David’s Ramblings

Disclaimer

My good friend Mad Cow and I have started a string of politics posts. To make sense of the posts, it’s probably better if you start at the beginning and work your way up to the latest. See that beginning here:
Start of the politicsMy responseRetort

Now to the fun

Starting with my claim that Mad Cow was making up crap. (“Malarkey without backing”) I said this because of his quote here: “Mr. Bush seems to misinterpret this notion [of small government] as meaning ‘Same amount of power, just less people’.” I again state that there’s not really anything I can see Bush doing today that shows him of this opinion. I again ask Mad Cow to clarify exactly how Bush is attempting to accomplish this supposed idea.

And, for those of you dumb enough (MC…) to still think Bush declared war on Iraq, HE DIDN’T! Stop trying to say he did. In fact, you say that he did here, then go on at the bottom to claim that Congress started it, just as it should be. He may have convinced them to do it, but that’s what part of his position as President is – to persuade Congress to take action. When it came down to it, it was their choice as much as it was his. If you’re going to blame someone in the government for the war in Iraq, blame all that helped HJR 114 go through, not just President Bush. Just because he’s a jackass doesn’t mean he’s the only one.

Abortion

I realize that my stance on abortion might be ridiculous to some. Heaven forbid I point out the logic that once conception occurs, a child WILL be born, and to kill that embryo is just killing a HUMAN BEING before it DOES (not might, does) fully develop. To argue against contraceptives is to take my argument and twist it out of context. Before conception, sex only provides a chance, not a certainty.

A child might be born, but it has not even happened yet. The components are not humans, and will never grow to become one on their own. To stop them from meeting is not to kill a child because it’s not a person until after conception. After conception, IT WILL BE BORN, and IT IS A COMPLETE HUMAN. Before that, it MIGHT BE BORN, and IT’S NOT YET HUMAN. This is in fact a great argument for contraceptives, because if you’re not ready for the conception of a human being, you’d better not let one come about.

Gays and Civil Unions/Marriage

If all civil union is to you is living together, gays already have that.

I’m not narrow-minded in saying gays also have the same right to be married as any others, because this is a simple statement of fact. Your analogy is off that where you say gays are asking for strawberry, they are in fact asking for sushi. When they complain about it, the ice cream man explains that he does not sell sushi, because that’s not his job. He goes on to tell them that he doesn’t want to make sushi ice cream because that is perverted and might make people sick. The person then complains to everybody that the ice cream man should sell sushi, because he wants sushi. People then agree because, hell, if he’s complaining so loudly, he must be right, ice cream men should sell sushi.

Giving civil unions to gays is saying that they are now, for all intents and purposes, the legal equivalent of married people, which basically means they are married without religious overtone. So, allowing civil unions for gays is the same as redefining marriage while giving it a different name.

Why not allow them to marry? Because, marriage has long been a beneficial aspect to society. When a man and woman joins there are marked advantages for society. To allow gays to do the equivalent, is it not fair to expect these unions to contribute to society? The simple fact is that by allowing civil unions for gay people, we’re encouraging them to be gay. Statistically speaking, this is harmful to our society.

Allow me to divert your attention now to some of those statistics. The homosexual male has a life-span twenty years shorter than an average person. Homosexuals are 6 times as likely to have and spread disease of all sorts. Nearly one out of every two gay men is hospitalized at some point for domestic abuse. Over 55% of lesbians experience violent domestic abuse from one of their partners. A study from 1999 shows that of the only 1317 so called ‘hate crimes’ toward a gay person because they are gay, 650,000 male homosexuals committed violence against their partners. 17% of young men are sexually abused before adulthood. Around 98% of those crimes are committed by gay men. An gay rights organization called NAMBLA distributes information on being a pedophile and getting away with it. (I have sources for all these claims, if you want them, just ask.)

That being established, if gays are going to be married or the equivalent thereof, they should at least show they can be faithful to one another. Yet studies have shown such to be near impossible for gay couples. The average number of gay sexual partners is 308, the high in that study was 18,000! Of the studies trying to prove that gays do stay together many proved ‘inconclusive’ because the gay couples always fell apart. In The Netherlands, where gays are allowed to marry, married gays have an average of 8 casual sexual partners… a year. In traditional marriage this kind of thing would be grounds for divorce, so obviously their definition of marriage is highly screwed up.

Since being gay is not exactly good for either the individual or society, we should probably not condone it. This doesn’t mean we should hate gay people or anything, but they certainly aren’t going to contribute positively.

It does not go against my beliefs in the Constitution to not want gays to have civil unions. This matter is simply up to each state to decide, and I feel they should all decide against it. Some people seem to not understand that the Constitution hands all matters it doesn’t cover to the states to do for themselves, allowing government closer and more responsible to the people. Actually abiding by the Constitution does not mean that anything not stated is not allowed by the government, it means that our national government can’t get its hands into everything. It is the job of the state to decide in what manner marriage is defined for legal intents and purposes, so it is obviously their job to regulate what it means to be married.

Real Charity and Forced Charity

Charity is giving to the needy. They shouldn’t have to pursue it, but our government is not and should not be a charitable organization. Our national government has no right to give our money to poor people. We give them our money to take care of our defense and other things that the government is supposed to provide in the Constitution. It is not their position (and thus it is illegal) for them to give our money to people that need it. That’s what there are charities for.

I find it odd that you have so little faith in humanity, when you yourself are willing to donate money to a church to help the needy in your own ward. The reason the founding fathers did not want to make our government a charity organization is because such a large power removes it from the realm of accountability.

At the local level, if we help our fellow neighbors then we know exactly who we help and they feel the need to actually get on their feet so they don’t have to depend on their friends any more. When the money’s raining down from on high, people don’t have to feel any accountability at all, any sense of trying to get back up. The amount of people dependent on our government since 1980 has doubled. If our system was working, we should see it lessening, not doubling. Welfare should be helping people to get out of hard times, not stay permanently in them.

Giving our money to other nations follows the same philosophy. It is not the duty of our government to provide a little of our greatness, but the people themselves. There are plenty of charities in our country that can and do make a difference. By donating to those, you can do something. There is already someone to oversee it, so stop saying the government needs to. As a nation, it is our responsibility to be our own nation. As a good people it is our responsibility to help other nations.

In closing of this subject, I turn to a quaint scripture story. God had a plan to send everyone down on earth to test and see if they’d listen to him. Satan suggested that if he were in charge, he’d force everyone to do the right thing so that they all passed the test. God was smarter than that though. If people are not free to make their own choices than they might as well not go through with it. They should have the opportunity to make their own choice. This is what made them good when they chose. So he told Satan that he was not so smart in his thinking and went with his plan. (Satan of course rebelled and became the bad guy of the story.)

Whether or not you believe in this as truth you can agree that the moral is true enough: once we are forced to make a choice, rather than asked to choose, we lose our freedom and might as well have not chosen at all. The real freedom is being able to choose what’s right and doing it because you want to.

Bush and Iraq

Without Bush, there very well could have been a war. Just because he went around screaming did not mean that half the Democratic party had to listen. In fact, you’d think them astute enough to have be able to make decisions for themselves. You know you’re reaching when you try to claim that Bush forced Congress to think exactly like him. Or does he have access to some secret mind control device. Come on. They thought how they wanted to think, now some regret it and want to pretend that it wasn’t their fault. I’m disappointed in your lack of any sense in this regard. It was their choice, not his. THEY chose to follow him. Don’t try to blame him for them making a choice.

Gitmo and those poor mistreated enemy combatants that were trying to kill our soldiers at some point

Regarding Gitmo, I’d love to see these reports that state the people were innocent, because that’s horrible. Find a source please. I’ve heard a lot of bologna from ‘respectable’ news sources, but nothing ever claiming that most of the people coming out of Gitmo are there without any reason.

Gitmo is a prisoner-of-war camp. People must be found on the field of battle to be enemy combatants to get sent there. Over 10% who were released were captured fighting against us again. It’s not like we storm into some innocent Iraqi’s house and say “You’re going to Gitmo!” We find them shooting at us and manage to force them to surrender. They’re not innocent. We have every right to hold prisoners in a time of war if they are the ones shooting at us. Would you prefer we executed all the prisoners-of-war?

And who said we have no what’s going on inside Gitmo? I don’t remember President Bush getting up and waving his hand in Jedi style saying “You will not look into Gitmo…” In fact, where are all these reports of abuse and errors coming from if people aren’t looking into it? Um, hello, you just caught yourself up in your own argument. Given that, it’s still an army prison for POWs so the army can and should conduct it in whatever matter it seems fit to, secrecy or not. (Barring breaking rules of engagement the US has agreed to, such as not torturing prisoners.)

Well, there’s the end of this part of the debate. Time to respond Mr. Cow.

Mad Cow wants me to respond to his political standpoint. (Find that discussion here.)
My post will basically follow right along his post, so it’d be good if you read that one first.

For starters, I will second the position that government should be small. This doesn’t mean just that there should be less people hired, which is certainly true. This means that the government of the US of A needs to stop overstepping it’s bounds. Welfare, Social Security, and all that just adds layers and layers of fat onto our government that we have to pay for.

Mad Cow also mentioned that Bush seems to believe in smaller government just being consolidating power, but I’d like him to be more specific about this claim. Sounds like malarkey without any backing to me.

As far as right to choose, that is what freedom is about. Choices. However, I don’t know if you could go so far as to give people the right to choose to kill another human. That’s infringing pretty hard on somebody else’s rights.

Here’s my stance on abortion: I don’t think it’s fair to think of a fetus as anything sub-human. We can all admit that (barring some form of medical difficulties) the fetus would eventually become a human. There’s no questioning that fact. After conception, there will be a human born (again barring medical difficulties). No ifs ands or buts about it.

The question then becomes, does the person who is not yet a full human deserve the right to have the chance to be one? If not, then why does a baby who was born yesterday deserve that chance? It’s not much better off at that point than it is in the womb. It probably isn’t going to think to itself “Hey, you can’t kill me because that’s wrong.” So where do we draw the line?

Moving on to the issues of gays. They already have civil rights. I want people to stop asking that they receive them. A gay man is just as allowed to marry a woman as any other man. The government won’t stop him. What gays want are new rights defined to fit their style. To redefine civil unions to fit them is to give them new rights, not rights everyone else already has. Get it straight. (Ignore the pun value of that last statement.)

Moving right along:
Our national government’s incessant need to throw money at people with problems.

I think people misinterpret the idea of charity as being the role of the government. Yes, helping people is an important thing for those more fortunate to be doing. It’s very much their duty. But it’s not the government’s duty.

Our government should certainly not be spending the money we pay them to run our country to help other countries run themselves. That’s why it’s not in our country’s Constitution. Funds to take care of the country shouldn’t be routed to Indonesia or something. If we want, as an American people, to help someone, we should be allowed to decide who we donate our money to and do it personally.

Charities are good, but forced charity leads to abuse and problems. It’s immoral for any person to force another person to pay for your problems. It’s immoral for them to turn a blind eye to your problems, but that doesn’t mean you can, or should, force them to pay. That’s all there is to it, for now. This post is just an overview of all the issues anyway.

Next topic Mad Cow mentions: the idea that reforms of any sort should not be happening under Bush’s administration. This is an absurd notion. Why is it that whenever the person you don’t want is in the White House, nothing should be allowed to happen? Bush doesn’t write the laws. He’s just a part of the system, not the entire system. To suggest that because Bush is in office we shouldn’t be writing laws is absolutely absurd and anti-democratic.

Let’s now focus on Iraq a bit. First, let’s stop blaming Bush for sending us to war. It was a decision made by Congress. Kerry included. In fact, several key Democrats signed a resolution begging the president to go to war. It was House Joint Resolution 114 of the 107th Congress: Vote Record. You can use Thomas (official online records of bills and resolutions) to read the full text. Search bill number “hjr 114″ and pick 107th Congress)

We weren’t sure of our safety, and it was not unreasonable to assume that a man who used chemical weapons on his own people would still try to have them. No, we didn’t find any evidence of those weapons left, but on the plus side we got rid of a man who’d been a ruthless dictator digging mass graves and all. Something that both Democrats and Republicans were for doing. Kerry signed the resolution to make it happen. Democrats need to stop blaming Bush for the war in Iraq.

That subject sort of brings us to Guantanamo Bay, something I’d like to hit on. The place Senator Durbin, a prominent democrat, said was as bad as Nazi prison camps. People are shouting that the people in Gitmo need rights as if they were American citizens, blah blah blah. Does anyone stop to mention that these are people taken on the battlefield as enemy combatants? As in, they’re prisoners of war? Duh, of course they aren’t going to get a trial by American civil courts, that’s not how wars work. And as far as mistreatment, there’s not a shred of evidence for the fact that it was more than an isolated incident. People who say Gitmo needs closed need to get a clue.

I’m tired. I think I’m done for the night. Stay tuned for the continued slugfest between Mad Cow and myself. Oh, and Mad Cow, I suggest we pick certain topics of discussion, so we’re not all over the place all the time – how about we write up in-depth opinions on a specific subject next? I’ll let you have the first go.

Review for Outlaw Trail Theater’s ‘Fiddler on the Roof’:
Rating – 4.5π out of 900º

I’m writing a review for Fiddler on the Roof as done at the Outlaw Trail Theater here in Vernal. If you’ve never been to an Outlaw Trail show, you’ve got to understand that it’s outdoor theater, and about the only theatrical-type event in Vernal. Just keep that in mind.

I have to admit that I wasn’t all that excited about going to see Fiddler on the Roof. I’ve never really heard the story-line, but I figured it was likely too be a bit boring. Nevertheless, I went, and I found it to be quite enjoyable as far as musicals go.

The story, if you were as deprived as I was during your childhood, revolves around a Jewish man and his family in a little Russian town. The man has 5 daughters and is looking to get his eldest married. Two of his younger ones also find love during the course of the play.

It’s hard to sound unbiased, because I have family in the play, but I thought they did an excellent job (except for the glass breaking sound effect that was way off cue). There were humorous parts in the play, and a good amount of true love and all that good touchy-feely stuff.

And let’s not forget being able to run and grab Arby’s during intermission. All in all a nice night which I would write about more if I didn’t have to wake up early for work tomorrow. (Earlier than I’m used to anyway, 7:30′s not that early.)