When I reflected upon the price paid for our freedom yesterday, I wondered are we getting the value out of our sacrifice? Are we surrendering what people paid with their blood to preserve? My father was a WW2 Disabled American Veteran. We often talked about his concern that we were slowly but surely losing our freedom.

He distrusted the growing control of government over our daily lives when it wasn’t about protecting the innocent. Where in the Constitution did government gain the right to say what kind of toilet you had? What about what color you paint your house? Set up massive phone monitoring? Seize and keep your property without convicting you of a crime? Become the arbiter of art, religion, and science? Tell you how to deposit your money into your own accounts?

I admit that I am not happy that we have been operating under emergency rule. Our government has not declared war, but claims we are in one which may last generations. War has been the single biggest tool by government to abridge our civil liberties. I fear that this war may be no exception. I admit that I was hoping for the expiration of the Patriot Act (which I never favored) and a lot of other nonsense. We have secret courts by which we deport people. We send agents into religious services and can pour through phone records and library records without evidence of a crime or a warrant. We sweep people up in the middle of the night and don’t let them call counsel. We hold people far away from their families and don’t notify anyone of their arrest. It seems like the fourth amendment has been repealed and I didn’t even know we voted. I am not referring to people found on the battlefield, but people who live here. It is like the Alien and Sedition Acts were never repealed but expanded. The founding generation would have never tolerated this travesty.

This is not a partisan issue, unfortunately it is a bipartisan problem. We seem governed more by fear than inspired by freedom. We have forgotten that Liberty is a moral issue. It seems we must once again convince our fellow Americans of the moral superiority of Liberty and due process of law, even for immigrants. The laws said to be for non-citizens have been applied to Americans. We have no liberty if the government can imprison us at length without trial, question us without counsel, and seize our property without conviction. Even worse, it wants to be able to execute people without a jury trial.

Sometimes I wonder, why we squander our freedom away to fight those who are trying to destroy our freedom? Sometimes I wonder will my children ever know what it truly is to live in a free country? This Memorial Day, I not only remembered those who paid for our freedom, but I tried to remember what it was when we had more of it.

Coast to Coast Insanity is here.  4 justices count more than millions of voters and thousands of years of human wisdom.  The California Supreme Court has found that it is discriminatory to give civil unions to same sex couples and recognize marriage of only mixed sex couples.  That is like saying it is discriminatory to require an insurance agent to know about insurance and a lawyer to know about law.  Why can’t the lawyer just pass the insurance exam?  Isn’t there some law involved in it?  That’s silly, you say.  They are serving different functions and they don’t do the same thing.

Neither do same sex couples and mixed sex couples.  Forgive me for having to go back to basics.  Nature says a man and a woman fit together in a unique way.  They complete each other.  Sexually their organs are made to compliment each other.  Emotionally, they are made to balance each other.  Spiritually, they are made to complete each other.  Biologically, only a man and a woman can perpetuate the species.  The species is one in which the offspring are best raised in a mixed sex environment.  Unsurprisingly, thousands or millions of years of experience (I am not arguing origin theory here) has led to the evolution of an institution to best channel that reality.  It exists in the most advanced of cultures and the most primitive of cultures in one form or another.  We call it marriage.  It consists of a mixed sex relationship or relationships for the purpose of raising families and bonding between the sexes.

Marriage over different cultures has different variations.  Some have more than two partners.  Some are exclusive for life.  Some have an escape valve.  Yet around the world, it is clear that marriage is between a man and a woman.  It is not a confusing proposition.  It is not open for judicial guessing.
Yet, again and again some on the far left insist on “progressive” social engineering.  They place the feelings of some over the strength of society.  The fact that an institution exists in a basic form throughout written history in thousands of different cultures is not a reason to keep it, but evidence of the need to change it according to these people.  Everything done in the past was not based upon the wisdom built up as we went from herding nomads to farmers to manufacturers to information engineers.  It is based upon prejudice and discrimination.  The will of God is considered a repressive scam which must be overturned.
I reject the premise and the goals of the secular progressive left.  I proudly stand for tradition, the Bible, and the collective experience of billions of people over the nonsense of a radical elite.  I call for a return of a common sense conservatism.

I understand what is at stake.  In the few countries which have tried this brave new world, marriage rates are already declining.  The stability of the family has worsen.  We already see the wreckage caused by a society based upon single parenthood.  It causes disconnected males.  It gives higher crime rates, higher poverty, a lack of commitment to anything, and a dispirited youth.  It causes government to expand to make up for the lack of family and gives a corresponding decline in freedom.  If even the tradition of marriage is not sacred, then all others are weakened.  A society without tradition is no society at all.  It is just a collection of people who happen to live at the same time.
Marriage and family are basic building blocks of civilization add in civil government, organized religion, and economic exchange (business) then you have a strong society.  Take away any of those and you tragically weaken the ability of any people to function as a community.

My critics are going to say that I am claiming gay people are destroying civilization.  No, I am saying the secular elite is destroying our civilization.  Gay people don’t hurt us by being, loving, or discovering their own institutions.  It is not the business of government to involve itself in emotional or economic relationships unless all of society benefits from it. Therefore government should not interfere with gay relationships, but neither does it have an obligation to pretend they serve the vital function that marriage does.  I don’t have a problem with gays.  I have a problem with those who wish to use gays to advance their radical agenda.  They don’t care about gays or straights.  They care about building a new social order as a shrine to their enlightened wisdom.  I say it is time to care about the common good and stop them in their tracks. It is time for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman.