An Okie looks at Gay Marriage

 

"To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical." –Thomas Jefferson

            The Supremes say that we can’t define marriage as one man and one woman.  What then is a marriage?  Can you marry a boat with a corporation?  Constitutionally they both have personhood.  Does the corporation consummate the marriage with a nice Mercury outboard? Does the boat keep coming back to the dock even though the corporation does a side deal with Johnson or Evinrude? 

If there is no defining factor of a man and a woman, how do you define a marriage?  For thousands of years us Okies thought we knew. It was one consenting man and one consenting woman.  Age of consent was defined as a socially agreed age corresponding to ability to make babies and procreate the human race. Procreation should come with a long-tem commitment to raise the young.  Simple.  And the prohibition against close relatives marrying was to avoid genetically transmitted conditions.  Only European royalty interbred until they got hemophilia.  Even hillbillies avoided hemophilia.  But if we now allow people of the same sex to marry, what’s the biological criteria for marriage? Love?  Then practically none of the European royalty were really married.  Chuck and Di weren’t the first who went on the rocks.  Age of consent makes no sense other than an arbitrary number when applied to gays. Age defined how? Some mindset of maturity? Did you really think Gomer Pyle or Liberace were mature enough?  But then who is to say a 15 yr old is more mature than a 12? Will we start giving mental tests over consensual relationships? Or do we just admit the N. American Man-Boy Love Ass. (Sorry. How do you abbreviate Association?)

            But even if society can agree upon an age of consent, can a brother marry a brother?  Dude, I really love my brother! A mother, a son?  How about those polygamists on the Discovery Channel?  Can you have the bonds of matrimony between two women and a dog?  There is no a priori biological fact that can prohibit why this should not take place--if the male/female procreation tradition is disallowed.  And then Hollywood stars often declare themselves as a corporation.  Can “Richard Burton, Inc.” then form bonds between itself and, say, a dozen women?  Well, I mean a dozen more than he already had.  There is after all, no bigamy when a corporation marries, is there?

            And then what happens when a religious faith, such as Judaism or Christianity, has Scripture (God’s Words) which are not favorable to gays?  Will there be a coming persecution of faiths because they are deemed bigoted? Will churches have their 501C3 status revoked if they don’t hire gays or if they perchance quote scripture?  Will Hobby Lobby have to stop selling fake decorative Bibles and rename the bunny the Spring Bunny?  But who would dream such a thing will ever take place?  It would take something weird.  A President that would say, “we ought to just disallow religious schools.” or an attorney general who would say, “a church does not have the sole right to determine its ministers.”  Oh, wait.  That has already happened, I guess.  But don’t worry.  There will be no persecution just as The Boy Scouts will not have to have gay scoutmasters.  Hey, no age of consent! That means no child molestation can be accused under that tent. I’m shopping for a Swiss Army knife with mace for my grandsons.   

            I’ll have to go check the mailbox.  I think America’s new address is One Heckuva-Mess St. Everyone thinks if they favor gay marriage they can’t call you a bigot and you won’t loose everything like Paula Dean.  No sir!  I never used the N-word!  I always called those nuts at Christmastime, Brazilian toes, even 40 years ago.

            My prediction is that a later day Gibbons, will someday write “The Rise and Fall of USA.”  And I believe he’d conclude that the demise of the family had a lot to do with a nation born out of wedlock and raised by women or just a nanny state, without a father’s affirmation, prone to emotional maladjustment, without goals and accomplishments, a nation that finally couldn’t even recognize marriage when marriage stared them in the face, lacked enough discipline to stop spending its finances into crisis, had no male leadership and was overcome by stronger nations.

            But you understand, I am just a dumb Okie.  None of this will probably happen.

there are times

There are times when I simply don’t understand the world and that is why they invented the St. Louis Cardinals. 

            I was listening to Chelsea Clinton lament the fact that her maternal grandmother didn’t have access to Planned Parenthood.  Yeah, so now we are stuck with Hillary and Chelsea.  Does she realize how stupid this sounds?  Sean Hannity was busy debating a liberal caller who was pro-choice.  I would have gone for the jugular.  Ask the guy if he believes the woman should have a choice.  Not the mother but the little woman in the womb.  And since I have asked this question often the lib who is delivering up wisdom often blurts out something like, “Well, as long as a child isn’t born or can’t speak their wishes, you can’t ask that.”  Oh? So if the kid is 2 and still doesn’t talk, you can’t decide on life or death?  If the baby is born ala Gosnell, you can’t decide? At one point the caller said, with much authority, he was just in favor of women having a choice to abort in all cases.  I guess I would have told him he sounded like a guy who favors sex without consequences.  How can a man be so sure of what a woman wants?

            Then some actor whose name sounds like Gondola-finny (never heard of him) who played a mobster is being lauded and magnified all over the media today.  What a wonderful guy!  But then no one seems to come up with anything laudatory except that they liked the way he played the bloodthirsty mob boss.  They showed clips of his much exhulted acting and I didn’t even get the gist of the scenes.  Suppose he had spoken out on taxpayer rights or had two dozen foster kids in real life, would that have made him admirable?  Wait, I think I have him mixed up with Michele Bachmann.

            Then we learn from Business Investors Daily that the Obamacare exchange money isn’t going so much for setting up exchanges as it is pork going to SEIU, NAACP, Planned Parenthood, and some outfit that is against fracking and drilling.  Millions apiece.  Verified by California records. What does this have to do with getting insurance marketplaces set up?  Nothing.  Just money in the pockets of Dem allies.  Is this not a strange world?

            And then they announced that Zimmerman trial was all women.  I am in disbelief.  A bunch of women would immediately conclude that the two dudes, Zimmerman and Martin, were wrong altogether in physically fighting in the first place.  Women just stand back and shout insults at each other and then rant to their friends.  Is this called a jury of one’s peers? Isn’t that what my great grandfather 23 generations ago demanded as he signed the Magna Charta?  Tune in next week when that court case between Warren Buffet and the Rockefeller family will be judged by a jury of welfare recipients.

            I’m going to watch Molina and the ‘Birds.

No net?

Now don't consider me a conspiracy theorist.  I just want to take us through possible scenarios as a worst case.
Ann-Marie Murrell has a deeply disturbing article on the Townhall website today. http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/ann-mariemurrell/2013/06/11/a-world-without-the-internet--are-we-prepared-n1617221
What she is saying is that Obama may try to shut down the internet using some sort of excuse about internet security--shutting down terrorist talk on the Net or some other thing--but then conservative websites will suddenly become inaccessible. And government seizes the website's computers.  This is what happens in China almost continually with "western thought" and Christian websites being shut down at will.  Of course it would take some national emergency in USA to do this for long, but what, she asks rhetorically, could we do? Why do I bring up China?  Because Obama is discussing Internet Security with that new Chinese dragon, Xi. 

Some possible answers.  First, a tyrant is most likely to attack and censor a website.  Private emails would remain.  But if they went after political dissidents and shut down email accounts or hauled conservative bloggers in, that would represent another step up in threat.  Finally they might shut down all but government speech on the net--China has done this from time to time.  What then?

First, know this.  China has had a lot of problems squelching political dissent because it is so hard to silence phone and internet chat about daily things.  Hence the government is under constant duress having to answer questions about aparachiks mishandling things like leaving some small village without rescue during a earthquake or hauling some village women in for forced abortions.  It's just hard to get away with tyranny if you are a tyrant these days.  People talk and have electronic means. But if the net is censored, and it is heavily censored in China, and emails/tweets/facebook is completely stopped, what then?

Townhall meetings.  Unless the government wants to try to round up normal citizens, we are still free to speak as we wish in public.  Remember there is only one policeman for every 2000 people even in large cities and who is the cop in Sharon Springs, Kansas? Just call a town hall and have a phone tree to announce. Could take place in your city park or anywhere.  It would make big headlines in the local paper.  There would be loyalists to the regime on hand, but that's okay.  It's still considered a free country. But what if they track telephone conversations?  How would people know to come?

A clue to strategy is given by the house churches of China. There is a notification tree of people who spread the word and meetings are in private homes which are very hard for the government to find.  Use of editorial information could take place via paper copies the old fashioned way.  But most printers have a copying feature nowadays so anyone can copy stuff. Paper can be passed around the way they passed around Christian pamphlets and Bibles in USSR for years. 

The cell phone revolution would give any government crackdown fits.  Without phones, the economy comes to a hault. But things get recorded and transmitted by phones.  Even Iran, a primitive country with a lousy economy, can't shut down the dissidents and their phones.

All in all, I rather doubt Murrell's scenario.  I don't think even a Stalin could shut things down for long without being thrown out.  But then look at what happened to countries that went fascist.

Pig Latin

Say, if USA convictsSnowden, could we then use him as captured labor or parole him to work for the NSA.  I could see a Tea Party President using him as 4^th Amendment snoop on NSA reporting to Congress and to the People and to their several states. You know you have to use talent wherever you find it. 

    So if I have foreign exchange students who are like sons and daughters, with whom I communicate with emails constantly, are these being monitored by NSA?  If I express political opinion in those emails, could they haul me in?  (Well, I know, I’m hardly worth the jail space.)  One of our German exchange daughters told about her and a friend riding the trains in France headed for a fun weekend in Paris.  And all the French passengers were listening-in on their German conversation.  Because suddenly some of them wanted to take issue with what the girls were saying.  Annoyed, the kids began using English, only to discover that the French understood that too.  So they began using English pig-Latin and it made all the darned Frenchmen mad because they scowled and crossed their arms in protest.  Evidently they couldn’t understand pig-Latin. 

    Err, then do the rest of us need to develop a pig latin so that future governments won’t be able to understand what we are talking about?  The OK Indians have a solution.  Just speak in native language.  Very few people with understand it and the government has no one to translate.  Windtalkers.  My friend is in charge of getting Ponca Tribal teens to learn the Ponca language.  Few have much interest and only about 20 people are still fluent in the native tongue. 

     “Oh, you are so paranoid!” You will say.  “The government is collecting data on everyone and has no intent to use it.”  Of course.  Perhaps we should suspect nothing and just assure ourselves that all is well.  Every person in government has good intentions.  That is what the Germans did in 1934.  Then came the Night of the Long Knives when people started showing up at Bundestag (parliament) member’s homes, threatening them not to show up for a vote in the Reichstag.  Mostly the Nazi members attended and immediately declared marshal law.  The rest, as they say, is history.

    “So Mr. Maldono, we see you are a political activist that opposes the present regime.  If you would give up your activism we might be willing to give your granddaughter that lung transplant she needs so desperately.”  The NSA data center as well as IRS privacy violations in behalf of Obamacare is insidious.  If the 4^th Amendment’s unreasonable search and seizure clause doesn’t apply to this, when and where will it ever?

    But, you may protest my logic.  Obama is a cool guy and he would never violate anyone’s privacy.  Well in that case, another friend of mine is correct.  He deflects my concerns about how Obama might violate civil rights.  Obama, he says, is more like James I of England /Scotland than Mussolini or Stalin. He might be right. There is a dire warning.  James was the son of Catholic Mary Stuart when she was run out of Scotland, sought refuge in England, was thereupon imprisoned for 19 years and tragically beheaded.  James was crowned king of the Scots at the tender age of 10 months.  Raised by nannies and tutors to be a Protestant, he was very bright, and educated as well as any man in Europe in an era when most Scots couldn’t write their name.  But what do you get when you have a king who can’t remember when he wasn’t the king, had missing parents, and everyone bowed to him.  You get a narcissist, an egotist who thinks the world revolves around him.  (sounding familiar?)  James then inherited England when Elizabeth died in 1603.  He was not so much a tyrant as a college professor who was a king.  He was not too serious about religion and very squeamish about war.  When Germany was getting destroyed by the Hapsburgs in the Thirty Years War, James wouldn’t commit to help the endangered fellow Protestants, despite pleas by his parliament and privy council.  He derided parliament and badmouthed them. Disgusted, they issued the Great Protestation of 1621, whereupon he disbanded parliament in a clever move to get around the rules.  Finally, to appease the polls against himself, James declared a futile war against Spain in 1624.  Most historians think that if James had countered Austria, the Thirty Years War would have ended in a couple years—the 5 Years War?-- instead of killing half the population of Central Europe. The Thirty Years War should technically be called the first world war since it destroyed so much of Europe and eventually included just about every country (Sounds like Syria, when Obama doesn’t commit to action until the situation is too late and sets up the entire Middle East to explode. 

     James ruled both Presbyterian Scotland and Anglican England with differing faiths.  James decided to solve this by calling the Hampton Court Conference in which he declared that not only did he have a divine right to rule but that his word on doctrine was infallible.  This was a stunning thing, for only the popes had claimed this last.  The Conference went home more divided than ever.  Yet James, typically loose about faith issues, didn’t enforce his decree.  He was a scholar miscast as a ruler.  (There was one saving grace of Hampton, the resolution of the clergy to authorize the King James Bible.)  James was too wishy-washy to follow his edict, but he set in motion, the Great Revolution against his son, Charles.  Maybe this really is like Obama. Not the achiever, but the divider and critic of every other institution.  Not the hawk but the dodo.  Not the law writer, but the orator. Not the dictator, but setting us up for one.

Fathers

Albert Speer notes in his huge book of recollections about Hitler and Nazism that the German high command thought the Americans were no big deal when they entered the war on the other side.  A bunch of mongrels of impure race, unable to get along and accomplish anything, was the analysis.  D-day put an end to such talk.  Speer, as German Industrial Minister, watched the Americans simply swamp the Nazi industry by a factor of ten, in planes and tanks and just about every other weapon.  And far from being wimps, they challenged relentlessly, in the Battle of the Bulge, in the Operation Cobra breakout, in Sicily and in crossing the Rhine. 

            Men are supposed to grow up to be dangerous, take risks and be society’s providers. When Igor Sikorsky, inventor of the helicopter, made a bomb at age 8, and detonated it on the front porch blowing out all the windows of the house, his mother said, “Wait until your father comes home.”  Dad came home, laughed at his son’s audacity and suggested that in the future they build the bombs together—after they’d fixed windows.  My own dad used to announce the day we would work cattle as “time for a rodeo.”  And the time I wished out loud that I could climb that massive Sycamore tree, 100 feet, tallest in the timber, my grandfather told me to climb on the hay stacker and he would give me a 20 foot head start up the trunk.  Psychologist John Eldridge calls this quest for risk the Cowboy Stage of a man which typically peaks in the pre-adolescent but really continues throughout a lifetime. Dads encourage the cowboy risk. Moms usually just worry about the behavior. 

            Followed by the cowboy stage comes the warrior.  Warriors become accomplished in something.  They achieve.  They find their purpose.  When little Charlie Curtis ran for help when the Cheyennes were about to attack his own tribe of Kaws, he ran 65 miles in 19 hours and no one could figure out how such a small boy could do this.  His own tribal elders called him aside and questioned.  He attributed it to determination and divine intervention  to give him strength.  The elders, all of whom had done dream quests as young men, understood and were much impressed.  The kid had passed muster and went on to be Vice President of the United States.  The Kaw tribe took a second look at his Christian faith.  Being an accomplished warrior can only be awarded by a father or a group of men.  No woman can tell you how to be a real man. 

            Creation requires all of us to submit in humility to a purpose and order larger than ourselves.  That is the lesson of warriorhood.  You can be accomplished but you are never a god.  You need God as a guide and the rest of humanity as a team in order to survive.  And that is what those men of D-day had despite being just a couple years removed from the Grapes of Wrath.  The Nazis were wrong.  These Americans hung together.  Japanese pilots marveled that the Yanks had inferior planes but flew in such formations that they were unstoppable.  The Germans knew their equipment was better.  The Yanks had not been ready for the war. But their cowboys-turned-warriors were.

            And men know they need God as a moral compass.  Teens with no dad turn to peers, and a bunch of insecure boys make up the rules as they go along.  There is no real morality when this happens. But real men are noble and virtuous.  

            In all that we know about military history, it is not the technology or the the equipment or the spit and polish that makes the winner.  It is the espirit de corps, the discipline, teamwork and determination that constitute about 90% while technology matters 10%.  Charles Martel and the Franks were correctly thought to be dumb, ill-equipped barbarians by the Moors.  “They stood like a wall” against the Moorish cavalry at Tours because they had been trained to fight together and fought for their lives.  The same was true of American backwoods militia at Cowpens in the Revolutionary War.

            There is still a highly successful military in the United States.  There are still highly successful young men coming out of intact families.  But there is the growing minority of boys with no dad.  Nobody cheers their  tree-climbing or when they successfully tear down the chicken house.  Nobody salutes their stamina when they stuck their head out the iced-over cab of a truck to drive home 10 miles in -40 weather.  Nobody told them to go apologize for insulting an elderly lady.  And so those kids are gangstas, seeking peer approval when no Army, no dad gives it.  Peter Drucker told a nation who didn’t listen in 1970 that they would pay for the divorce culture with maladjusted and listless workers in the future.  And with little inner moral compass.

            That, Speer says, is what was at the core of Hitler’s monstrosity.  He was a boy fighting his Jewish origins, determined to prove himself a German man, but attempting it in frightening ways—wild oratory, radical socialism, and persecution of Jews and others who weren’t Germanic. Speer himself, more or less roped into the Nazi regime when they needed an industrial minister to supply the war, was always an outsider to the strange, depraved inner circle of Hitler.

 

           I guess that leaves me no great fan of the nanny state.  Men, according to feminazis are just inseminators.  But who will teach the kids to be honorable and brave?  Instead we get much higher probability for drop outs and druggies, rapists and unemployeds. Even a father like Huck Finn's humorously bad dad who cussed everything and everybody, seems better than none.        

             

The story behind our flea market

Our local Sunday Morning Flea Market came to an abrupt ending last week.  Someone fell over some of the crap, er merchandise, and sued naming the owner of the parking lot the deep pockets defendor.  The ensuing result was that the parking lot owner decided to close his obligation.  So the Flea Marketers are now looking for another lot.  My suggestion is that they demand the Trial Lawyers Association parking lot.  But since the Trial Lawyers have no such location, they would have to buy a parking lot somewhere.  An alternative is to use government parking areas on weekends.  These are rarely used on a weekend.  Plus, you can’t sue the government because you are the government and you can’t sue yourself.  There are several government lots—State Park of the Pioneer Woman Monument, city building parking, Vo Tech and High School.  I suppose the Head Start parking lot next to one of my rentals is too small.  The federal government workers habitually throw the tree limbs of their Chinese elms onto my lawn so I have to pick them up and dispose of them.  And why do they throw them onto my lawn?  So they can park in the shade under their own trees.  

            Today I was in the Tag Agency, which goes by the name DMV in most other states.  Several people have died at the Tag Agency due to strangulation by cob webs that have accumulated on their persons.  An old man was standing at the desk as we waited in line today and it took them nearly 45 minutes to figure out his car situation. The lady behind me said she thought he was trying to file a last will and testament.

            Why do we think government can fix things best? Comparing the government with private sector is like a baseball manager needing a pinch hitter in the bottom of the ninth.  Do you go with MVP who was given a day off or the government .184 hitter?   Inevitably something goes wrong and people clamor for the government to 'do something'.  Politicians thrive on doing such things.  There’s a big storm, like we are prone to have in Oklahoma.  Libs all say that the fix-up will stimulate the economy and the infrastructure will be rebuilt. Pah! Some help that is! Do you really think that we prosper by destroying property and wealth.  If that were the case, why not have a storm every day? Imagine the stimulus! What needs to be asked is this question, “What would people have done with that money if they didn’t have to spend it on re-building?  You could conceive of a massive earthquake having struck Silicon Valley years ago and the pols saying that the infrastructure is now rebuilt so wonderfully.  Yeah, but the Internet and iphones weren’t invented because of it. 

            So the people of OK are pitching in and helping their neighbors in the OKC area and the national media is stunned.  Why?  Do they expect us to sit and bellyache over FEMA not being here like they did in NY and NJ?  No, the sooner we get over this the better off us sooners will be.

            East coast crabbing is a sport, they say.   People talk about how the feds didn’t help Staten Island or Long Island enough.  It wasn’t fair!  Oh give me a break! The fairness arguments always sound like this, “That not fair that you have some benefit I don’t”  So then they take away that benefit from the privileged guy whereupon nobody has it.  Hence we are all equally miserable.  Fairness politics takes away the things that people aspire to.  It deprives the dreams.  It kills the American Dream. 

            To get ahead in life, stop fretting about all the things others have that you don’t.  Covetousness is not only a sin, it eats the soul away and makes talents go unused and worthless.

            Case in point.  A few years ago, I had a renter who could only find sporadic work and he apologized for being late with the rent.  I told him that at age 30, he was about where I was at age 30.  Perhaps he should figure out something he could do to supplement on the side.  And so he started re-fixing damaged things and doing flea markets.  Last I heard, he and wife had 3 kids and moved to Tulsa to a good job.  Don’t tell me flea markets are just junk.  Just let us have our flea markets and garage sales and don't try to come up with some sort of cash for clunkers program for them.  We're still doing fine, Oklahoma, without federal help.