Posted on 02/14/2011 10:32:05 AM PST by re_tail20
Social conservatives say they're trying to address the problems of family breakdown, crime and welfare costs, but there's a huge disconnect between the problems they identify and the policy solutions they propose. It's almost like the man who looked for his keys on the thoroughfare, even though he lost them in the alley, because the light was better.
Social conservatives tend to talk about issues such as abortion and gay rights, stem cell research and the role of religion "in the public square": "Those who would have us ignore the battle being fought over life, marriage and religious liberty have forgotten the lessons of history," said Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) at the Family Research Council's 2010 Values Voter Summit.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, at the same summit, said: "We need to understand there is a direct correlation between the stability of families and the stability of our economy…. The real reason we have poverty is we have a breakdown of the basic family structure." And Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said: "It's impossible to be a fiscal conservative unless you're a social conservative because of the high cost of a dysfunctional society."
Those are reasonable concerns. As a 2009 Heritage Foundation report stated, children born to single mothers "score lower on tests, have increased chances for committing a crime, have higher chances of living in poverty, experience more emotional and behavioral problems, are more likely to abuse drugs or alcohol and have higher chances of becoming pregnant as teens." And social problems like that do tend to lead to higher government spending.
But those problems have nothing to do with abortion or gay marriage, the issues that social conservatives talk most about.
(Excerpt) Read more at articles.latimes.com ...
Man, I hate soiling my browser by clicking on that link...I guess I’ll do it when I get home...
Lolololol
Oh really? Why is it, then, that the most rabid abortionists all look like:
Why is it that the proponents of gay marriage are too damn lazy to advocate that people in their communities use wills, durable powers of attorney or other legal instruments to secure the "rights" they claim to crave but are so active and vocal in demanding to overturn the 6000 year old tradition of marriage and families which serves the other 97% or so of us in order to conform to their perverted worldview?
People who want to solve social problems by government social engineering are doomed to failure.
They HATE Any and All forms of Godliness and Righteousness. THey HATE any standard of morality that declares their
actions and consciences as guilty of being wrong.
To "escape" from guilt, they want to outlaw GOD and His institutions that HE has bestowed upon mankind [fatherhood/masculinity, motherhood/ femininity, marriage, family, etc.].
They begin by perverting and, when successful, they move-on to re-defining. After that, they work to abolish by law and/or penalty of death.
I have to thank the Cato guys for reminding me, and often at opportune moments, why Libertarians really, really can’t be trusted.
Make that “embryonic stem cell research”. Notice how the qualifier is being left off, by leftist commentators, now that it's obvious that only adult, and umbilical-cord stem cell research are producing useful results.
Example 1: The Black American Community (70% OOW birth rate).
Example 2: The UK Chav culture (44% overall UK)
Example 3: Iceland (+65% OOW birth rate, still in financial crisis)
Boaz was a useful warrior for economic liberty back in the Reagan era, but his understanding of matters social is distorted because of his own, um, social problem.
The reason social conservatives defend marriage by keeping poofters in check is that the cultural import of homosexuality undercuts being a husband and father. And there is no civilization without husbands and fathers.
Part of this picture that is rarely talked about is that homosexual men are disproportionately likely to abuse children: At 1-to-3 percent of the male population, they manage to commit about 30 percent of acts of child molestation. Allowing homosexuality to be put in society's "shop window" is not consistent with the security of the family.
Boaz shows why you can't rely on "economic conservatives" who are social liberals. Unless you're also a social conservative, you're blind to what makes a national economy work: the family economy.
“Gay marriage” and the abortion license are very closely related to the crisis of unwed motherhood and divorce which Boaz identifies as the genuine social problem we should be confronting. There are only two ways to keep a society on the rails. You can have a free society that governs itself in accord with a strict moral code and requires a minimum of government coercion to function. You can also have a coercive, tyrannical government that maintains order by force. Libertarians like David Boaz just don't understand that if you let morality decay you get an explosion of social problems and liberty goes by the boards.
The left’s crusade to celebrate homosexuality and abortion is part of a larger project — uprooting the bourgeois morality that supports our bourgeois culture so we will have no alternative to the totalitarian Utopia leftists want to construct. Lax divorce laws were also part of that project, but that ship sailed decades ago. The left has taught generation after generation to think that sex has no serious moral implications and bears with it no responsibilities. Marriage is just a symbol of a private understanding between two people and any form of sexual gratification is good as long as all parties consent.
A culture that takes that view of sex can't maintain strong families. Addressing our serious social problems means rebuilding our sexual morality. We can't do that if we insist on normalizing homosexuality and proclaiming that abortion is a constitutional right.
What part of this does the Cato Institute fail to grasp?
“The left has taught generation after generation to think that sex has no serious moral implications and bears with it no responsibilities. Marriage is just a symbol of a private understanding between two people and any form of sexual gratification is good as long as all parties consent.”
Some of us are willing to fight. The root of all this is here. Fix families, and much of the social ills will go away.
I’m down for the fight. Every conservative is. Very few, if any, libertarians are, which is what makes them so annoying.
Good! We need more folks like you!
“What part of this does the Cato Institute fail to grasp?”
All of it. I know those people.
The key is that the moral code cannot be generated or handed down from government.
I would encourage Mr. Boaz to consider what abortion has done to the black family and then attempt to dismiss it as an issue ancillary to the breakdown of society.
Unfortunately, Mr. Boaz is absolutely right here.
Many Christian conservatives obsess about homosexuality because it is classified as sin in the Bible. In the NT where it is mentioned, it is as part of a fairly lengthy list of other sexual and non-sexual sins, not something uniquely evil in its own right. Yet you will have to look a long time to find a socially conservative Christian who spends 1/10 as much time denouncing premarital or even extramarital heterosexual sex as he does deploring homosexual sex.
Easy divorce has indeed caused far more destruction to our social fabric that homosexuality, but "Christians" are little if any more likely to stay married than unbelievers.
BTW, I oppose homosexuality and abortion. I just don't believe the "popular" sins such as divorce and fornication should be left out so we can keep tickling our own ears. Jesus denounced divorce. He didn't say a thing about homosexuality.
That is, indeed, the key. Morals are part of the private realm. The government may need to reinforce them (or at least leave them alone) in order for society to thrive, but it can’t be in the business of revising them. I couldn’t agree more.
Well said, SamuraiScot, well said indeed!
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