Tag: Netroots Nation

Do we get to pick and choose?

There are a lot of my friends who are deriving a certain amount of schadenfreude over the fact Martin O’Malley was heckled off the stage at the Netroots Nation conference yesterday, as was fellow Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders.

But I want to concentrate on what O’Malley reportedly said in response at the start of the interruption: “I know, I know…Let me talk a little bit…Black lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter.” For that, he was shouted down and unable to continue.

I’ll set aside the complete lack of tolerance once again shown by the “tolerant” far left and say that I agree with O’Malley on the last part: all lives do matter. But I’m sure that if you asked the vast majority of O’Malley backers – or even Martin O’Malley himself – about the lives of the unborn, he would immediately change his tune. This is the problem; not only with the Left but with a fair number in the center and a troubling and increasing number on the Right.

It turns out that, as editor of this website, I know exactly what my cohort Cathy Keim is going to write about and tomorrow she will be sharing her thoughts on abortion and the Planned Parenthood situation. (Trust me, you will like what she has to say. I almost ran it today but know that my audience is larger on weekdays and the piece deserves a wider reading.)  It’s no secret where we stand on the subject, though.

And it’s even more ironic that the same people who thundered and carried on about #blacklivesmatter are aborting themselves at a far higher rate than the population at large. Do the lives only matter when they are outside the womb?

Just the other day a young couple we know from being at their wedding in January of last year had their first child. I’m sure if you asked them when his life began to matter, they would have said that it became paramount the moment they discovered she was pregnant with him. Maybe they weren’t in the greatest financial situation and their lives will never be perfectly settled as long as the young father serves in the military, but they were understandably excited with the role they would be taking on.

A quote from the Guardian story shows the mentality of the Left. This is MoveOn executive director Anna Galland:

The presidential candidates’ responses today to the powerful protest led by black activists at Netroots Nation … make clear that all Democratic candidates have work to do in understanding and addressing the movement for black lives.

Saying that ‘all lives matter’ or ‘white lives matter’ immediately after saying ‘black lives matter’ minimizes and draws attention away from the specific, distinct ways in which black lives have been devalued by our society and in which black people have been subject to state and other violence.

Do you mean devalued as in receiving an oversize proportion of abortions? Sounds like the extension of your desire of having “choice” to me.

But even more so, it begs a question about how black lives specifically have been “devalued”: presuming this goes back to the days of slavery, what would be considered paying off the debt my great-great-great-great grandparents (and I think I’m recalling the family tree right; there may be another great- missing) supposedly incurred to black people for enslaving them? That is if my ancestors ever held black slaves and I think back in that era they were still in Germany and what is now Poland, so I doubt it.

Obviously that question is rhetorical because no amount would ever satisfy the minds of those who choose to make themselves victims.

In short, all lives matter but it’s the choices we make that determine how much they matter. Those at Netroots seem to want government to determine what constitutes mattering and allow them, through the power of coercing those who made correct choices, to receive atonement for their incorrect selections in life – many of which involved turning their back on God to one extent or another.

Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders may be church-going men, but that which they allow to happen in the name of compassion makes me wonder what they’re being told from the pulpit.

Cardin: I’ll talk up same-sex marriage

What I can’t decide is whether Senator Ben Cardin is pandering to the small base which really, really cares about the issue (maybe 5% think it’s the most important thing out there) or just ignoring the minority vote because it’s not going to cast ballots as a bloc against the referendum and for same-sex marriage.

But thanks to David Moon and Maryland Juice, here are a couple of instances of Ben Cardin speaking on the subject at the recent Netroots Nation conference.

So “our friend Ben” believes that two guys or two girls should be able to call themselves “married” and will talk about it at every campaign stop – unless he forgets, of course. I’ll wager he forgets a lot when he’s on the Eastern Shore or out in western Maryland, not that we anticipate him making trips too far outside the I-95 corridor anyway.

And if he does care to mention this at a nearby campaign stop, someone should ask Ben when he’s going to sponsor the legislation to take same-sex marriage to a national level – after all, it’s supposedly a civil rights issue on par with other areas of discrimination and he’s fighting DOMA tooth and nail even though Cardin originally voted for it. I know, I know…our friend Ben has evolved (read: pandered to the small but vocal militant gay-rights crowd.)

Then maybe the line of questioning should be taken further: shouldn’t Ben step up and demand polyamory and plural marriages between multiple sets of those of opposite genders be legalized? From both a religious and a policy viewpoint, some contend that’s the direction in which the debate will eventually head. While many voters would support the compromise of having civil union and preserving the concept of marriage as that of being between a man and a woman, that’s not good enough for that radical LGBTQ lobby. For them it’s marriage or nothing, even though civil unions would confer onto same-sex couples all the legal rights married couples have.

No, Cardin and his liberal allies believe the solution lies in distilling the institution of marriage to become meaningless and open to anyone who wants to claim it. Imagine the legal ramifications of fifteen people claiming to be married in one big, happy family until one of the fifteen thinks better of it. I’m not saying this will happen tomorrow, or even in the next decade, but that’s the Rubicon we cross once same-sex marriage becomes accepted via an affirmative vote in some state. Give it a generation or so.

While I noted the gay lobby equates this fight with the racially-based civil rights struggle of a half-century ago, I reject that argument out of hand. People don’t choose their ethnicity, but they do choose their relationship partners. If you happen to choose one of the same sex – even if you’re monogamous for decades – it comes with the understanding that you’re not going to naturally create children nor will you naturally be married.

I’m not one to delve into religion a great deal, but over my lifetime I’m starting to think we as a society are well on a path to reaping a whirlwind. To exploit the same-sex marriage issue for electoral gain may be a decision Ben Cardin makes as a political calculation, but it calls into question whether his 45 long years of public service have given him a sense of entitlement rather than the sense of humility he may try to convey.