My youngest and her man are soon to be airborne, off for a few days of frivolous Walloonery in the zone of the Napoleonic Code where habeus corpus is a somewhat iffier proposition than it is here -- or was, anyway, when their native land was operating under a Constitution.
I don't worry about it too greatly. They're not the kind of kids to get into much trouble. Oh, maybe a snide or otherwise disrespectful comment about governments here and there. A lamentable attraction to foreign food, heavily sauced due to late adoption of a technology called "refrigeration" in those parts. Nothing, however, really, that should get them gaoled.
The lady identifies "Dinant" as the adventurous element of the trip. I don't know what she means by that and and am afraid to ask. Wiki informs me that the place held Celts in Neolithic times, so perhaps she just means adventurous communing with our ancestral spirits.
They have also worked a jaunt to the Ardennes into the schedule and promise faithfully that in Bastogne they will turn to face whatever enemy is most obvious and state firmly, "The answer is still "Nuts'."
Mar 27, 2013
Mar 26, 2013
Quote of the Day (Clear Thinking in the 50 Words or Fewer Category)
Very tasty free ice cream this morning from the potential Empress of the Universe (and I've heard worse ideas). The subject is pedestrian -- shoveling your walks -- but she elevates it to a sizable segment of a world view and prompts a comment which ought to be chipped into the marble front of every court house in the land:
"... There are things you should do in order to live in a cultured society, and things you should be punished for if you don't. They are not necessarily the same set of things. Being unable to distinguish between the two is guaranteed to get you a police state."
"... There are things you should do in order to live in a cultured society, and things you should be punished for if you don't. They are not necessarily the same set of things. Being unable to distinguish between the two is guaranteed to get you a police state."
Gay Day in America
A good day to be very judicious in consuming the output of the electric news from the cable. Anything over a couple-three minutes per hour could warp a mind into believing that there isn't a committed, loving, heterosexual couple in America -- or, if there is, no reason to pay attention to it.
Too much of what I see seems like an offshoot of some sort of old European navel-gazing novel aimed at making me like the idea of homosexuals getting married, of achieving a class status identical to man-woman unions while simultaneously retaining their grip on the most exalted status in America -- victimhood.
I don't like it. There isn't enough money in the world to buy enough advertising to make me.
So what?
So this:
If the Supreme Court decides the Constitution protects gay marriage, good for the court. It would be the same Constitution and Constitutional reasoning that protects putrid speech. George Lincoln Rockwell. Al Sharpton.
In a pleasant world of liberty, the court says, "Okay." Then gays marry one another, more or less quietly like most everyone else in the sub-celebrity genre. Then they shut up about it. It is found unnecessary to put their posed intimate gestures on national television in celebration of a new-found diversity.
Of course there are moral and practical objections, just as there are to other freedoms. The morality can be debated where it belongs, outside the coercive chambers of government. Let a church sanctify gay marriages or refuse. If the Bachman woman and her husband want to operate a pray-away-the-gay business, it is neither official government business nor a fit subject for civil action.
The workaday problems can in due course yield to clear libertarian thinking. Write marriage out of the law books. Eliminate the marriage license. Write it out of the tax code and labor laws. See it for what it is, a moral and emotional commitment between humans which may be based on nothing more than that -- or on a religious ceremony or on a confirming private contract between the private parties.
I oversimplify of course, but mostly in the quest for clarity and for final burial of the the notion that we ought to keep the 82nd Airborne on high alert for two squigglies holding hands at 42nd and Broadway.
Too much of what I see seems like an offshoot of some sort of old European navel-gazing novel aimed at making me like the idea of homosexuals getting married, of achieving a class status identical to man-woman unions while simultaneously retaining their grip on the most exalted status in America -- victimhood.
I don't like it. There isn't enough money in the world to buy enough advertising to make me.
So what?
So this:
If the Supreme Court decides the Constitution protects gay marriage, good for the court. It would be the same Constitution and Constitutional reasoning that protects putrid speech. George Lincoln Rockwell. Al Sharpton.
In a pleasant world of liberty, the court says, "Okay." Then gays marry one another, more or less quietly like most everyone else in the sub-celebrity genre. Then they shut up about it. It is found unnecessary to put their posed intimate gestures on national television in celebration of a new-found diversity.
Of course there are moral and practical objections, just as there are to other freedoms. The morality can be debated where it belongs, outside the coercive chambers of government. Let a church sanctify gay marriages or refuse. If the Bachman woman and her husband want to operate a pray-away-the-gay business, it is neither official government business nor a fit subject for civil action.
The workaday problems can in due course yield to clear libertarian thinking. Write marriage out of the law books. Eliminate the marriage license. Write it out of the tax code and labor laws. See it for what it is, a moral and emotional commitment between humans which may be based on nothing more than that -- or on a religious ceremony or on a confirming private contract between the private parties.
I oversimplify of course, but mostly in the quest for clarity and for final burial of the the notion that we ought to keep the 82nd Airborne on high alert for two squigglies holding hands at 42nd and Broadway.
Mar 25, 2013
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