February 28, 2004

The recent dustup in which Assistant Secretary Of State Roger Noriega was grossly insulted by the Dishonorable Corinne Brown (D-FL) has shown some legs. Congressman Henry Bonilla (R-TX) has shown admirable political courage in giving Miss Brown's remarks their full significance, right on Congress's floor.

Republicans have long wondered, given the GOP's record of support for civil rights and the superiority of its market-based policies in uplifting the economically disadvantaged, why black Americans have attached themselves so firmly to the Democrats, who are in large measure responsible for the condition of the black American underclass. The matter becomes more puzzling when one looks at the quality of elected black political representatives. With few exceptions, such as Congressman Harold Ford, they're execrable: ideologically stupid, committed to alienating the white majority, and vicious of speech.

Yet blacks, as a cohort, have risen smoothly into American society these past forty years. No other identifiable group has penetrated the middle class nearly as fast. The best-known black intellectuals are men of true stature, such as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and Shelby Steele. The highest-placed black officials, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, command immense, well-deserved respect.

Electoral politics, of course, is more susceptible to venal influences than other lines of endeavor. There's no shortage of vicious, mendacious white politicians. But among black politicians, the vicious, mendacious ones ride at the front of the bus, while the sober, well-spoken ones are shoved to the back.

It's a formula for political regress. Your Curmudgeon cannot account for it.

Meanwhile, a little way across town, the National Education Association is trying to derail the No Child Left Behind Act. Its objections, as usual, have to do with the Act's insistence on measuring the performance of government-run schools and reporting on their progress or regress.

Note that the educrats have no problem with the huge additional slug of federal funding for the government schools provided by the Act. They want more, of course, but that's not news.

Infinitely repeated demands for more money and less accountability. A constant struggle to prevent any form of school choice or competition. Skyrocketing costs and declining performance on all fronts. Yet the NEA's kingpins wonder why school budgets are being voted down at an unprecedented rate while the homeschool movement is growing by leaps and bounds.

Well, no one ever said you had to be smart to teach in the government's schools. In fact, from the NEA's standpoint it might just be a liability. The dull and foolish are more easily led than the intelligent and reflective. But in striving to make their sinecures ever more plush, the educrats are creating the very conditions required for their downfall. When the day arrives -- as Michael Ledeen likes to say, faster, please! -- will they recognize their own contributions to their demise?

If you call a tail a leg, how many legs has a dog? Five? No. Calling a tail a leg don't make it a leg. -- Abraham Lincoln.

Well known, multi-award-winning science fiction, fantasy and horror author Orson Scott Card has declaimed on homosexual marriage in a brilliant, angry essay that cuts like a white-hot scalpel. (Thanks to Mark Alger at BabyTrollBlog for bringing this to your Curmudgeon's attention.) Card, while he has a bit more affection for the State preferences awarded to married couples than your Curmudgeon allows, hits the central point right up front, and never loses sight of it: words must have definite meanings.

A word is intended to represent some fragment of reality. When it's deliberately twisted away from that reality, such that one cannot know what is meant by it in ordinary usage, it becomes useless or dangerous. So it is with marriage.

Marriage is a critically important institution with a long history. It's recently taken numerous serious wounds. Yet the institution endures, as does the necessity for it. In fact it's shown some signs that it could reacquire some of its earlier seriousness, if not obstructed by political interference.

If, as your Curmudgeon believes, homosexuals want access to marriage as part of a campaign to be accepted as "normal," the revival of marriage's earlier gravity is antithetical to their aims. In the older marital regime, heterosexuals didn't gain rights or privileges when they married. Quite the reverse! Each spouse forfeited latitude of action, in exchange for access to one another's bodies, their community's blessing on their joint household and its progeny, and a promise of mutual support regardless of developments: "for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part."

Events could move in either direction. Marriage could be rendered meaningless, by the extension of the word to "unions" more fragile than spun sugar, that cannot by their nature produce children, that don't require fidelity or mutual support, and that undermine the norms of the community rather than reinforce them. Or it could go back to being a serious matter, difficult to dissolve, oriented toward children and their proper rearing, whose bonds forbid unbounded sexual indulgence and transgressions against which are widely condemned.

Imagine that homosexuals are granted the "right" -- what a misuse of words! -- to marry. Imagine further that normal Americans then adopt some other term for their sexual-economic-procreative unions. Let's call it "blitherage." To make things even more interesting, let's postulate that government does not involve itself in any way with blitherage, neither by granting the blithered privileges of any sort nor by imposing legal requirements on blithered adults. Would homosexuals demand the "right" to blither?

Your Curmudgeon thinks so.

No matter how the thing plays out, normal Americans will not accept homosexual conduct as normal; that's impossible on its face. But if marriage fails by reason of political interference, homosexual-marriage activists will not be forgiven. Indeed, the backlash might undo all the gains of the homosexual community these fifty years past.

Those are the stakes. Place your bets.

Posted by permission of Francis W. Porretto, all rights reserved, 2004,2005.