Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Barton was right but is completely tactless

Hizzah - Amspec got a Daily Beast mention - indirectly but still.

Basically Joe Barton (or a Joe Barton staffer) had the audacity to retweet an Amspec blogpost entitled "Joe Barton was right" Luckily, the Post got a screen capture of the tweet before it was taken down.

This further illustrates my point that Barton WAS right but lacks some serious tact. That House hearing was not the time and place to make that point. Or maybe it was and it is Barton's delivery that doesn't sit right with me. Still it wasn't a good political move. And neither was retweeting something that says you're right!

He is fundamentally right though - the government should not coerce private companies into surrendering their property. BP was already processing claims and now we have just bogged the process down with another layer of government bureaucracy.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

The government in your bedroom

He goes about it in a roundabout way, but I was happy to hear Bob make the case for the privatization of marriage since he is such a strong social conservative:

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/06/17/another-peaceful-solution

Obvi I'm for overturning Prop 8 because it writes discrimination into the law, but ideally there would be no law regarding marriage to begin with. Why make a positive right? Why is the government involved?

Just as I'm not happy that Prop 8 put heterosexual marriage in the law, I'm not crazy about explicitly putting gay marriage on the books either. I hope that court precedents can take care of this so we can avoid overlegislating. Doesn't the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment take care of this discrimination? Gay couples should sue for rights and a new norm will form. Couples should be able to add a significant other to their insurance, have them visit them in the hospital, and yes adopt children if they want.

If gay marriage goes into law, I am concerned, like Bob, about the argument that churches' tax exemption could be revoked for discrimination. Call me crazy/old fashioned/whatnot but private organizations should have the right to discriminate! Girls belong in Girl Scouts and boys in Boy Scouts. Sports teams discriminate based on athletic ability. Country clubs discriminate based on income. Colleges discriminate based on academic ability - oh wait now they are forced to enter race, income, and a whole other bevy of socioeconomic factors into the equation. You get the idea.

Why must marriage be a public and federal issue? The government shouldn't be in our bedrooms.