchanan Burgess Burton (IN) Butterfield Buyer Capito Carney Carson Carter Castor Cazayoux Chabot Chandler Childers Clay Cleaver Coble Conaway Conyers Costello Courtney Cuellar Culberson Cummings Davis (KY) Davis, David Davis, Lincoln Deal (GA) DeFazio Delahunt Dent Diaz-Balart, L. Diaz-Balart, M. Doggett Doolittle Drake Duncan Edwards (MD) English (PA) Fallin Feeney Filner Flake Forbes Fortenberry Foxx Franks (AZ) Frelinghuysen Gallegly Garrett (NJ) Gerlach Giffords | Gillibrand Gingrey Gohmert Goode Goodlatte Graves Green, Al Green, Gene Grijalva Hall (TX) Hastings (WA) Hayes Heller Hensarling Herseth Sandlin Hill Hinchey Hirono Hodes Hoekstra Holden Hulshof Hunter Inslee Issa Jackson (IL) Jackson-Lee (TX) Jefferson Johnson (GA) Johnson (IL) Johnson, Sam Jones (NC) Jordan Kagen Kaptur Keller Kilpatrick King (IA) Kingston Knollenberg Kucinich Kuhl (NY) Lamborn Lampson Latham LaTourette Latta Lee Lewis (GA) Linder Lipinski LoBiondo Lucas Lynch Mack Manzullo Marchant Matheson McCarthy (CA) McCaul (TX) McCotter McHenry McIntyre McMorris Rodgers Mica Michaud Miller (FL) Miller (MI) Mitchell Moran (KS) Murphy, Tim Musgrave Myrick Napolitano Neugebauer Nunes | Ortiz Pascrell Pastor Paul Payne Pearce Pence Peterson (MN) Petri Pitts Platts Poe Price (GA) Ramstad Rehberg Reichert Renzi Rodriguez Rogers (MI) Rohrabacher Ros-Lehtinen Roskam Rothman Roybal-Allard Royce Rush Salazar Sali Sánchez, Linda T. Sanchez, Loretta Scalise Schiff Schmidt Scott (GA) Scott (VA) Sensenbrenner Serrano Shadegg Shea-Porter Sherman Shimkus Shuler Shuster Smith (NE) Smith (NJ) Solis Stark Stearns Stupak Sullivan Sutton Taylor Terry Thompson (CA) Thompson (MS) Thornberry Tiahrt Tiberi Tierney Turner Udall (CO) Udall (NM) Visclosky Walberg Walz (MN) Wamp Watson Welch (VT) Westmoreland Whitfield (KY) Wittman (VA) Woolsey Wu Yarmuth Young (AK) Young (FL) |
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