Next in California: “Marriages” between kids ages 5 and 7

It looks like Proposition 8 is going down to defeat out here in California, at least according to the last Field Poll [.pdf]. It would reverse an absurd May 2008 California Supreme Court edict “allowing” so-called same-sex “marriage.”

The game was rigged from the start when Attorney General Jerry “Gov. Moonbeam” Brown wrote the title of the proposition to read, “Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry.” That’s what voters see when they consider the initiative. And we, as good, equality-loving Americans, wouldn’t want to take away anybody’s rights, would we?

Except same-sex “marriage” is an absurdity, and there is no right to an absurdity. It won’t be the last absurdity.

In Pakistan, two children, ages 5 and 7, just were “married“:

THE Muslim wedding of a seven-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl has been raided by police.

Cops arrested the Muslim cleric conducting the sick ceremony and the children’s parents in Pakistan’s largest city.

The cleric had not yet begun the ceremony of Mohammad Waseem, seven, and his bride Nishain Karachi, five – which was attended by 100 guests.

Pakistan law forbids marriage below the age of 18 – but some Muslim scholars say it is permissible if the bride and groom have reached puberty.

TV footage showed both children in traditional wedding clothes in the laps of policemen after the raid – the girl with tears running down her cheeks.

That’s Pakistan, a notoriously repressive country that doesn’t have “rights.” In California, the people have “rights,” including the “right” to same-sex “marriage” and of children to “marry.”

Soon, the California Supreme Court will order that children be allowed to “marry.” Soon after, Mohammad Waseem and Nishain Karachi will move here, with their extended families, to be “married.” After them, tens of millions of other foreigners will follow. They’ll also get all sorts of tax-funded benefits — free schooling, medicine, welfare — that are their “right.”

As a local anti-Prop. 8 lawn sign insists, “Equality for All.”

Pro-abortionists are lying about California’s Proposition 4, which would require parental notification before a child’s abortion

Out here in California we have a chance to require that parents be notified before a child has an abortion — if voters pass Proposition 4. Of course, abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. It’s the killing of an innocent child.

Abortion also is racist. Some 40% of abortions in America are of black babies, even though blacks make up just 13% of the population. So blacks are aborted at a rate almost four times as high as the rest of the population. Why Barack Obama is an ultra backer of abortion is a good question.

Yesterday on TV I saw an ad opposing Prop. 4. It showed a sleazy house, like one being foreclosed. The narrator says something like, Your daughter is safe and secure. But that’s not so in some families, where a daughter is abused by her father, gets pregnant, and needs to take care of her pregnancy without the abuser knowing about it.

It’s all a lie. It also shows how the pro-aborts also are anti-family.

The most likely scenario is that a young girl gets pregnant by her 25-year-old boyfriend, who committed statutory rape. He then takes her to the local Free Clinic for an abortion paid for by the taxpayers. So, he gets away with two crimes: rape and abortion. The abortionist makes a lot of money. The taxpayers are hit, even if they’re pro-life and hate abortion.

The girl goes home and sulks. Her parents don’t know what’s wrong. They take her to a psych jockey. He puts the girl on valium. Maybe she commits suicide.

If a school gives a girl an aspirin, it first must ask parental permission. But under current law, the parents are cut out if their daughter has an abortion — even though the parents are the ones who conceived her, raised her, and loved her, and the abortion means the killing of her child, their grandchild.

Two initiatives similar to Prop. 4 lost in recent years by close votes. So there’s a chance it will pass on Nov. 4 — if the abortionists’ lying propaganda, worthy of Dr. Goebbels, doesn’t hold sway once again.

Vote Yes on Proposition 4.

More on same-sex “marriage” — Yes on California’s Proposition 8

The biggest fraud this election isn’t the presidential election, although that’s a close second, but the vote over same-sex “marriage” out here in Nutsifornia. This shouldn’t even be an issue because there is no such thing as same-sex “marriage.” It’s a fraud, an absurdity.

But last May, four members of the California Supreme Court imposed on the state this “right.” The four should have been immediately removed from the court and exiled from the state. But these are insane times, so they remain on the court, and their preposterous edict remains in effect.

Voters on Nov. 4 will get to choose whether to enact a slight return to sanity by passing Proposition 8, which reverses the court ruling and bans same-sex “marriage.” But if it loses, the foolishness will become enshrined in state law with the stamp of approval of the voters. From then on, anyone who objects to this joke will be told, “Well, the people of California have spoken. They like same-sex ‘marriage.’ So shut up.”

My favorite magazine, Chronicles (subscribe here), just came out with its November election issue. Editor Thomas Fleming writes (not online):

Both camps [Republicans and Democrats] have their own reasons for the cordon sanitaire that has been placed, quite properly, around Mrs. Palin’s children. Since neither party has the slightest interest in decency or good manners, what they are really saying is that the way in which politicians conduct themselves or manage their family responsibilities is of no interest to the electorate. I wish someone had told the Republcians this when they were going after Bill Clinton. In some states, Bristol [Palin] could marry a Suzie instead of a Levi, and, before this generation passes away, she will be able to marry both Levi and Suzie and perhaps the family’s entire team of sled dogs, because marriage has been made the mere creature of the state, which can choose to define it in any way that pleases the current consensus of college professors, media moguls, and judges we call “public opinion.”

Polygamy next

Of course, you know that’s all going to happen. First the renegade Mormon sects will sue for the “right” of men to marry forty 15-year-old girls, using the same “equality” argument being used against Prop. 8 — and they’ll win. Then the animal rights fanatics will insist on their right to “marry” their pet gerbils.

How should family issues such as same-sex “marriage” be addressed? I mean politically, because there can be no such thing as same-sex marriage. It is a mere figment of the imagination like the unicorn, but worse: It is a self-contradictory figment, something like a unicorn with two horns. As a colleague once sagely observed to me, erotic relations between two men or two women are not sexual, since the very word sex requires male and female.

Dr. Fleming includes a useful discussion of the difference between a democracy and a republic, which I will leave to the print edition because our state flag says we are the “California Republic.”

Since marriage, family, and kinship are prior to the state, which draws its legitimacy from these connections of blood and sex, a true republic would be loath to interfere in marriage and, at the very least, could never redefine this basic institution of our common life, either by permitting no-fault divorce or by creating the fiction of civil unions between homosexuals, which is merely marriage by another name.

There is, in fact, a wealth of solid information, from historians and anthropologists, on Western and non-Western cultures, and despite the creative richness and ingenuity men and women have displayed in devising exotic forms of marriage and family, they converge, statistically, upon a human norm of a monogamous pair of a faithful wife and a not always perfectly faithful husband mated more or less for life and dedicated to the happiness and well-being of their children over whom they exercise something like sovereign authority.

It is from the family and from networks of extended kinfolks that larger social and political structures have been developed, up to and including the nation-state and the world state that is being constructed in our lifetime. The family constructed civilization and the state, not vice versa.

De-legitimizing the state

Dr. Fleming’s point is one I have been making to my libertarian friends: The state (meaning here the government as the holder of monopoly sovereignty, not just the state of California) has no right redefine marriage. Doing so dissolves marriage and de-legitimizes the state. If Prop. 8 is defeated, families will have no alternative but to react to the state the way a mother would to an adder attacking her children.

Civilization and political systems are fragile, but marriage and family are natural institutions, and although they can be corrupted, distorted, and damaged by human arrogance and folly, the results will always be the same: social collapse followed by a renewal of all the ancient and beautiful things without which human life is impossible.

Maybe Prop. 8’s opponents should campaign with this theme: “Keep same-sex ‘marriage’ so civilization collapses instanter and we can more quickly begin rebuilding it.”

Dr. Fleming adds:

If we could ever succeed in lifting the dead hand of government from our everyday lives — cutting taxes and rolling back virtually all the social legislation of the past 100 years — we should not have to worry too much about the state of the family….

Get the state OUT of marriage, not deeper into it

Libertarians especially, listen up to this next part:

One obvious answer to the questions raised by same-sex “marriage” and no-fault divorce is that it should not be the state’s business to define or even regulate marriage. Marriage, as a good republican [small “r” here; not the political party] should understand, is not a private contract between individuals or a matter for legislation. Marriage unites families, not individuals, and if the families belong to a religion, their marriage customs will be regulated by their church.

The one helpful thing that a government can do is not to interfere in the right of private contract that would allow a Christian couple to draw up a marriage covenant, restricting the justification for divorce to specific offenses, stipulating custody, and regulating inheritance. If two businessmen can form a partnership, why have so many state legislators tried to prevent husbands and wives from doing the same thing?

I’ll answer that: It’s because so many state legislators want do dump their wives for younger models, and are too cheap to spring for a trip to Vegas. But there’s no reason we have to put up with their continuing assault — going on 40 years now — on marriage and family.

Whatever happens to Prop. 8 on Nov. 4, the call should go up: Give us the right to private marriage contracts!

Yes on Prop. 8

In the meantime, if you’re unfortunate enough to live here in the Pyrite State, vote Yes on Prop. 8.

Chickenhawk Ben Shapiro’s propaganda film

A McCain voter (but not supporter) sent me this video by Ben Shapiro, who’s a chickenhawk. As I’ve noted, Shapiro is just 23, so he easily could join the U.S. Marines. A smart fellow, he could learn Arabic and help G.I.’s in Baghdad talk with the locals.

The video tries to get Christians to oppose Obama, but does so by being obsessed with warmongering. It wrongly identifies Ahmadinejad as Iran’s leader, when his post of “president” is not the top job, which is held by a mullah.

“Christianity is not pacifism,” the video intones. True, but Christianity believes in Just War Theory. Both the Iraq and Afghan wars violate Just War Theory because, to cite just 3 reasons:

a) They were not begun by the legitimate authority (the U.S. Congress, the only body the Constitution authorizes to declare war; it didn’t), but by the president.

b) They were not begun with a just cause. The Iraq War was justified because Saddam supposedly had WMDs and ties to al-Qaeda. That was all just lies, as some of us pointed out even before Bush launched the war. The Afghan War was begun to get Osama bin Laden, a just cause, but quickly turned aside from that to “nation building,” which is not just, especially in an area that has repeatedly expelled every invader, from Alexander the Great to the British Empire to the Soviet Empire. Osama still is out there, maybe not even in Afghanistan anymore.

c) They were not begun as a last resort. Saddam was cooperating in weapons inspections. The Taliban were only party cooperating in the hunt for bin Laden but, in any case, could have been circumvented to go after him. Taking down the whole Taliban regime was not necessary, especially in a tribal country with a weak central government.

No wonder both popes of this decade, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, opposed Bush’s aggressions. That’s the true Christian position.

Obama not a dove

Chickenhawk Shapiro’s video goes on to maintain that Obama is a pacifist who would dismantle the U.S. military. This is just pro-McCain propaganda. As Justin Raimondo points out, war suppoeters now are flocking to the pro-war Obama campaign.

The video attacks Obama for wanting to negotiate with Iran’s government. But now Bush is actually doing that. It tries to get us afraid of Venezuelan boss Chavez, the Caribbean pipsqueak.

Enough. The Shapiro video quotes Orwell, but is itself Orwellian.

I again invite Mr. Shapiro to become Lt. Shapiro, USMC — and not as a JAG  lawyer, but as a front-line jarhead. The Marines are still looking for a few good men.

He now practices law in Los Angeles, so here’s a link to a local Marine recruiter.

5 days to the Nov. 4 abomination of desolation

And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate. (Daniel 9:27.)

I never met my maternal grandmother, but she had a saying my mother passed on to me: “Don’t wish your life away.”

Yet never have I wished anything more than for Nov. 4, 2008 to come and pass. This election is the “abomination of desolation,” the nadir of America’s political life, the End Times of the Republic, the disaster of disasters, the Hurricane Katrina of plebiscites.

Out of about 130 million Americans eligible to run for president, our rigged two-party system — our duopoly — upchucked the two worst possible candidates. More than 100 million voters will choose one of those two under the delusion that it is a real choice, and that it will do any good.

A million or so of us, perhaps more deluded — myself included — will vote for third-party candidates who are as relevant as a fly on Godzilla’s tail.

I’ve been avidly following these risible elections since 1964, when I was 9 years old. They get worse every year. The issues are worse, the media coverage more absurd, the delusions of the voters more psychotic.

At this point, I’m supposed to insert Churchill’s cant phrase, “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.” But we don’t really have democracy. If you still think we do, just attend your next local school-board meeting and try to change the curriculum. You can’t. It’s been set by unelected bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Education.

What we have is a massive bureautocracy (rule by bureaucracy) in which the minutest things in our lives, from the size of our shower spigots to our very marriages — the very sanctum sanctorum of our families — is run by millions of government dweebs with Napoleon complexes. In today’s America, freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to decide by yourself.

At least on Nov. 5 the lastest farce will be over with and we can get back to our regular prison routine.

China’s role in this election — America as No. 2

America’s self-absorption, so grating to the rest of the world, is about to come to an end. Our foolish government has sharply reduced the productive capacity of our people, wasting our treasure — and our young folks’ lives — in disastrous imperial adventures.

Meanwhile, the Chinese have dumped Maoism for capitalism, have curbed Mao’s own foreign adventurism, and have enjoyed 10% average annual growth rates for 30 years — something unprecedented in human history.

Our candidates — McCain and Obama — should be talking about China. But I haven’t heard them doing that. Obama is obsessed with his socialist schemes — Maoism Lite. McCain wants to expand even further America’s bankrupt empire.

Meanwhile the Chinese are over there, like Confucian sages, tending to their business.

Sascha Matuszak reports from China:

China currently stands alone in its ability to weather virtually any storm the banking crisis in the U.S. whips up. With almost $2 trillion in foreign currency reserves, China can afford to be unconcerned about an economic decline in the West that spreads throughout the world, hurting dependent and emerging economies from Pakistan to Panama.

China is not completely insulated from the economic crisis – a slowdown in orders from abroad and a credit crunch at home will hurt the Chinese economy like it hasn’t been hurt before – but the difference is preparation. China is prepared, socially and economically, for a slowdown. The U.S. is not.

Maybe that’s because China’s leaders were trained as engineers, whereas America’s are Skull and Bones scions (the Bushes and Kerry), a “pump-headed” bypass survivor (Cheney), a “community activist” lawyer (Obama), and the burned-out, dim-witted son and grandson of admirals (McCain).

Of course, the Chinese could start doing something stupid, such as invade Taiwan. And now and then in its long history China splits into separate territories run by warlords.

But otherwise, the Chinese seem to be playing it smart. Only about 400 million of 1.3 billion Chinese are in their advanced economy, meaning they have to bring the others in to avoid big problems. As they do so, within a decade or two they will surpass America as the world’s largest and most powerful economy.

The only chance America has of staying ahead is to sharply reduce our own government’s Maoist interference in our economy, allowing a thousand free markets to bloom. End the empire, massively cut taxes and regulations, imitate pacific Switzerland rather than the expansionist Soviet Union.

Yet Bush has done the opposite, in his 8 years — and especially the last 8 weeks — putting the government even more in charge of our economy, and our lives, than ever before. And President Obama promises even more Maoism.

The Bush years will be seen as the “tipping point,” to use our modern phrase, when we plunged downward and irrecoverably fell behind China. Bush and the Neo”conservative” ideologues have spent 8 years attacking the patriotism of anyone who questioned their misrule. Yet it is they who took America from No. 1 to No. 2.

My New Deal for John Kerry

News item:

The nation’s battered economy needs an old-fashioned “Rooseveltian lift” of regulatory reforms and government spending on the infrastructure, clean energy and other sectors, U.S. Sen. John Kerry said yesterday.

Except there was no “Rooseveltian lift.” President-for-Life FDR prolonged the Great Depression until 1946, recovery occurring until after he died, Republicans took charge of Congress, and passed a big tax cut over President Truman’s veto.

But since Kerry wants a New Deal, I have one for him. Just as FDR confiscated  property to pay for his Mussolini-inspired schemes that controlled people’s lives, Kerry’s wife’s wealth — something like $1 billion — will be confiscated, entirely. Even if he wins his Senate re-election bid on Nov. 4,  he and she will be forced to live on a salary no greater than that of a Starbucks barista.

Let this fat cat live like the rest of us for a change and we’ll see how much he likes socialism.

O.C. Register abandons free markets for economic nationalism

The old newspaper where I wrote editorials for 19 years, the Orange County Register, today came out against free markets and for economic nationalism. Libertarian founder R.C. Hoiles (pictured at right) must be spinning in his grave as fast as an old 78 rpm turntable.

The editorial, “So much for gouging: The price of oil drops, a relief for our wallets and for our national security,” is on the recent decline in oil and gas prices. As I wrote on Oct. 10, the major reasons for this decline are the declining price of gold against the dollar (all commodities are tied closely to gold’s price), meaning lower overall inflation; and relative peace in the Middle East, with an attack by the U.S. or Israel on Iran less likely, for now.

I also noted that the price of oil usually falls within the range of 10 to 15 barrels per ounce of gold. That ratio has held up since World War II, despite many wars, recessions, the end of the Cold War, etc.

On Oct. 10, I calculated that ratio at 11.2. Today, Oct. 29, it’s a ratio of 11.1 ($68.40 for NYMEX crude, $760.1 for gold).

So, nothing has changed in 3 weeks — except the value of that funny money we call the dollar.

Foreign mischief?

However, the Register notes that oil’s drop (really an apparent drop)…

has a strong potential of making the world at large a slightly less dangerous place.

Three countries in particular, Venezuela, Iran and Russia, have used a good deal of the money they acquired when oil prices were much higher to bolster their ability to make mischief. If international oil prices stay (relatively) low, they are likely to be less troublesome than their leaders had hoped they could be.

The only reason any of these countries is of concern to America is because of our globe-straddling empire — which has bankrupted us. First, what “mischief” has Russia caused?  The Register says:

Russia’s invasion of Georgia this summer (following Georgia’s attacks in South Ossetia) was met with widespread criticism but no effective action. In part this was because too much of the U.S. military is tied down in Iraq, and in part it was attributed to the growing dependence of Western Europe on Russian natural gas.

At least they note that Georgia started the war. Indeed, a new BBC report just found that it Georgia’s troops committed war crimes — on orders from the close Bush and McCain ally President Mikheil Saakashvili — when they entered the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali. The Russians stopped the war crimes and expelled the criminals.

And anyway, what business is it of America’s what goes on in that region of the world? What does the Register mean by the U.S. being unable to take “effective action”? Should we have sent troops there to fight the Russians? Maybe they would like to volunteer and join the U.S. Army? Maybe they would like to dig me a bomb shelter as protection against Russia’s 10,000 nukes?

We don’t need a new Cold War and the Russians are not communists anymore, nor are they even a remote threat to America — unless our insane government incites them. The Russkies actually are less communist than the USA. The top Russian income tax rate is 11%, America’s is 35% (going up, up, up under President Obama), plus another 10.3% in California.

Venezuelan boss Chavez is a minor mischief-maker and always has been.

Amok on Iran

On Iran, the Reg writes:

If oil prices stay low, Iran may have to cut back foreign meddling and reach some kind of compromise on its nuclear ambitions. President Ahmadinejad, who has been steadily losing popularity anyway, could well be defeated in next June’s elections.

Is Iran going to stop meddling with its Shiite buddies in Iraq? Hardly. And who put the Shiites in power in Iraq, dumping the Sunnis who don’t like the Iranians? Bush and the Neo”conservatives.” Oh.

According to Bush’s own National Intelligence Estimate, Iran stopped its nuke program in 2003.

President Ahmadinejad actually holds a position below that of the mullahs who really run Iran, and is just a loudmouth. The Bush administration itself is working to establish an “interests section” in Iran.

America needs peace, not empire

The Reg editorial seems to have been dictated by Dick Cheney’s office.

The fact is, there is no energy crisis, as I wrote in August.

Further, the United States nowadays has no enemies abroad but those our foul government itself makes. We need to return to our Founding Fathers’ philosophy of no foreign entanglements.

The U.S. government’s immense foreign empire has bankrupted us. It should be dismantled entirely, the troops dismissed to return to their familes, and the money saved returned to taxpayers.

The Register used to understand that.

Nazinomics

The ongoing centralization of the U.S. economy is the same as that of the Nazi era. What does that tell us about Bush-Bernanke-McCain-Obama-Paulson-Pelosi-Reid? (Via LewRockwell.com’s blog.)

See if this sounds familiar, from Gunter Reimann, The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism (1939), p. 174:

The most serious financial problem for the Nazi State is not the danger of a breakdown of the currency and banking system, but the growing illiquidity of banks, insurance companies, saving institutions, etc. . . . Germany’s financial organizations are again in a situation where their assets which should be kept liquid have become ‘frozen’. . . . But the totalitarian State can tighten its control over the whole financial system and appropriate for itself all private funds which are essential for the further existence of a private economy. Yet the institutions which still exist as private enterprises are not allowed to go bankrupt. For an artificial belief in credits and financial obligations has to be maintained in open conflict with realities.

Republicans should blame themselves for ACORN corruption of the election

Republicans rightly are upset that ACORN, an activist group, is using federal tax money for political activism and electioneering, possibly illegal.

But Republicans have had 28 years, since Reagan’s first term, to cut off the funding, and haven’t done it.

When I got out of the U.S. Army in early 1982, I ended up that fall in Washington, D.C., as a young conservative activist. One of our movements was to “De-fund the Left.” Terrible name. Sounded like “De-fend the Left,” but nobody could think of a better one.

The policy was to cut off all the federal money that was going to ACORN, LULAC, the Legal Services Corp. and other leftist swine drinking at the taxpayers’ trough.

Not much happened. Pretty quickly, the Reagan administration was taken over by VP George H.W. Bush and his gang of “moderates,” such as Jim Baker. A conservative friend of mine wrote a song back then that had the lines — run a slow blues tune in your head —

Ooooh, I got the Jimmy Baker blues.
Ooooh, I got the Jimmy Baker blues.
Just when I thought we won
He say, Ha, ha! You lose.”

The unfabulous Bush and Baker boys shut down any attempts to cut funding to the Left. They didn’t care about any of that nutty conservative stuff.

When Republicans took over Congress in 1994, they had another chance, and did at first try to cut down spending on this and other wasteful things. But it didn’t go far. President Clinton flummoxed them.

The current President Bush hasn’t cared about any of this either. Instead, he has tried to get funding for conservative churches through his “Faith-Based Initiatives” scam — money that Obama now will get to give to his favored activist churches.

Now, ACORN and the others still are around, causing mischief. They won’t throw the election to Obama because John McCain’s incompetence already took care of that. But these groups, using your tax money, will make Obama’s victory look bigger than it actually is.

It’s another case of Republicans, yet again, hurting themselves and not acting on principle. Do they do anything else?