L-Shaped Recovery and the Trampoline Effect

Some years ago, I talked about government interference affecting the economy. There’s a pair of posts: Parabolas and The Trampoline Effect. When there are downturns in the economy, there’s usually a natural rebound, forming a parabola, like a U. The bounce back usually reaches and exceeds the start of the fall pretty quickly. But if government steps in to “help,” or interfere, then you get something more like “help” on a trampoline, when someone steps in purportedly make the bounce higher. That help disturbs the natural up and down, and takes the energy out of the bottom of the bounce, so you don’t go back up. You just sort of stumble, and the trampoline flattens. And then you have to get going again from scratch.

In economist terms, this is an L-shaped recession recovery, instead of the usual U-shaped recovery.

Here’s the definition: 

L shaped recession—refers to a period of stagnant recovery after initial fall in GDP. Even though technically the economy may have positive growth (e.g. 0.5%) it still feels like a recession because growth is very slow and unemployment high.

You know the phrase, about the scariest words: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Government’s role isn’t to interfere, or intervene. It’s to set up the background for free enterprise to take place. 

Government isn't the only interference that can cause an L-shaped recession, but it's the usual suspect. When we look at the past decade, we see an L-shaped recession/recovery, and it wasn't just bad luck; it was government caused. 

There are a number of measures of how well the economy is doing. Growth in GDP is one. In fact, a recession has a specific definition related to GDP: "a period of temporary economic decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters."

The converse is that two successive quarters of growth, however minimal, signify the end of the recession. But in an L-shaped recession, getting to technical recovery likely takes longer, probably over a year, rather than merely months. But getting back to starting position can take much longer, multiple years.

The L-shaped recession recovery looks like this:

Such a "recovery" can take so long that various opinions may start calling it a square root-shaped recovery, meaning that, instead of ever getting back up, we should expect a new, permanent, lower growth reality. Obama and George Soros agreed on this "just the new reality" description of the 2008-2009 Great Recession. The malaise economy of Jimmy Carter was also described as a new normal that turned out not to be normal, after a bit of a Reagan tax cut.

And the Great Recession wasn’t a square root-shaped “recovery,” we now know, because the malaise of extremely low growth wasn’t permanent. It went away as soon as we had a government regime change that made necessary changes. They haven’t been extraordinary changes: lower taxes across the board, and concerted attempts to get rid of burdensome regulations.

We didn’t have to get all the way to the ideal lowest possible tax rate, just better. And we didn’t have to get rid of all burdensome regulation, just go in that direction, and stop the threat of ever more regulations that could be placed at any time, causing businesses to be wary about investing and growing. When people are free to make use of their own money, and can plan without government-induced uncertainty, that's the energy we need to get the economy moving back upward.

We can see some examples of the L-shape in various charts. A typical chart for showing recessions is GDP growth. This one, from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP)[i]

Because growth, by definition, rises, in order to see the parabolas and other shapes of recessions and recoveries, you need to turn the chart somewhat sideways, so the rise line is horizontal. The green is to show the L-shape.

Besides GDP growth, there are some other measures. One is unemployment. Here’s a comparison of recent recessions and up to five years out.  In this chart the U-shape, or parabola, is upside down, because we want unemployment to be low. It goes up during the recession and down afterward. You can see that the unemployment spike was a bit higher in 1982, but by one year out had reached its starting point, and then continued dropping. The 2009 recession went higher half a year out, had some downs and ups for a year and a half, and afterward only slowly began dropping back down, taking seven years or more to reach pre-recession rates.

It’s possible for unemployment to go down even though there are more people not employed. Unemployment is measured by taking some combination of people applying for unemployment benefits and polling. That misses people who would be looking for work in a less hopeless economy. People who can’t find work could try to get more education, or could be just staying home. They don’t get counted. So another way to look at economic vitality is the employment-to-population ratio.

This one gives us a really clear picture of the L-shaped recession/recovery. I’ve highlighted the Great Recession in green, and in yellow are a few other more typical recessions with a quick rebound. On this chart, it looks like there might be another L-shaped recession just after 1960.

Another chart that shows the L-shape is average private sector hourly earnings. The housing and banking bubbles burst in the last quarter of 2008, which precipitated the drop. They didn’t start to rise again until 2015, and we’re still quite a distance from the starting point. The source for this chart seemed certain, later in the article, that things would have been much worse without the government interference. It’s hard to show an alternative version to use for comparison, but it is my assertion that government interference caused the intensity of the problem as well as the continuation.

The 1929 market crash was similar. It was beginning to right itself within months, but then government stepped in with one intervention after another, intensifying and continuing the pain for more than a decade. It wasn’t the war that ended the depression, because there was so much to produce for the war; it was that FDR focused on the war instead of the economy, and he largely quit experimenting with ever more interventions.

There was some good news from The Heritage Foundation's 2018 Index of Economic Freedom. We used to be ranked “mostly free,” but had been less free since the beginning of the Obama administration—or maybe since the legislative takeover by Democrats two years before that. Now we’re moving back toward freedom.

The United States, ranked “mostly free,” had not been performing well in the index over the last decade. That precipitous slide has now fortunately come to a halt, with signs of renewed economic growth reinforced by major regulatory and tax reforms that elevate business confidence and investment. It is notable that the U.S. economy grew at a rate of about 3 percent in the last three quarters, something that economists said was very unlikely just a year ago. For the first time in a while, the United States isn’t just economically stronger. It has a real chance to become economically freer in the coming years.

We’ve had two additional quarters of higher growth since that assessment last February. So the news is even better.

When somebody interferes with your jump back up on a trampoline, it takes some regathering your balance and re-energizing your jump. And that gets harder when the “friend” keeps their hand on the trampoline. But once they get out of the way, the energy you put into the jump gets you rising again.

It’s good that happens in the economy too. When we move closer to a free market, not only do we become more prosperous, we become more free.

_______________________________
[i] CBPP is the source for the remaining graphs in this piece, although some have my marks on them.

Relief

I spent most of Tuesday in a news blackout. I had planned to work the polls, but I was ill, and things were running smoothly without me at the polling place, so I stayed home. And turned off the news. I didn’t want to know.

After the polls closed, I went to help Mr. Spherical Model, who had served as our Presiding Judge, to drive the ballots to the collection location. I told him I didn’t have any news; I didn’t want to know which way our country was going to slowly be put to death.

But later, he tuned in to the returns on TV, and the first thing of note was Wisconsin going to Trump—and the media seemed shocked. And I thought, that’s where Republican Governor Scott Walker had to face recalls and persecution from labor unions, and he kept winning. And that had activated a lot of Republican support. Plus, Hillary had tried to win the state without bothering to set foot there. So, not really a surprise.

But other surprises continued. And eventually I started paying attention.

I hadn’t realized how much relief I would feel to learn that the media and their polls were wrong, and that we wouldn’t be subjected to a Clinton socialist/corrupt presidency following the eight painful years of an Obama socialist/corrupt presidency. The complete and permanent transformation from our constitutional republic to socialist tyranny wasn’t inevitable after all.

There’s still a Trump presidency to deal with. I’m adjusting to that. But, on the immediate bright side, because the Democrats didn’t win, we still have a Republican Senate and House. And there’s the small but hope-filled possibility that, with a non-antagonistic president, they might actually move toward conservative policies.

In Texas, of course the Republicans remained strong across the state. But here in Harris County, Hillary won. Democrats vote straight ticket, and every county-wide race was lost by Republicans. That includes sheriff, district attorney, tax assessor, and every judge. Every judge. This is tragic. Not only does that mean that every court on the ballot (not all terms ended this election) went to an inexperienced new judge, but to a judge who are philosophically willing to use something other than the Constitution, rule of law, and justice to determine their rulings.

Hopefully this damage will be offset in off-election years, when Republicans pay more attention and are much more likely to vote than are Democrats.

So, things are mixed. But overall, the sun came up sunnier than I expected on Wednesday morning.

My Facebook feed was filled with calls for kindness and uniting, and very few desperate pleas to wake from the nightmare. I guess my friends and I have already mostly self-selected. But I have become aware of the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth around the country.

My daughter-in-law, Mrs. Political Sphere, posted this gentle message:

I know that many of you are disappointed with the outcome of the election. As am I but I would have been disappointed either way. I could not bring myself to vote for Trump or Hillary. That being said I hope Trump is not as bad as I think he is.

This was reposted by a couple of her liberal friends. And I concur.

A brother-in-law was a Trump supporter—all along, even when Ted Cruz was still an option. He’s a businessman, and he reimagined Trump as he would want him to be. He believed all the bombast was a sort of show, over-the-top, to get attention, to get elected. And once elected, he would modify and do what it took to get the country economically back on its feet.

image from here

I never bought that. There’s way too much evidence to lead me to believe that’s not what was going on in Trump’s mind. But now that we are where we are, I would like to believe he’s right.

So far there are hopeful signs.

He released his plan for the first 100 days in office, which he calls his contract with the American voter. I’m not with him on the whole thing, but there are some good essentials in there. Remember that list of five things Cruz promised to do on day 1? It’s not all there, but most of it is.

Thursday there was a panel discussion at The Heritage Foundation, discussing conservatism during a Trump administration. Jonah Goldberg took a question about how large the issue of Supreme Court appointments loomed during this election. His answer went beyond that, and made a point I found useful.

It’s absolutely true that Hillary Clinton was a grave threat to the Constitution, grave threat to the Court…. The opposite is not necessarily true about Donald Trump. His commitment to the Constitution rhetorically has been quite good as a matter of campaigning. But he also said that there were twelve articles to the Constitution, so I don’t know that he is deeply enamored with the text. He also has views on things like eminent domain that a lot of people in this room, I think, are nervous about. He also has views on the First Amendment that I think a lot of people in this room are nervous about or should be nervous about.

And so I think that the question among conservatives and constitutionalists isn’t so much of what’s in Donald Trump’s heart. That remains to be seen.

What really matters is surrounding him, giving him the incentive structure whereby the information flow, the political decision-making process, all point him in the right direction….

The whole purpose of the conservative movement is not just to elect more Republican politicians; it is to move the zeitgeist and the popular understanding of the issues so that it is in politicians’ interests to do the right thing. And I think that is the first task for Donald Trump—for the conservative movement, it is to make sure that the arguments he is hearing and the incentives that he has push him in the right direction. I certainly think that he’s open to it. And he has made promises that commit him to it.

So, we have work to do, but there’s reason to believe we can do it. It will take constant vigilance, and practice at explaining what it is we conserve and why. But, for now, while he gets underway with a Trump presidency, I’m willing to support any efforts to bring us northward into freedom, prosperity, and civilization.

(I might even start capitalizing the title of president, which I have refused to do for president Obama for several years now.)

A Parent's Job

So, you’re a parent of school-age children. Suppose you have a family situation where you can’t take a vacation during summer, because of the job of one of the parents. But there is a week you can take off during a week in April, say. You look at your children’s grades and attendance records, and you make the decision to go to take a well-earned trip to Disney World. The kids will miss a full week of classes. You meet with their teachers and arrange for work to be made up. And you go make some good family memories.

And then you get fined for failing to have your child attend school, a criminal offense.

That’s ridiculous, so you take it to court. And you win, because a court isn’t going to go all the way to the logical conclusion that letting your child do something other than school for even a single day is criminal parental behavior.

This was big news in Britain on Friday.

A couple of days later, on a British news show, there was another educational issue that came up. As I recall, it was about a parent’s choice to take a child out of a failing neighborhood school and go into a school of the parents’ choice. The newsperson thought this was fair and right. But when she was asked about the outcome of the vacationing father’s case, she thought that was wrong. It would encourage other parents to take their kids out of school for holidays. The news people agreed that there was a limit to what sensible people could allow parents to do, and compulsory education was for a good reason.

Meanwhile, back in the US, the president put forth an ultimatum regarding his latest social agenda item. He sent out a decree to all public school districts in the country, threatening to cut off federal funding for education to any that did not comply with the requirement to allow self-proclaimed transgender students to use the bathroom and showers of their choice.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott responded, “I announce today that Texas is fighting this. Obama can’t rewrite the Civil Rights Act. He’s not a king.”

So maybe it’s time to think about education.

Let’s start with a basic question: Who has the natural right to see to the care and upbringing of their children?

If you believe the parent has that responsibility, you’re in the freedom zone. If you believe the government has that responsibility, you’re in the tyranny zone.

If you’re thinking, “Yeah, but it’s in everybody’s interest if we educate the next generation. And we can’t expect all parents to take care of that—or be able to. So we’ve agreed together to do that,” then you’re partially right, but there’s more to it if you follow the thought through.

Yes, we all have an interest in an educated populace. But that doesn’t automatically give the responsibility to the government. And yes, there are some parents who will not or cannot provide for the education of their own children. But, as an alternative to government monopoly, wouldn’t it be better to help only those incapable of affording education, and taking responsibility away from only those parents who have proven to be negligent?

Let’s assume we’re in agreement that, a) education isn’t a government responsibility; it is a parental responsibility with societal help as needed; b) to the extent any government participates in education, it should be the most local level possible and should exclude the federal level.

Given that, the next question is, how do we get there from here?

The answer, as usual, is to limit government to its proper role and allow the free market to find innovative solutions.

So then the next question is how.

I’m not sure of the answer, but a week and a half ago I spent a day talking with Heritage Foundation visitors to Houston. They were here to listen—I got to talk education one-on-one for a couple of hours, before even hearing from their panel and then evening speaker, Jim DeMint. Part of their purpose was to introduce an idea that I’m beginning to consider.

Have you heard of ESAs? That’s Educational Savings Accounts (or other meanings for the letters, depending on where you are, but with that general idea). It’s similar to a medical savings account—money that follows the child, that can be used in various approved ways for the education of that child.

This is already being tried in five states. In Arizona, it started with special needs students. It took 90% of their state funding (leaving alone their local and federal money) and gave it to the parents. The parent could leave the child in the local public school program, but they had the option to take the allotted money and spend it one some combination of tuition, tutoring, therapy, classes, and educational equipment. This could include, maybe, a parochial school plus tutoring and equine therapy (which helps rewire the brain).

Educational Savings Account in use
photo found here

One example we were given showed the parents being allotted some $19,000 of the total $21,000 (the amount spent by the state on each special needs student in public schools), to use as best they could. They were able to provide very well, doing all they had intended—and had about $2000 left over for the year.

This leftover could be spent later in the year, or rollover to the next year, or accrue for the child to use for a college education.

Arizona expanded its program beyond special needs. As the money is made available to families to use as they choose, the market responds. And competition drives both innovation and lower prices.

Heritage was suggesting to Texas that we endeavor to persuade the legislature to initiate an ESA program, and that we set it up from the start to include all students who choose it, including homeschool and private school students, whose family’s currently pay taxes for their children’s educations, which they do not benefit from, and additionally have to pay out-of-pocket for their expenses.

I’m hoping to consider this in more detail in the future—with my notes in hand, and with some of the data and charts that Heritage showed us. But I was heartened to see that people have been thinking about marketplace solutions to free us from the government monopoly of education.

If we’re able to find ways to get better and cheaper ways to educate our children, that is good for everyone. If we’re able to return the responsibility and choice to parents, bypassing the federal government and its social engineering coercion—that’s priceless.

Economic Freedom in Good Measure

Yesterday I came across The Heritage Foundation’s 2016 Index of Economic Freedom. If you like charts, maps, and visual representations of related data, this is a great playground.

There’s an explanatory video under “About the Index,” that explains how economic freedom relates to other factors of civilization. Freedom, prosperity, and civilization are interrelated, as we assert here at The Spherical Model.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the video:

In addition to enjoying higher levels of financial prosperity, people in these free societies live longer, have better health, are more educated, and, surprisingly, are better protectors of the environment....

So, why does all this matter? It turns out that while there’s no single solution to the world’s major challenges, economic freedom can have a powerful effect on improving society. Our data shows that the five freest economies in each region are significantly more prosperous than the five least free. Every year’s index confirms this point, showing that countries that score higher on the index also perform higher in three key areas: income per capita, social progress, and democratic governance.

For each year, the data includes an overall score, which is made up of data on ten economic freedoms divided into four categories (followed with this year’s US scores, with 80.0 and above qualifying as “mostly free”):

·         Rule of Law

o   Property Rights  80.0

o   Freedom from Corruption  74.0

·         Government Size

o   Fiscal Freedom  65.6

o   Government Spending  54.7

·         Regulatory Efficiency

o   Business Freedom  84.7

o   Labor Freedom  91.4

o   Monetary Freedom  77.0

·         Open Markets

o   Trade Freedom  87.0

o   Investment Freedom  70.0

o   Financial Freedom  70.0

You can get an explanation of their methodology on page 467 of their book, or look around at heritage.org/index .

The US ranks only 11th most economically free country this year. A quick snapshot of the US scores reveal the following:

Economic Freedom Snapshot

·         2016 Economic Freedom Score: 75.4 (down 0.8 points)

·         Economic Freedom Status: Mostly Free

·         Global Ranking: 11th

·         Regional Ranking: 2nd in North America

·         Notable Successes: Open Markets

·         Concerns: Management of Public Finance and Rule of Law

·         Overall Score Change Since 2012: –0.9

That last one, because it’s an average, doesn’t show that last year there was a downturn of 0.8 points, after a year of improvement.

I’m interested in, not just change over the past year, but longer trends. So I charted these ten freedoms from 1995-2016, based on the Heritage data. I wondered whether we would see trends toward or away from freedom based on who elected leaders were, and what was going on in the country at the time. (I’m assuming that other years were like 2016, with the information coming out in the first quarter, which means that we’re looking at what happened in the previous year.) Here’s what I see:

·         Property Rights start out consistently high, fully free, until 2010, and then deteriorated further in 2014, so that we now hang at the bottom of the freedom zone, at 80.

·         Freedom from Corruption also started high, but suffered a serious drop in 1997, and declined further, with some ups and downs, to a further drop in 2008, dropping significantly again in 2013, with a slight rise since, leaving us only "moderately free," at 74.0.

·         Fiscal Freedom starts low, at 64.8, and doesn’t show much of a rise until 2004. A slow rise and maintenance continues until a sharp drop in 2014, and another drop in 2016, ending at 65.6.

·         Government Spending (a rise here means the problem is less, because there’s less spending) starts terribly low, at  a "mostly unfree" 57.8, rising sharply in 2000, dropping following the 9/11 attack, but remaining steady until drops changed from slow to sharp in 2010, with a low of  a "repressive" 46.7 in 2012, with slight increases since, ending at 54.7. Changing this factor might do the most in improving US economic freedom.

·         Business Freedom stayed steady at 85.0 until improvement in 2006, maintaining or remaining steady until 2015, with a sharp drop this year, ending at 84.7, still considered free, but lower than ever on record.

·         Labor Freedom wasn’t recorded until 2005. It held around 95.0, with a couple of years higher, until a sudden drop this year, ending at 91.4, still quite free, but trending the wrong direction.

·         Monetary Freedom stayed steady around 84.0 until 2009, with drops continuing through 2014, with slight improvement the final two years, ending at 77.0.

·         Trade Freedom started increasing in 2001, up into the freedom zone, with considerable improvement in 2004, then dropping back out of freedom into moderate freedom in 2009, continuing to drop through 2012, with slight improvement since, ending at 77.0.

·         Investment Freedom stayed steadily at 70.0 until three good years 2006-2008, then dropping back down and remaining at 70.0 since 2011.

·         Financial Freedom stayed steadily at 70.0 until a sharp improvement to 90.0, well into freedom, 2001-2006, dropping to 80.00 for three years, then back down to 70.0 from 2009 to present.

The overall score has a number of ups and downs, but the general trend is up from 2001-2008, then decreasing since, with a slight uptick in 2015 followed by a final drop to a the low 75.4. We were only considered economically free from 2005-2008. It would be interesting to go back further, to see what the measures looked like as we left the Carter administration malaise and entered better economic times under Reagan, even with nothing but Democrat legislators during those years.

For what was set up to be the grand experiment in freedom, with government limited to protecting our rights to life liberty and property, we’re nowhere near as economically free as we ought to be. Because government oversteps.

We know what works, in all of these measures: a lot less government interference; laws that are reasonable, predictable, and fair; in a country that protects itself from attacks. Good people, anywhere in the world, can take it from there.

Defining Marriage

A week ago the Indiana House Judiciary Committee met, discussing the state’s marriage law. Most of the day was spent talking about the emotional civil rights argument pressuring for “same-sex marriage.” Then the committee was schooled by a young man named Ryan Anderson. He’s the William E. Simon fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which is a non-partisan (but conservative) think tank in Washington, DC, which I often turn to for data and opinion. Anderson is also a doctoral candidate at the University of Notre Dame in political science. As an undergrad at Princeton, he co-authored a book—part of which was published as an article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy—along with another undergrad and Constitutional Law professor Robert George. The title of the book/article is What Is Marriage? [I found a pdf here, 43 pages, so I think this is either the article or a summary of the book.]

Man/woman, exclusive, permanent marriage
is still a beautiful public good

His brief speech was organized with a lawyer’s mind, but with clarity for regular people. Most of his points are arguments I have made myself [see my Defense of Marriage collection], but I always admire someone who finds yet clearer ways to tell the truth. So today I’m going to just outline his speech, with occasional quotes.

The definition of marriage is necessary in the discussion:

Everyone in this room is in favor of marriage equality. The only way we can know whether or not any given state law is treating marriage equally or not is if we know what marriage is. Because every state law will draw lines between what is a marriage and what isn’t a marriage. If we want those lines to be drawn on principle, if we want those lines to be drawn on the truth, we have to know what sort of a relationship a marriage is as compared to other forms of consensual adult loving relationships.

He sets up the speech answering three questions:

•                      What is marriage?

•                      Why does marriage matter for public policy?

•                      What are the consequences of redefining marriage? 

His definition argument for defining marriage as the permanent commitment between a man and a woman keys on the biological fact of offspring.  

Whenever a child is born, a mother will always be close by. That’s a fact of biology. The question for culture, and the question for law is, Will a father be close by? And if so, for how long? Marriage is the institution that different cultures and societies across time and place developed to maximize the likelihood that that man commits to that woman, and then the two of them take responsibility to raise that child. 

He offers up just a sampling of social science data, of which there is a mountain, that children are most likely to have best outcomes when raised by a mother and a father—one of each gender, not interchangeable. He quotes President Obama, showing this is not dismissible as a conservative anachronism:

We know the statistics that children that grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of schools, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.

So, if we start with the premise that procreating and raising children are important to society, and that it is valuable to have the mother and father who bring life to the child stay together to raise the child, then public policy should, at the very least, not interfere with that preferred condition, and would be better to encourage that condition.

He referred to the change in the out-of-wedlock birthrate over the past 50 years (which I noted last week as well): “At one point in America virtually every child was given the gift of a married mother and father. Those numbers right now—more than 50% of Hispanic children are born outside of wedlock; more than 70% of African-Americans are born outside of wedlock. And the consequences for those children are really serious.” There’s no way out of poverty without turning this trend around.

He uses the language of the opposition to address the policy:

So everything that you can care about if you’re someone who cares about social justice and limited government—if you care about freedom and liberty and you care about the poor—is better served by having the state define marriage correctly to ensure that men and women commit to each other and take responsibility for their children, while then leaving other consenting adults to live and to love how they choose, without redefining the institution—the fundamental institution of marriage.

Much of the rest of the speech addresses the results of redefining marriage, using not presupposition, but actual outcomes from changes that have happened.

First is the reorientation of “the institution of marriage away from the needs and rights of children and towards the desires of adults.”  This point ties back in to the social science argument: “If the biggest social problem we face right now in the United States is absentee dads, how will we insist that fathers are essential when the law redefines marriage to make fathers optional?” Redefining marriage would multiply the likelihood of fatherless children.

Second concerns the three basic components of the traditional definition: man/woman, exclusivity, and permanence. If you declare these three attributes of marriage to be “irrational,” what do you replace them with to delimit a definition?

He refers to three new words, invented to refer to sexual relationship combinations that are claiming comparable value.

·        Throuple—a three-person couple. If you remove the importance of the one man and one woman who come together to parent a child, then you remove the principle that limits the number of participants in the “marriage,” without adding anything of value to society.

·        Wedlease—a temporary arrangement, removing the permanence of the relationship that has been of value to children, who take a long time to raise to adulthood.

·        Monogamish—more or less retaining the two-person marriage, but removing the exclusivity, so that sex with partners outside the marriage is accepted as part of the marriage.

The third result of redefining marriage concerns liberty, specifically religious liberty. He points out that in Massachusetts, in Washington, DC, and in neighboring Illinois, Christian adoption agencies were forced to stop offering their services.

These agencies said, We have no problem with same-sex couples adopting from other agencies, but we only want to place our children with a married mom and a dad. We have religious liberty interests. We also have social science that suggests children do better with a married mom and a dad. In all three jurisdictions they were told they could not do that.

Because of the redefinition of marriage, it became illegal for anyone to purposely prefer to place orphans with a mother and father—the best situation those innocent, voiceless unfortunate could have had.

Additionally, there have been court cases against photographers, bakers, florists, and innkeepers—individuals who presumably still have their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion—who are coerced by activist judges to act against their conscience. In none of these cases have the accused attempted to deprive the plaintiffs of services; they have only reserved the right not to accept their business. Courts have ruled that they can and should be deprived of their religious liberty and be forced to take on business they find objectionable—or else close their businesses and serve no one.

This coercion can only happen in a tyranny. If such cases are allowed to stand, we no longer have Constitutional guarantees of freedom.

What we do not find is an example of a place where redefining marriage has not resulted in loss of religious liberty. So those who argue, “That would never happen here,” are either lying or blinded.

So, what do we get if we redefine marriage? A small segment of the population (of the approximately 3% of the population that is homosexual, the even smaller percentage who choose to commit to one other person) can call their romantic relationship equivalent to marriage, with no benefit to society as a whole.

What is the cost? Fatherhood and motherhood are declared irrelevant. Children are abandoned and left in poverty. People who for religious or social science reasons value man/woman parenting, permanence, and exclusivity are coerced by the brute force of government (not to mention a fair amount of media and peer bullying) to behave against their beliefs. By any measure, it’s not a fair exchange.

Here is the video, if you’d like to hear the whole speech.