Thought Crime Press

I have a list of questions:

·         When five of nine judges make a societal change, are all Americans required to change their beliefs to align with that slim majority?

·         If individuals don’t immediately realign, should they be shunned, publicly shamed, forced out of their livelihood, and protested? Should this happen based on assumptions about someone’s beliefs, rather than on what they have done?

·         If one judge swings the majority opinion to something at odds with entire religions, such as Catholics, most Protestants, Latter-day Saints, and Muslims, should all of those adherent be required to denounce their religions or face the loss of their rights to participate in the marketplace and society?

·         If everyone is to change their opinions to align with that slim majority, does that include the four dissenting judges? Should the dissenters be forced to change their opinions or else risk being drummed out of their positions?

·         If even judges are to be forced to change their opinions whenever they are in the minority, does that need to happen even when a ruling goes against the side you’re now supporting?

·         Does that mean that you must change your beliefs whenever a slim majority of the Court goes against you? Should you be subject to coercive efforts such as shunning, public shaming, being protested, and forced out of your livelihood?

I’m asking the questions to carry a thought to its logical conclusion. Because people who police other people’s thoughts and attack them for disagreement tend not to be people who think things all the way through.

I’m hoping that we’ve reached the end of that pendulum swing (the disallowing dissent from current popular beliefs, particularly those in progressive/social-justice-y minds) and moving back to actual tolerance and respectful disagreement and dialogue.

This past week there was the attempt at public shaming of Chip and Joanna Gaines, hosts of HGTV’s Fixer Upper. I’m a fan. I’ve binge watched the seasons available on Netflix, and I’m glad a new season is underway. We’ll be within an hour of their store in Waco during the holidays, and we’re trying to work out a visit.

Chip and Joanna Gaines of HGTV's Fixer Upper
Photo from HGTV on Twitter, also found here

One of the things I love about the show is their happy family. They show the kids, at home around their farm. And they show how the family works around the parents’ busy schedules to make sure there is time for kids. There’s a little bit of family in every show.

They’re Christian. They’ve been very open about their faith in multiple interviews. Joanna has talked about how God led her, first to close down the store she loved to spend time with her small kids. And then, when it was time, step out and build something even better. Their growing business isn’t just about hard work, skill, and Joanna’s exceptionally good taste; it’s about using their talents to serve others and glorify God.

The attack in the press, BuzzFeed, was underhanded, and couldn’t even qualify as journalism. They spread the story that Chip and Joanna attend a church where the pastor is against “same-sex marriage.” There was no interview of the pastor; there was nothing in his behavior to show that he has attacked homosexuals or even been unkind to them. There was only assumption and inference. And, by association it was implied that the Gaineses ought to have publicly denounced their own pastor. And, failing that, maybe their show ought to be boycotted.

But, instead of some of the torches and pitchforks we’ve seen surrounding this issue, even people who support “same-sex marriage” were saying, that’s not only bad journalism, it’s just the wrong thing to do.

In a Heritage Foundation panel discussion, “Decision 2016: What’s Next for Conservatives?” Ben Domenech of The Federalist talked about this in a way that made me hopeful:

I don’t think we should underestimate how significant an issue the fact was in this election, that we had an election after the progressive left in America had announced an end to the culture wars. They were confident that the culture wars were over, “and we won. And we’re going to go around the battlefield shooting the wounded. And we’re going to continue to do that in a very public way. And we’re going to single out American individuals, private citizens, who simply have what is, from our perspective, the wrong views. The wrong views about God. The wrong views about family. The wrong views about the way that we live.”

I think it is very interesting what happened over this past week with the targeting of the HGTV hosts Chip and Joanna Gaines, merely for the fact that they went to a church where the pastor was a Christian and believed Christian things that one would expect to see if you went to a church in Texas and heard Christians talking about Christianity. And the fact that there were a number of members of the media, the left media included, who stood up and said, “This is unfair. You shouldn’t do this. You shouldn’t target people this way.”

I think that we are in an entirely new space culturally, about where there are a number of people on the left who recognize, “Hey, there are a lot of Americans who don’t agree with us about things, and maybe we should acknowledge that those views are acceptable to have within the public square. Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to embark on this type of targeting.”

I think, under this administration, you are going to see an amazing thing happen, which is that the left is suddenly going to rediscover that they like civil liberty, that maybe federalism is a pretty good idea. Maybe not the entire country needs to be governed by the same rules or expectations whereby a centralized government in Washington… I think you’re going to see them rediscover the fact that, hey, local things are good—and not just food. And that’s something that I think is going to be a very beneficial trend. And it’s one that conservatives, that people who believe in the Constitution, should be prepared to seize a hold of. Because, if the outcome of that is to devolve power back to our citizens, to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our states, that’s something that we’re all going to benefit from.

Chip and Joanna Gaines said nothing during the week of attacks on them. Then Chip finally tweeted this:

Chip Gaines

✔@chippergaines

Regardless of our decision to make a statement about all this craziness, or not, I ask that people please! respect @KateAurthur & @ginamei

3:15 AM - 3 Dec 2016

He asks for respect. That is all. After taking the attacks without so much as a single defensive grumble, he appeals to common decency. In other words, he has responded as a good Christian.

Maybe there’s something in Christian beliefs that build people like this, or at least people who strive to be like this as much as we have learned so far.

I don’t know the anything more about Kate Aurthur, who wrote the non-news piece with the insinuating headline. I’m not inclined to shun, shame, and protest until she is fired and blacklisted. But I’d like to point out the irony of her claim—after what she just did to Chip and Joanna—that Christians are immoral. And I suggest she open up a Bible and look up Matthew 7:4 or Luke 6:42 and read about motes and beams in the eye.

About the Children

Section seven of Ryan T. Anderson’s book Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom discusses families. In particular, the outcome for children raised by two parents of the same sex, which was imposed on the American people in June, on the whim of a wavering Justice Kennedy.

The book lays out research on children of gays (COGs), reports from children so raised, and various other opinions—which Justice Kennedy had in hand and dismissed as unimportant. Anderson’s presentation is always logical. I’ll leave it to you to read his version. But for today I’d like to offer a few passages I took note of.

One story comes from an essay by Robert Oscar Lopez, “a bisexual Latino intellectual,” who was raised by his mother and her female partner. His essay, first published in the online journal Public Discourse, is titled “Growing Up with Two Moms: The Untold Children’s View.” Lopez recounts the hole in his young life because of the absence of a father. His friends, he said, learned how to approach life from a man and a woman.

They learned, typically, how to be bold and unflinching from male figures and how to write thank-you cards and be sensitive form female figures. These are stereotypes, of course, but stereotypes come in handy when you inevitably leave the safety of your lesbian mom’s trailer and have to work and survive in a world where everybody thinks in stereotypical terms, even gays.

Not only did he lack a male role model, his mother and her partner were not traditional mothers either. He makes the valid point that, while gays and lesbians have been pushing for so-called “marriage equality,” they have cavalierly favored depriving children of either a mother or a father, even though, he says, “Many gays don’t realize what a blessing it was to be reared in a traditional home.”

Lopez has been silenced and maligned for expressing his experience and opinions, which do not align with the movement’s agenda.

As Anderson comments, “Gay activists use intimidation to shut down debate about their agenda, and no one has faced more attacks on their characters than the children of gays and lesbians who oppose gay marriage.”

Katy Faust is another such voice, a grown woman who was raised by two women. She wrote, in an amicus brief in the Obergefell case,

There is no difference between the value and worth of heterosexual and homosexual persons…because we are all humans created in the image of God….[But] when it comes to procreation and child-rearing, same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples are wholly unequal and should be treated differently for the sake of the children.

She reminds us, “Each child is conceived by a mother and a father to whom that child has a natural right.”

I noticed this line, because it aligns with a sentence from “The Family: A Proclamation to the World”: “Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity.”

Faust goes on:

When a child is placed in a same-sex-headed household, she will miss out on at least one critical parental relationship and a vital dual-gender influence. The nature of the adults’ union guarantees this. Whether by adoption, divorce, or third-party reproduction, the adults in this scenario satisfy their heart’s desires, while the child bears the most significant cost: missing out on one or more of her biological parents.

When she became a mother, she came to realize this fact: “Kids want their mother and father to love them and to love each other.” And she adds,

Now that I am a parent, I see clearly the beautiful differences my husband and I bring to our family. I see the wholeness and health that my children receive because they have both of their parents living with and loving them. I see how important the role of their father is and how irreplaceable I am as their mother. We play complementary roles in their lives, and neither of us is disposable. In fact, we are both critical. It’s almost as if Mother Nature got this whole reproduction thing exactly right.

Indeed.

It isn’t that same-sex parents are bad at parenting. Both may be good and devoted parents. But there is still something missing. As the research shows, children raised by divorced parents, or single parents (never married, the father not in the picture), or by in vitro reproduction through a donor, or are abandoned by parents—these children all ache for the missing parent. Their lives are not whole. So, if that is true, Faust asks, “How can it be possible that they are miraculously turning out ‘even better!’ when raised in same-sex headed households?” In reality they aren’t.

She concludes, “The onus must be on adults to conform to the needs of children, not the other way around.”

Heather Barwick, another child of two moms, adds her story. “I’m writing to you [the gay community] because I’m letting myself out of the closet: I don’t support gay marriage….It’s not because you’re gay…..It’s because of the nature of the same-sex relationship itself,” which always deprives a child of either a mom or a dad."

There’s something wrong with adults who think it’s all right to reorder society to meet their desires when those desires necessarily deprive a child of what the child is entitled to, and will feel the absence of. Barwick said,

A lot of us, a lot of your kids, are hurting. My father’s absence created a huge hole in me, and I ached every day for a dad. I love my mom’s partner, but another mom could never have replaced the father I lost…. It is a strange and confusing thing to walk around with this deep-down unquenchable ache for a father, for a man, in a community that says that men are unnecessary….

[A legal system that redefines marriage] promotes and normalizes a family structure that necessarily denies us something precious and foundational. It denies us something we need and long for, while at the same time tells us that we don’t need what we naturally crave. That we will be okay. But we’re not. We’re hurting.

Children of divorce are free to say that they miss having their parents together, or they miss the parent they don’t get to live with. That makes sense to us. But these children, purposely raised without a father, or without a mother, don’t even get to voice their pain; it’s not politically correct to bring that up. Barwick says, “If we say we are hurting because we were raised by same-sex parents, we are either ignored or labeled a hater.” Children who love their gay parents are labeled homophobic for missing something children are naturally made to expect—both of their biological parents.

Another story comes from Doug Mainwaring, a homosexual male who married a woman, left the marriage to pursue a homosexual lifestyle, and then came back for the sake of the children. He says, “(1) Creating a family with another man is not completely equal to creating a family with a woman, and (2) denying children parents of both genders at home is an objective evil. Kids need and yearn for both.”  He said, “I do not get to throw away the mother of my child as if she is a used incubator.”

And Mainwaring added, “When you are a parent, ethical questions revolve around your children and you put away your self-interest…forever.”

Anderson concludes, “For all of Justice Kennedy’s concern about conferring the ‘dignity’ of marriage on same-sex couples, there’s little concern about conferring suffering on the children raised in such relationships. A relentless focus on adult desire has left us astonishingly calloused.”

That callousness—which fits into what we refer to here at The Spherical Model as southern hemisphere savagery—is the legacy of this redefinition of marriage.

Those of us who know what real marriage is have an obligation to remember, to speak up regardless of negative backlash, and to find ways to express the truth and keep it from being buried. The next section of the book talks about how to build a movement of marriage, to help our society recover.

The downward movement started decades earlier, with “the sexual ideology that undermined the rational foundations for the marital norms of permanence, exclusivity, and monogamy.” What took decades to deconstruct will take decades to rebuild.  Anderson paraphrases Pope Benedict XVI, who “reminds us that while intellectual arguments are important, people are moved more by beauty and holiness….So the first thing we need to do is live the truth about marriage ourselves.”

That’s a starting place. We’ll leave it at that for today, and talk about organization and activism another time.

Millennia of Marriage, Part I

For those who consider listening to Supreme Court oral arguments a good way to spend an afternoon, Tuesday was particularly good.

This was the day of oral arguments on Obergefell v. Hodges and the consolidated cases related to same-sex “marriage.” As we reviewed recently, [here and here] they covered two questions. The first is whether the 14^th Amendment requires all states to license same-sex “marriages.” The second assumes that question 1 is answered no, and then asked whether all states are required to recognize same-sex “marriages” licensed in any other state.

As I understand it, the way the Supreme Court works is, each justice studies the case individually, reads the briefs associated with the case, and develops an opinion. Quite likely those opinions are fairly well settled by the time of oral arguments.

But that is not to say the arguments are irrelevant. The arguments are intended to give each side the opportunity to voice its strongest points, and also to respond to questions the justices have—which might be intended to either show weakness in the arguments, or bolster those points with added clarity. And court watchers look at the questions and comments from the justices to give some idea about the way they’re leaning.

Our current Court is relatively set on divisive issues—as this is. We have four justices who generally read the Constitution as written and judge based on the written law; and we have four who generally look at cases according to their own personal views and then look for ways to construe those opinions as if they adhered to the Constitution. And then we have one justice, Kennedy, who is unpredictable. That means the future of marriage in the United States rests on the counsels’ ability to persuade one unelected man.

Justice Kennedy during oral arguments April 28, 2015
photo found here

I and others who know the value of real marriage have been justifiably worried about the possible outcome. While there was nothing too definitive on Tuesday, there was an awful lot that gives hope. So it surprised me when I read Wednesday’s Houston Chronicle and they (Adam Liptak of the New York Times wrote the story) seemed to have observed different oral arguments. Their news story ignored what I’m about to cover below, and opined, “On the evidence of his words, he seemed torn about what to do. But Kennedy’s tone was more emotional and emphatic when he made the case for same-sex marriage. That, coupled with his earlier judicial opinions, gave gay rights advocates reason for optimism.”

I’m doing this review to see if there’s something I missed. Buckle up. This will definitely take more than just today’s post.

Question 1

As soon as counsel for the plaintiffs, Mary Bonauto, began her introductory speech, Justice Ginsburg interrupted:

JUSTICE GINSBURG: What do you do with the Windsor case where the court stressed the Federal government's historic deference to States when it comes to matters of domestic relations?

Good question. Because, in Windsor, the Court declared that the federal government could not have a definition of marriage (despite the thousands of places in law where marriage relates to federal law and thus requires a definition) because it had to defer to states, who might have different definitions. OK, so the federal government cannot prescribe a definition because of federalism—separate sovereign states. Yet now they are being asked to force a definition on all states because of the 14^th Amendment equal protection clause.

MS. BONAUTO: And here we have a whole class of people who are denied the equal right to be able to join in this very extensive government institution that provides protection for families.

Justice Roberts then pointed out that, according to longstanding definition, these people were not joining the institution, but changing it.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Every definition that I looked up, prior to about a dozen years ago, defined marriage as unity between a man and a woman as husband and wife. Obviously, if you succeed, that core definition will no longer be operable.

Ms. Bonauto went on autopilot, repeating the claim that state laws are preventing a class of people from participating in the institution, rather than biology and choices. Justice Roberts made sure she understood:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: No. My question is you're not seeking to join the institution; you're seeking to change what the institution is. The fundamental core of the institution is the opposite-sex relationship and you want to introduce into it a same-sex relationship.

It wasn’t spelled out, but it was clear to me that there is a difference between preventing a person from marrying because of their belonging to a class (homosexuals) and preventing couples. There is nothing in the law related to sexual orientation (which counsel for the defense did say); homosexuals are not prevented from marrying. But that doesn’t mean they can “marry” someone who does not qualify as being a person of the opposite sex, not married to someone else, not too close a relative, or not of age to consent—the same law that applies to everyone else.

Ms. Bonauto tried to claim that the male-female relationship isn’t fundamental, and that ideas change. I get the feeling she’s not used to being challenged on her talking points. At this juncture, Justice Kennedy stepped in with what is likely to be a quoted point going forward:

JUSTICE KENNEDY: One of the problems is when you think about these cases you think about words or cases, and the word that keeps coming back to me in this case is millennia, plus time. First of all, there has not been really time, so the Respondents say, for the Federal system to engage in this debate, the separate States. But on a larger scale, it's been it was about the same time between Brown and Loving as between Lawrence and this case. It's about 10 years. And so there's time for the scholars and the commentators and the bar and the public to engage in it. But still, 10 years is I don't even know how to count the decimals when we talk about millennia. This definition has been with us for millennia. And it's very difficult for the Court to say, oh, well, we know better.

Indeed. If there is a theme for the day, that is it.

Justice Alito brings up the next point, about intent of traditional marriage laws.

JUSTICE ALITO: You argue in your brief that the primary purpose of the Michigan law limiting marriage to a man and a woman was to demean gay people; is that correct?

That is indeed the claim. Therefore, they must prove that the people of Michigan had no other purpose than to demean homosexuals when they enacted the law. That is a high bar, and unreachable.

MS. BONAUTO: The Michigan statute and amendment certainly went out of their way to say that gay people were in some sense antithetical to the good of society.

JUSTICE ALITO: And did you say in your brief that the primary purpose of that was to demean gay people?

MS. BONAUTO: I think it has that effect, Your Honor. I do. Now, at the same time

JUSTICE ALITO: Is that true just in Michigan or is that true of every other State that has a similar definition of marriage?

She had to admit that maybe not all had the precise intention, but…

MS. BONAUTO: But even if there's not a purpose to demean, I think the common commonality among all of the statutes, whether they were enacted long ago or more recently, is that they encompass moral judgments and stereotypes about gay people. Even if you think about something 100 years ago, gay people were not worthy of the concern of the government and the and and moral judgments about

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, how do you account for the fact that, as far as I'm aware, until the end of the 20th century, there never was a nation or a culture that recognized marriage between two people of the same sex? Now, can we infer from that that those nations and those cultures all thought that there was some rational, practical purpose for defining marriage in that way, or is it your argument that they were all operating independently based solely on irrational stereotypes and prejudice?

I like it when thinking people ask questions that get to the germ of an issue. He’s going to make her prove that, not only the current specific Michigan law exists only to express animus toward a class, but that the antecedents to such laws, the definition used over time and cultures, all were intended to demean homosexuals. She begins to look foolish. She stammers that, “Times can blind.” And, you know, discrimination against women, and blacks, and….

Justice Ginsburg tried to help by muddying the waters with the idea of dominant-subordinate relationships in ancient marriage. Justice Roberts halted that analogy as not useful here. Ms. Bonauto added in questions about mixed-race marriages. Justice Scalia squelched that:

JUSTICE SCALIA: Well, not all societies banned mixed-race marriages. In fact, not even all States in this country banned. But I don't know of any—do you know of any society, prior to the Netherlands in 2001, that permitted same-sex marriage?

He’s continuing his point about her insistence that all these cultures were bigoted:

JUSTICE SCALIA: For millennia, not a single other society until the Netherlands in 2001, and you're telling me they were all—I don't know what.

And then he tries to bring us back to the clarity of the question to be settled:

JUSTICE SCALIA: Well, the issue, of course, is not whether there should be same-sex marriage, but who should decide the point.

I’m pretty sure Justice Sotomayor is pro-same-sex “marriage,” but she's not done with the intent question, and introduces a question on historic discrimination that only strengthens Justice Scalia’s point:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Now, counselor, in terms of this millennium, what's been the status or the view of gay people in most of those countries? Have they been subject to the kinds of discrimination that they were subject to here? Were they welcomed into the worldwide community? Was it free of discrimination?

Ms. Bonauto says some irrelevant things about whether they had constitutional protections like ours. And then Justice Alito gives a little history lesson:

JUSTICE ALITO: But there have been cultures that did not frown on homosexuality. That is not a universal opinion throughout history and across all cultures. Ancient Greece is an example. It was well accepted within certain bounds. But did they have same-sex marriage in ancient Greece?

He summarizes: they had marriage; they had same-sex relationships that even received a fair amount of cultural approval. But they did not have same-sex marriage. So…

JUSTICE ALITO: So their limiting marriage to couples of the opposite sex was not based on prejudice against gay people, was it?

She seems flustered. And then, surprisingly, it is Justice Breyer (another I would have assumed favored same-sex “marriage”) who nails the point:

JUSTICE BREYER: And to me, it takes the form, the opposite view has been the law everywhere for thousands of years among people who were not discriminating even against gay people, and suddenly you want nine people outside the ballot box to require States that don't want to do it to change what you've heard is, change what marriage is to include gay people. Why cannot those States at least wait and see whether in fact doing so in the other States is or is not harmful to marriage?

It must be a daunting thing to face the Supreme Court—especially when you’re in the wrong. And not very well prepared for the inevitable questions.

So far we’ve looked at the likelihood that real marriage requires a man and a woman for reasons other than bigotry. We’re still in the middle of question 1 arguments. So coming up next we’ll look at rationale for changing marriage to include same-sex couples, but not include any other changes in the definition.

Preparing the Ground, Part II

The last post was a request not to “draft Romney” for President, even though he’s a great man, made for our times. The reason has to do with the culture—a culture that rejected him when the alternative was a known failure.

So what we need to talk about, rather than who should run, is how to improve the culture. Very quickly. Now.

Related to culture, on the Glenn Beck radio show last week, Pat and Stu were discussing “a new poll” about religion and beliefs. I tried, unsuccessfully, to track down exactly which poll—or perhaps a collection. My guess is that the info comes from the Pew Research Foundation, or possibly this Harris Poll (a Nielsen company),but they didn’t say. So I’ll just go with Pat and Stu’s numbers.

First they were talking about what American people believe:

·         62% of Americans believe in Satan and hell; 75% believe in heaven.

·         42% believe in evolution.

·         82% believe in God; 8% don’t believe in God; 10% are unsure.

·         79% believe in miracles; 74% believe in angels.

·         41% believe in ghosts; 35% believe in UFOs; 31% believe in witches.

·         74% believe Jesus is the Son of God; 72% believe Jesus was resurrected; 60% accept as truth the virgin birth.

·         25% generally attend church weekly.

So far it’s just interesting. We Americans still have a pretty strong belief in God, especially compared to other countries. But if you measure dedication to belief by attendance, one in four is not that good. That’s certainly down from my childhood. (My childhood home, Utah, still has the highest attendance of 74% attending weekly—the highest in the US.)

Then Pat and Stu started talking about a specific surprising shift in belief. I’ll let their transcript tell the story:

Stu: Right now adults now support "same-sex marriage" by 54-38%; a 16-point margin now support "gay marriage." For more than a decade only about a third of Americans supported the idea, ranging from 27% in 1996 to 35% in 2009. So in 2009 it was 35%, and today it’s 54%. A 19-point move in that type of topic is incredibly fast. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything like it, to be perfectly honest with you. In 2011 it was the first time it crossed over the plurality level, and 2013 was the majority. Now we’re at 54%.

Listen to these numbers, though, broken down by age category. Those 60 and older oppose "gay marriage" 50-39%. They’re the only group now that opposes it.

Pat: Sixty and older.

Stu: Sixty and older, uh huh. [Age group] 45-59 favor "gay marriage" by a percentage of 49-40%. Between the ages of 30 and 44, they favor it 55-38%. So that’s a 17-point margin. But this is where you find—and this is, you know, where democrats are going, you know, because they try the same arguments over and over again. But these are the numbers they’re basing these arguments on: Those aged 18-29 favor "same-sex marriage" 75-18%. Seventy-five to eighteen!

Remember, this is a topic that Karl Rove is known as the architect because of—the idea that he organized a bunch of constitutional amendments on "gay marriage" to get conservatives out to vote, and they voted George W. Bush in for a second term in 2004. That’s the general reason he’s known as the architect, because he thought of that idea. That it was so popular to be opposed to "gay marriage" and to support traditional marriage back in 2004, that it was the thing that motivated people to go to the polls over a presidential election. Now we have a situation where it’s a 16-point margin among all people, and it’s 75-18% for younger people. Pretty amazing….

I mean, that’s just a societal study. You’re kind of seeing how people’s views change. I will say, on "gay marriage," I don’t know that I’ve ever seen something move that fast. 19 in five years is an astounding move for something that has been… You know, it wasn’t like a, you know, an idea no one had ever thought of. This is something that people considered for a really long time. And about a third of people said, “Yeah, there should be 'gay marriage.'” And all of a sudden, 19 points in five years. Interesting.

What else has happened during this five years? A civilization-hating president has been in the white house. Certainly he hasn’t helped, by lying during his campaign about what he wanted to do on this issue (lying about pretty much any issue, if he didn’t want us to make a judgment based on truth) and then going so far in the other direction that people are prosecuted for their beliefs, or forced out of business if they don’t go along with the homosexual agenda.

But it can’t be all just him. The speed of the change is alarming.

Meanwhile, more people are educated on the Constitution and basic human rights than ever before—mostly in the same time frame—about five years since the Tea Party started popping up. Albeit with the mistaken idea that Mitt Romney isn’t conservative enough, but at least making it clear that adhering to the Constitution—which we read and carry with us—is required of anyone we vote for.

If we’re looking for a reason the changes could happen so quickly, I think we have to look at the diversity of the media. We connect with each other instantaneously and widely, where such communication used to take days, weeks, or months, and was much more limited.

This blog is a tiny little example. The Spherical Model think tank is just me, and my computer, and whatever resources I put to use (which include my son Political Sphere, my son Economic Sphere, and my daughter Social Sphere). As obscure as this spot on the internet is, during the past week, it reached people not just in the US, but also in Russia, Ukraine, Taiwan, France, Singapore, South Korea, United Kingdom, Canada, Philippines, China, and New Zealand. If you add beyond this week, there were also significant readers in Turkey, Poland, Lavia…. Thank you, readers, for sharing. I write because I hope that what I have to say can help people seeking freedom, prosperity, and civilization. Such people are kindred spirits, wherever we are in the world.

Elder David A. Bednar
speaks on flooding the earth with positive messages.

David A. Bednar, former BYU-Idaho President, and now an Apostle in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, gave a talk this past week in which he suggested that we flood the world with positive messages. Use the internet for good, for uplifting one another. He said,

"I exhort you to sweep the earth with messages filled with righteousness and truth—messages that are authentic, edifying, and praiseworthy—and literally to sweep the earth as with a flood."

We need to flood the world with truth, in greater quantities than the opposition is flooding the world with lies. On the issue of same-sex “marriage,” for example, the widespread message/lie has been, “It’s discriminating to prevent gays from marrying.” In truth, no homosexual is prevented from marrying, according to the definition we’ve always had; they simply choose not to. They choose instead to force a change in the definition, so that we no longer have what marriage has always been.

What if every time any media source supported “gay marriage,” a clarifying message showed up saying, “homosexuals insist on changing the definition of marriage, so that it no longer includes permanence, exclusivity, nor the sexual act that can lead to procreation, but refers simply to any two people declaring they are currently in some sort of sexual relationship”? What if every time any media source referred to “a ban on gay marriage,” a more accurate reference showed up: “a change in the definition that would throw out the millennia-old definition of marriage and replace it with a new definition that lacks all the known benefits”?

The term “gay marriage” is quicker to say than what is actual. And the term “banning gay marriage” is quicker to say than what is actual. But going with the “quick” and “easy” over and over, in a flood of messages, has led to a change in thinking that is harmful to civilization and to freedom. (More, new, examples another day.)

How do we get out the truth, on this issue and so many others, when the message is harder and longer to say? I don’t know. Twitter might not be enough. And we don’t want to put out contention on Facebook or Pinterest. A blog, like this, at least has a chance of saying the fuller message—to people who choose to seek it.

But we have to get into the minds of young people, and older people, to get the ground ready for re-planting a great tree of civilization.

And, not to put too much pressure on, but a year from now we’ll be deciding who to put forward as president against the anti-civilization crowd currently dominating the media.

Flood! Positive, uplifting, truth! Now! Go!

More on Marriage

I’m not quite a week into the month-long wedding trip. It took until late Friday evening to get internet, so now I can post when I get time to write.

In my last post I said that I would be re-publishing some pieces I wrote back in 2004-5 about protecting the definition and institution of marriage. I’ll start doing that later this week. But I think I may have sounded as though I hadn’t written about those things much on this blog, and that isn’t quite true. Only a few are related to the specific “same-sex marriaige” issue, but there are quite a few on the importance of marriage and family to civilization, which is always my point of view. I don’t think I have found them all, since the concepts are integrated into so many topics. But here is a partial list of blog posts from the past year (June 2011 was a good month to read in total):

·         6-6-2011 Good Parenting Yields Civilization

·         6-10-2011 Family Is Essential

·         6-16-2011 Demographic Winter

·         6-17-2011 Honoring Fathers

·         6-20-2011 Building Better Families

·         6-23-2011 Mounting Data on Families

·         6-24-2011 My Rational Belief in TraditionalMarriage

·         6-27-2011 New York—If You’d Only Asked, We HaveAnswers

·         Devaluing Marriage and Family = Decay of Civilization 

o   6-30-2011 Part I: Vico and Unwin

o   7-1-2011 Part II: Death of Marriage in Scandinavia

o   7-7-2011 Part III: Decay of Civilization

·         8-31-2011 Speaking Up

·         10-3-2011 The Way Back Up to Civilization

·         10-5-2011 Priceless Women

·         10-26-2011 Parental Rights

·         11-18-2011 One Small Victory

·         2-24-2012 Formula for Success

Plus my post a week ago about my intentions to cover this topic for a while: 4-16-2012 Wedding Plans.

I hope you’ll find these posts and the ones to come to be a good resource. One more quote for the day, from Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, which is the light reading I’m doing during my vacation:

What did [Henry] Adams, writing in the 1880s; [Francis] Grund and Tocqueville, writing a haf century earlier; and the founders, writing a half century before that, have in mind when they spoke of virtue in the people?

Different writers stressed different aspects of the topic, and they could be parsed in several ways. But if there is no canonical list, four aspects of American ife were so completely accepted as essential that, for practical purposes, you would be hard put to find an eighteenth-century founder or a nineteenth-century commentator who dissented from any of them. Two of them are virtues in themselves—industriousness and honesty—and two of them refer to institutions through which right behavior is nurtured—marriage and religion. For convenience, I will refer to all four as the founding virtues (p. 130)

At the Spherical Model, writing 230+ years after the founding, I am still writing about those founding virtues.