The MSM often tells us that despite all of the recent votes to the contrary, the majority of people are in favor of neutering state marriage licensing. The polls cited usually have serious flaws. Well, I'd like to see the results of this poll.

The Los Angeles Times has been doing much to try to sway California voters in the upcoming election. The latest is this article by Cathleen Decker based on their poll with USC that is headlined with this:

Californians Hold Positive Views of Immigrants; Most Oppose Deportation
In a recent poll of likely voters, 48% said immigrants are a benefit to the state, and 59% said illegal immigrants who have held a job here for two years should be allowed to stay.

I have positive view of immigrants. It is illegal aliens that I have some problems with. But the paper refuses to make a distinction, or use the legally correct phrase.

Deportation is not necessary. Between workplace enforcement, nonaccommodation, and getting the government out of charity, people will either adapt or self-deport.

...and not a marriage. I'm referring to a woman who "married" herself in Taiwan. It is no more silly than if she "married" another woman. My analysis is over at The Opine Editorials. Is it bigotry to deny this woman the title and benefits of marriage? How could it not be, if it is bigotry to deny them to groomless couples?

Merrill Holbrook of Yorba Linda wrote in to the Orange County Register with some sense:

Campaign ad after ad imply California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and GOP senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina are bad because they had to reduce staff or export jobs to keep their companies afloat. Just ask yourself this, Would you rather lose a few jobs or the whole company? Management decisions to let people go are not because of mean people in management; they are necessary to keep a company competitive. When a company fails to be competitive it shuts down, and all lose their jobs, not just a few.

What makes a company non-competitive? More often than not the reasons are the high cost of labor and government regulations and taxes. The higher wages, additional regulation, and taxes translate into U.S. jobs lost because consumers buy the less-expensive product made outside our borders.

If you don’t want to see this continue, stop buying products made in a foreign country or elect representatives who will not support more regulation, more taxes on business and the rich, and unions seeking continually higher wages. These are two ways to create jobs for us in the United States.

And I would add that if people in other countries don't have jobs, they won't be able to buy American products, invest in American businesses, or spend money here as tourists. Let the market work as freely as possible.

A dozen liberal "Christian" and Jewish clergy offered support Wednesday for a federal judge's decision to unjustly strike down a state constitutional amendment defending marriage. And because a whole dozen of them held a press conference, the Los Angeles Times saw fit to cover it, which is good because you can know which congregations to avoid joining. My analysis of this clear violation of the separation of church and state is over at The Opine Editorials.

Supposedly conservative Ted Olson told a federal court it should go ahead and overturn a state's constitutional amendment even if there isn't a right to sane-sex marriage. My analysis is over at The Opine Editorials.

Michael Hiltzik writes a column for the Business section of the Los Angeles Times, and he likened CEO pay to that of City of Bell officials who were getting salaries that were extremely high in comparison to similar cities. His column prompted some letters.

Richard J. Steckel of Santa Barbara:

Michael Hiltzik hit the nail on the head by pointing out direct parallels between the practices of Bell's administrators and those of some corporate leaders and their confederates on boards and compensation committees.

The difference is that corporations, unless they are unduly getting taxpayer money, are funded through completely voluntary transactions. People choose whether or not to buy shares in the corporation. City of Bell officials were deliberately hiding the truth of what they were doing with taxpayer money. Taxes are compulsory.

Fred Reiner of Granada Hills:

Hiltzik gives the same old vilification against highly paid executives of publicly traded corporations while ignoring Hollywood's top earners, as though they are exempt from the same accusation. Are Hollywood and the music industry off-limits?

They get a pass, for some reason.

James B. Davis of Beverly Hills:

Is earning too much money a crime? If so, how much is too much?

While you're at it, please explain why Ray Irani's compensation is any of your business.

Also, please explain why you're not upset about the much higher earnings of professional athletes. Is playing a great round of golf more valuable than running a multizillion-dollar company?

Good points.

Michael Napoliello of Manhattan Beach:

Companies pay the going rate for talent. Companies can only choose from executives who are available, able and willing to do the job. Executives with the qualifications to run a billion-dollar company — even those who sometimes falter — are a rare breed, as are their salaries.

I do think some corporate execs are overcompensated in that there are people who will do as good of a job (or almost as good of a job, or even better) for a lot less. But that's up to shareholders.

Hiltzik's argument against their salaries is nothing more than a trendy rant against free-market capitalism.

Yeah, which is not unusual for him.

Ideally, corporations are based entirely on voluntary associations and transactions. People choose to buy their goods or services. People choose to invest in the company or not. People choose whether or not to apply for a position in the company. Corporations do not have taxing power, fining power, jailing power, or use of force. To compare corporations to local government is to compared apples and orioles.

Ted Olson, like many marriage neutering advocates, apparently has no qualms about exploiting a suicide and gang violence to further the pathological need to have federal courts impose the neutering of marriage licenses on unwilling states. He did this in written arguments filed with the 9th District Court of Appeals in the Proposition 8 case. Read my analysis over at The Opine Editorials.

For higher offices, anyway...

I prefer that people in power, in control of military weaponry, and essentially possessing a license to kill believe in cosmic justice, ultimate personal accountability, and the sanctity of human life; that rights are something we're born with, not invented by government or social consensus.. I want them to believe they will have to answer to God or some other judge for their actions, even if they "get away" with wrongdoing as far as human justice.

Besides, avowed atheists have a bad track record in governing.

Please don't take this to mean that I'd vote for anyone with any foolish beliefs about God, just because they believe in God. There are a lot of problematic belief systems that include God.

Voting us underway in California for the November election. There's at least one important issue on which it makes a difference who is elected Governor and Attorney General.

Hey! Look at this! It is time again for the Los Angeles Times to run another commentary in which someone warns that churches need to stop teaching the Bible if they want to stay relevant. This one is written by Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard University, and David E. Campbell, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, the  authors of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us.

The most rapidly growing religious category today is composed of those Americans who say they have no religious affiliation.

Well, yeah. When 95% of a group identifies as either A, B, C, or D, then the 5% who identify as E will grow 100% if it numbers switch to 90%-10%.

While middle-aged and older Americans continue to embrace organized religion, rapidly increasing numbers of young people are rejecting it.

Guess what? Young people tend to get older. They tend to get married and have kids, and get more serious about religious identity.

As recently as 1990, all but 7% of Americans claimed a religious affiliation, a figure that had held constant for decades. Today, 17% of Americans say they have no religion, and these new "nones" are very heavily concentrated among Americans who have come of age since 1990.

So 83% claim an affiliation. If 83% of scientists say they believe in manmade global warming, if 83% of voters were to say they support abortion-on-demand being legal and taxpayer funded, if 83% of voters were in favor of neutering state marriage licensing, it would be call an "overwhelming majority" and dissenters would be portrayed as crackpots. Perhaps people in the past who claimed an affiliation were not regular churchgoers or people who practiced a religion, and young people are refusing to pick an affiliation out of honesty?

So, why this sudden jump in youthful disaffection from organized religion?

Assuming the premise of your question is true… it might have something to do with the rabid militarism of secular humanism or moral relativism in the public square and public institutions.

The surprising answer, according to a mounting body of evidence, is politics.

Here's where they get to the point of their commentary, which is to tell us that we should stop taking religion seriously when deciding which political issues are important to us and how we vote.

Very few of these new "nones" actually call themselves atheists, and many have rather conventional beliefs about God and theology. But they have been alienated from organized religion by its increasingly conservative politics.

Organized religion is hardly getting more conservative politically. It is that the Leftists are finding it harder to move the country Leftward.

During the 1980s, the public face of American religion turned sharply right.

What happened was that people woke up and realized that staying out of politics and letting the elitists, ivory tower hermits, and hedonists run everything was becoming a huge problem.

Political allegiances and religious observance became more closely aligned, and both religion and politics became more polarized.

Politicians are more likely to be seen speaking in liberal churches.

Abortion and homosexuality became more prominent issues on the national political agenda, and activists such as Jerry Falwell and Ralph Reed began looking to expand religious activism into electoral politics.

Why don't these commentaries every bring up Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, etc.?

Church attendance gradually became the primary dividing line between Republicans and Democrats in national elections.

Yes, Democrats should really get to church more often.

Some Americans brought their religion and their politics into alignment by adjusting their political views to their religious faith. But, surprisingly, more of them adjusted their religion to fit their politics.

You mean the liberal churches, who abandon the Bible in favor of political correctness?

But a majority of the Millennial generation was liberal on most social issues, and above all, on homosexuality. The fraction of twentysomethings who said that homosexual relations were "always" or "almost always" wrong plummeted from about 75% in 1990 to about 40% in 2008.

Gee, I can't imagine why, given what they are bombarded with the media and academia.

If being religious entailed political conservatism, they concluded, religion was not for them.

Religion is good as a social club and motivational exercise, but when the logical application of religious teachings means not forcing other people to pay your way through life and saving sex for marriage, well, that's just too much.

Continuing to sound the trumpet for conservative social policy on issues such as homosexuality may or may not be the right thing to do from a theological point of view, but it is likely to mean saving fewer souls.

From a Christian perspective, you are not saving souls at all if people don't have Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. He's not Lord if you don't let Him lead when it comes to sexuality.

More likely is that as growing numbers of young Americans reject religious doctrine that is too political or intolerant for their taste, innovative religious leaders will concoct more palatable offerings.

This has been going on since the beginning of time. People want to mold God in their image, rather than being transformed to following the will of God. There are plenty of churches that cater to the former, and they are the ones who are dying. Bible-teaching churches, like my own, are growing. You think I like everything in every sermon? Nope. It would feel great to have the minister say that everything I'm doing is okay and I don't need to change a thing about how I live my life. But the minister would be lying.

The Gospel is offensive, because it requires that people recognize they are sinners that there is a Lord and His way is the only right way. I agree that we need to be gentle and respectful and relevant when presenting the Gospel and making disciples and ministering to the needy, but there is no compromising when it comes to the truth.

Previously:

Losing Their Religion
Evangelical Collapse
Are You Ready For Post-Christian America?
Steamed Rice
On the Manhattan Declaration
On Jesus, the Bible, and the Religious Right

1) We're nothing more than meat machines, a bag of molecules; animals. We, like all life and the universe itself, are nothing more than the products of natural processes unguided by any transcendent God. Chance mutation after chance mutation has produced us – the ones fit and lucky enough to have had a series of ancestor organisms that survived long enough to reproduce. Our thoughts are nothing more than chemical reactions in our brains; our actions the result of those chemical reactions, the chemical reactions themselves being the result of natural processes extending back to when the universe somehow popped into existence from nothing (ah yes… because gravity exists).

2) Our actions are dooming the planet. The human population is growing too fast and causing climate change that will destroy the planet in a few decades.

Some of the very same people who have been loudly and stubbornly insistent that one or both of those are indisputable facts and that they should be taught unchallenged in academia and in the media are now mourning suicides and speaking out against bullying, telling people they shouldn't engage in either.

Why not? Why not bully? Why not commit suicide?

Who are you to judge? Who are you to say you're right and someone else is wrong? Don’t like bullying? Don't do it. Don't like suicide? Don't do it. Who are you to force your morality on someone else?

Isn't it survival of the fittest? Perhaps the bullies are more fit, and those who can't handle or deflect being bullied are not fit to survive.

If we're overpopulated, isn't it noble to commit suicide?

The planet is doomed, and the only way to make things better is through governments we know are ineffective.

The only reason to live it to be famous. Isn't that really what it is important? But how many people will ever be famous? Looks like the easiest way, ironically, is to kill yourself as a result of being bullied.

Clearly, some cultures have esteemed bullying and suicide; isn't it arrogant to say those cultures were wrong?

Shouldn't everyone be able to come up with their own concept of life? And if their concept of life is that it isn't wrong for them to kill themselves, especially if they are unhappy, who is anyone else to say otherwise? Their body, their choice.

Can public schools – or anyone else for that matter – tell anyone why they should not bully or commit suicide without invoking morality?

Now, I can tell someone why they should not bully and should not commit suicide, but my strongest argument against these things is ultimately based on God - someone dismissed by so many of the people speaking up about bullying and suicide as a "sky pixie".

So... all of you enlightened, freethinking brights, who are unencumbered by what you see as Dark Age superstition and ancient folly... Why shouldn't someone bully? Why shouldn't someone commit suicide?

Scott Campbell of Laguna Hills wrote in to the Orange County Register, citing a good reason not to put Jerry Brown back into the role as California Governor.

Jerry Brown signed the 1977 Dills Act (Sections 3512 through 3524 of the Government Code) into law in 1978 and granted collective-bargaining rights to state employees. Since that time, state worker salaries, pension and health care costs have skyrocketed. State workers now enjoy salaries and pension benefits that (conservatively) average 20 to 30 percent higher than private-sector workers, along with Cadillac health care plans.

After 1978, state, county and municipal collective-bargaining units were established throughout California and, indeed, across the entire country. As a consequence, the ranks of government workers have exploded nationwide.

This is one of the biggest problems from Brown's previous time as Governor and one of the main reasons California is in the mess it is in.

Campbell goes on to write:

Government employees, civilian contractors to the government and anyone who gets paid by private sector tax revenue have no right to say, “I pay my taxes, too.” They should not have a voice (or a vote) in matters of public service or elections.

Deny the vote to government employees? I don’t see how that is Constitutional. However, government employees should have a real choice to NOT join a union, and NOT pay dues to a union that turns around and spend that money on political causes the employee does not support.

I do think it would be interesting if votes were weighted according to income taxes paid, with everyone getting at least some vote. But I imagine the "soak the rich" crowd would be more hesitant to raise income tax rates for “the rich” if it meant the rich would get more a vote as result.

I think is a better way is to decrease the reliance on income taxes and flatten the income tax rates.

Previously: Funding Government

Jon Cowan, president and co-founder of Third Way, a "moderate think tank", and Evan Wolfson, founder and executive director of Freedom [for some] to Marry have a commentary in the Los Angeles Times in which they try to convince Republicans that all of the cool kids – er, cool Republicans – support neutering marriage.

They start out with the "Pledge to America".

Though the pledge gives a perfunctory nod to "traditional marriage" (in a single line in a list of things, like "families," that it supports ), explicit opposition to marriage for same-sex couples is conspicuous in its absence. The document never uses the word "gay" (or "homosexual") — a stark contrast to past party platforms, which have made opposition to gay equality a centerpiece of their social agenda.

That's it? Mentioning "traditional marriage" isn't enough to paint the picture? Well, they go on to cite what they think is more evidence that a deep, lasting shift is happening...

The GOP, in large part, isn't displaying its usual anti-gay election-year demagoguery, and not just in the "pledge."

What exactly is considered "anti-gay"? This is a common tactic of marriage neutering advocates. They want the average person to picture mobs of people beating people because they identify as gay, and say, "I'm not anti-gay!" Then the marriage neutering advocates do a bait and switch and equate that definition of "anti-gay" with "defends bride+groom requirement in marriage".

As recently as 1995, a Republican-controlled Congress was holding hearings investigating "homosexual recruitment" and the "promotion" of homosexuality.

How is it "anti-gay" to hold hearings into such allegations? Surely investigations would reveal the truth that such allegations were utterly unfounded, right?

During the George W. Bush administration, the party used its fervent opposition to marriage for gay and lesbian couples as a get-out-the-vote strategy, encouraging more than a dozen anti-gay state ballot initiatives geared at driving turnout in the 2004 election and engineering repeated efforts to pass an amendment to the Constitution.

See? Defending marriage is "anti-gay" to these authors. They are referring to initiatives that confirmed what most people intuitively know – that the legal definition of marriage should be one that is bride+groom.

I note that they fail to mention that the GOP used it is a strategy in California in 2008 to turn out votes for that great Republican, Obama.

Anyway, we're supposed to not vote. We're supposed to sit back and let the marriage neutering advocates vote. I thought these people were all for getting out the vote? I guess that's more for dead people and Mexican citizens.

This year is the first election year in recent history in which anti-gay rhetoric has been significantly muted: No state is facing an anti-gay initiative on the ballot, and marriage has not been a focus of the national conservative agenda.

Um, that's because most of the states already have adopted their laws and amendments defending marriage, and because fiscal matters are taking precedence. Really. This is like saying people in Oakland no longer care about football because they stopped trying to lure the Raiders back from Los Angeles, or that Chile no longer cares about making wine because they've been focusing on rescuing miners.

They go on to cite that – surprise, surprise – that the GOP is a big tent, and there are homosexual people in the GOP and they're coming out! They cite Ted Olson (supporting the neutering of marriage, not coming out).

Cindy McCain and former First Lady Laura Bush have both spoken out in support of [neutering] marriage.

In August, Ken Mehlman, former Republican National Committee chairman and campaign manager for Bush in the 2004 election, revealed that he is gay and supports the freedom to marry.

The editors must have taken out a lot more names. Hey, guess what? I support the freedom to marry, too. What I don't support is neutering marriage into something completely new, especially through judicial fiat.

Mehlman hosted a fundraiser in support of Olson's lawsuit, with a guest list that would have been unheard of five years ago. It included numerous well-known Republicans such as former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, former McCain strategist Steve Schmidt, former Bush White House Communications Director Nicolle Wallace and former RNC counsel Benjamin Ginsberg.

Clutch the pearls!

Perhaps even more telling, the proudly right-wing GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas appeared for the first time at a reception for the Log Cabin Republicans, a leading gay GOP organization. Cornyn had turned down invitations and even contributions from the Log Cabin group in the past.

Are those straws firmly grasped, yet?

What's driving this insiders' insurrection? Perhaps a sense that a libertarian-leaning belief in fully extending the freedom to marry to all Americans does not, in fact, clash with a conservative commitment to holding together the social fabric, as marriage entails personal responsibility and social stability.

Yeah, we all know that the social ills prevalent in the "homosexual community" will vanish if they can only get a state-issued marriage license. Faux monogamy will become real monogamy, promiscuity will drop, depression levels will drop, everyone will stop getting STIs, mental illness rates will drop, substance abuse will drop, homo-cide and other forms of domestic violence will drop. They've just been waiting for the state to mandate that the higher earner will owe alimony to the lower earner (and domestic partnerships don't count, even though they do that)... once they have that, all of those other things will take care of themselves.

They then go on to poll dance.

For Republicans, it means they could become less moored to their socially conservative base and may get back in touch with the cautious but forward-looking American political center that is vital to GOP hopes of cobbling together a governing majority.

If that the "political center" that these guys are thinking of is forward-looking, so is someone who is diving out of an airplane without a parachute. I'm less concerned about being consider forward-looking than being Constitutionally-focused.

They then go on to cite fauxmentum.

Look, I know it is frustrating that you haven't been able to get Obama to fully endorse marriage neutering with his words, but let's face it - the Democrats are pretty much in the tank for homosexuality advocates on most issues. Your attempt to bamboozle Republicans is weak.

Let's look at reality again:

1) Men and women are different. Even most of the people who try to deny this demonstrate that they understand this to be true. After all, if men and women were not different, all, or at least three, of the terms in "LGBT" would have no meaning.

2) The paring of a man and a woman is different than the pairing of two men or two women. This automatically follows if #1 is true. But we know that the pairing of a man and a woman is the only kind of pairing that is able to naturally produce new citizens (who, unlike the adults, do not consent to the relationship), even if not all do. This alone is enough to give the state more interest in the pairing of a man and a woman.

3) Men and women are different in personal relationships. Again, even the people who try to deny this demonstrate that they understand this to be true. If that difference matters enough to someone in picking a lover, how can it not matter when it comes to the parent-child relationship?

4) State licensing of bride+groom pairings provides children with a role model, guardian, and bonding partner from each of the two sexes that comprise all of society, legally bound to each other as well as the children; generally, this is good for children.

5) It is constitutional, moral, common, and necessary to treat different kinds of relationships differently.

6) One need not believe homosexual behavior, relationships, or people to be harmful, sinful, or inferior to accept any or all of #1-5.

We all have an interest is shaping our culture, including our laws. Let's not abdicate our responsibilities and allow others to decide these things for us. The truth is, Republican leaders and most people in the party are just as much in favor of protecting the rights of homosexual people as they are in protecting the rights of anyone else. Most of us believe that people should be treated equally under the law based on what they do. But like President Obama, we don't believe a brideless or groomless pairing is a marriage; we don't think states have the same interest in nonmarital relationships are they do in marital relationships, and we don't think federal judges should neuter state marriage licensing.

Let's encourage as many of them as possible to go on a voyage to find one.

It's an AFP story prompted by something the WWF people are saying. Don't confuse the WWF with the more intelligent WWE.

Carbon pollution and over-use of Earth's natural resources have become so critical that, on current trends, we will need a second planet to meet our needs by 2030, the WWF said on Wednesday.

2030 will come and go and this will prove to be laughably false, but if anyone brings up this false prophecy, the nuts will point to some minor change as having saved the planet.

These alarmist warnings are designed to gain power over our lives and neglect to take into account the amazing mechanisms our world has to sustain itself, and the innovations that human beings, especially in free markets, develop that aid in using natural resources more efficiently.

Regardless, the sun will not burn forever.

Biologists say many species, especially mammals, birds and amphibians, are in headlong decline, their numbers ravaged by habitat loss, hunting or the likely impact of climate change.

And why should we care? Aren't all of these life forms mere cosmic accidents, the byproducts of purely natural processes that are nothing more than molecules interacting per the laws of physics? Isn't that what dominant elites in the scientific authorities insist?