Bush's marriage plan
Last post 02-17-2004, 5:42 PM by KGBMan. 15 replies.
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 02-17-2004, 5:42 PM |
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Leah
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Joined on 11-20-2003
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(Tennessee) USA
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Posts 6,064
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Ron Paul reacts to Bush's costly plan to promote the sanctity of marriage-
http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2004/tst011904.htm
Government and Marriage
"If government subsidized beaches, we would have a shortage of sand."
-Ronald Reagan
The president recently announced a new program designed to promote “healthy marriages” by using welfare funds to subsidize media campaigns and feel-good relationship counseling, all courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. In fact, Mr. Bush proposes spending $1.5 billion over the next five years, all to promote an institution that flourished for centuries without state encouragement.
The irony is that an initiative aimed at promoting moral values will be funded immorally, by taxing people who may have no interest in such government folly.
The idea is not new, as politicians have talked about using government to advance marriage for decades. But federal promotion of marriage, even if well-intentioned, is a form of social engineering that should worry anyone concerned with preserving a free society. The federal government has no authority to promote or discourage any particular social arrangements; instead the Founders recognized that people should live their lives largely free of federal interference. This is not to say that the Founders intended or imagined a libertine America. On the contrary, they envisioned an America with vibrant religious, family, social, and civic institutions that would shape a moral nation. They understood that strong private institutions, so important in a free and just society, could not coexist with a strong, centralized government.
The failed history of welfarism and socialism in America shows that government programs ultimately erode our culture by damaging personal virtue. When government ostensibly attempts to promote culture, it always further erodes liberty. The administration’s proposal only expands the reach of the federal welfare state, even if for supposedly conservative ends. Healthy marriages are not the result of government programs. Healthy marriages are the result of individual conviction and personal responsibility, neither of which can be mandated by government.
Government is not morality, government is force- and forcing taxpayers to fund another silly program will not strengthen the institution of marriage. If Mr. Bush really wants to promote marriage, he should work to dismantle the soul-destroying welfare system that rewards out-of-wedlock births. He should work to end the judicial assault on religious liberty. He should urge Congress to cut spending and taxes, so that more money can flow into churches and private charities. The president certainly is correct that marriage is important, and the need for stable, two-parent families is apparent. We should all be quite skeptical, however, of claims that government programs can fix the deep-rooted cultural problems responsible for the decline of the American family.
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| 02-17-2004, 6:17 PM |
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| 02-17-2004, 6:43 PM |
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Anais
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Joined on 02-20-2003
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( ) USA
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Posts 4,246
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All these love haters.....
Check this out..... lots of love in San Fran.... one lesbian couple has been together for 51 years! That is a marriage if ever there was one. I know another lesbian couple that's been together for 20 years.... Call a spade a spade.
San Francisco mayor defends same-sex weddings
SAN FRANCISCO, California (CNN) --As hundreds of lesbian and gay couples surrounded San Francisco's City Hall for a chance to be married, the city's mayor said Tuesday that marriage between same-sex couples is "inevitable" and that anything less is "fundamentally wrong."
Mayor Gavin Newsom's controversial move to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples could come to an end, at least temporarily, when judges hear two legal challenges Tuesday afternoon. But the mayor promised to "fight hard" for his position.
"There's also a constitution in the state of California that I swore to uphold just 39 days ago," he told CNN's "American Morning." "The bottom line is I took an oath of office and read that constitution, and nowhere in there did it say that I should discriminate."
Nearly 2,500 gay couples have been married in San Francisco since Thursday -- 825 in a chilling rain on Monday -- and Newsom said the marriages would continue until a court stops them.
Each couple paid $82 for a marriage application and a $13 license fee in exchange for the certificate.
As newlywed couples emerged Monday from the rotunda proudly holding their marriage licenses, trumpets blared, a mariachi band played and they were showered with bubbles. Cars driving by often honked their horns in support and the crowd outside cheered.
San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Kevin McCarthy has the first opportunity to stop the marriages when he hears an injunction request from Campaign for California Families at 11 a.m. (2 p.m. ET).
Three hours later, Superior Court Judge James Warren is slated to hear a similar challenge from the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund.
The judges could void the licenses that have been issued, simply stop granting more of them or allow them to continue. One legal expert said that, because so many of those tying the knot are from outside California, the case could wind up in federal court. Couples have been traveling to the city to marry because San Francisco does not require proof of residency to wed.
Randy Thomasson, the executive director for the Campaign for California Families, said his group and the Alliance Defense Fund are going to court "to protect marriage and uphold the state law."
"State law of California says that marriage is only for a man and a woman," Thomasson told CNN. "The renegade mayor of San Francisco is violating the state law. He's pretending to be a dictator. He's imposing his own values upon the citizenry, and he is really out of order."
Newsom, when told what Thomasson had said, laughed politely and told CNN that he doesn't "see the world with the same set of eyes that [Thomasson] sees the world."
"I see a world that I saw over the course of this weekend where people were literally coming, from states across this nation, coming together because they have been in a loving relationship for decade after decade, and they want the same privileges and rights and obligations that were extended to my wife and I," Newsom said.
"That's the kind of world that I want to live in," Newsom said. "That's the kind of world that I think the constitution of the state of California, for that matter, the U.S. Constitution, provides and protects."
The court challenge is based on a 2000 state ballot initiative approved by voters that declares that California recognizes only marriages between a man and woman.
Newsom said that he -- and the hundreds of couples who have been married -- "know the limitations, know the challenges and know the hurdles" that face them.
Citing the fight to make interracial marriage legal in the United States -- from 1948 to 1967, "the year of my birth," Newsom said -- the mayor told CNN he was not content to wait for what he sees as "inevitable."
"It's a question of time," he said. "If we don't succeed today, or we don't succeed in the courts, because of the actions we took in the last few days ... eventually we are going to succeed."
The long-held bans on interracial marriages were "fundamentally wrong," he said, as are bans on gay marriages that prevent couples "like Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, who have been together for 51 years, [from being] able to consummate that in the way my wife Kimberly and I were able to do."
Lyon and Martin, who in 1955 founded the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian organization in the country, were the first same-sex couple to be married in San Francisco on Thursday.
The issue of gay marriage could become heated during this election year.
Currently, 38 states have passed laws forbidding the recognition of gay marriages. President Bush in his State of the Union address said he was prepared to support a constitutional amendment to prevent "activist judges" from "redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives."
The issuing of the licenses in San Francisco began as lawmakers in Massachusetts debated a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. After a third attempt to pass the measure failed Thursday, the Legislature recessed its constitutional convention until March 11, when it is expected to take up the issue again. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has ordered the Legislature to allow gays to marry by May.
Anais
"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
Anais Nin
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| 02-17-2004, 6:46 PM |
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| 02-17-2004, 6:46 PM |
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| 02-17-2004, 6:52 PM |
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| 02-17-2004, 6:55 PM |
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| 02-17-2004, 6:57 PM |
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TAP3AH
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Joined on 07-17-2003
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Washington (DC) USA
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Posts 5,459
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Laws Be Damned
By Al Rantel (who's by the way, openly gay)
Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2004
There is a new political development in America that should frighten every law abiding citizen in this country. That is the growing disregard for people who follow the law and play by the rules, and the rewarding of those who do not.
Where I live in California we have two concurrent stories going on that demonstrate clearly what is at issue. The first one involves the Mayor of San Francisco who, though sworn to uphold the laws and the Constitution of California in his just taken oath of office, now allows and instructs city government to break those laws.
Under California’s penal code, he might very well be committing a felony. Mayor Newsome has decided that he doesn’t like California’s law that says marriage is only between one man and one woman and so he orders marriage licenses to be issued to hundreds of gay couples waiting in line at city hall.
The public and the law be damned, the Mayor will do what he wants. Meantime, Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger has a “no comment” for the media when asked about it, and the State’s Attorney General musters a statement that no one has asked him to issue a legal opinion. Are they serious?
Imagine for a moment if some local public official starting giving out gun licenses en masse because he did not like California’s oppressive anti-gun laws? The entire weight of the media elite and the state would be down upon his head. The irony is there is in fact a right to bear arms as stated in the now ignored second amendment to the Unites States Constitution. There is no right to get married.
The second example is the newest move in California only weeks after a similar law was repealed due to huge public opposition to allow those people in this country illegally to obtain California drivers licenses. The Governor now says he is close to a deal with the state’s liberal Democrats that run the legislature to bring back the idea with a few new safeguards like background checks.
Yes, background checks for people who are already living outside the law and who as illegals are notorious for having more false documents than Saddam Hussein’s weapons manufacturers. Those who have chosen to ignore and outright violate the nation’s laws on how one enters into this country would be rewarded with the most important piece of state documentation, the drivers license. As we all know, this photo identification in a country that does not have a national ID card is used even to enter the country when you come from places like Mexico or Canada, but is also used as ID to board commercial aircraft.
So here we are living in a country that stands for the rule of law and not the rule of a single individual or group of individuals, and those who choose to break the law are not only allowed to keep on doing so but in the case of the drivers license controversy, they are given a reward for thumbing their noses at the rest of us.
What will happen to our society when people begin to ask what law they can break that they don’t like? What will happen to our society when it finally becomes clear to law abiding citizens that those who do not obey the laws are not only not worse off than they, but in some ways are better off?
Just think, in the nation’s most populous state today, you can get an illegal marriage license and soon be illegal and get a drivers license. Not only will public officials not stop you, but they will even help you to break the rules. Even the tough guy Governor will not be able to muster a comment when he used to talk for living.
America has never been on such a morally ambiguous path, but no intelligent person can really believe all of this can make our country better, safer, or stronger as a nation. And we embark on this road at our own peril.
"Вошел в интернет, как в женщину..."
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