July 2^nd

Pat Buchanan is holding forth in a very predictable way about the SCOTUS decision on same sex marriage; for him it represents even more evidence that Christians are losing the culture wars. He is amazed that the Fourteenth Amendment could be used to support the SCOTUS decision and he wonders what equal protection has to do with gay marriage.

Well, of course he does. He points out that this amendment has been around since the 1880s and this application “has just been discovered.” Buchanan seems unaware that Loving vs Virginia, which SCOTUS unanimously decided in 1967, also used the Fourteenth Amendment as part of its decision to invalidate laws against interracial marriage. Earlier arguments that favored that absurd law focused on the fact that since both parties were discriminated against the law wasn’t discriminatory at all!

Buchanan assures us that we are going to hell in a handbasket. He doesn’t say so, but I believe he would begin the descent with the abolition of slavery, and following in no particular order was a right to abortion, marrying someone of another race, no fault divorce, decriminalization of homosexuality, distribution of condoms to the poor and various other horrors. He cites an Italian, one Antonio Gramsci, dead these seventy five years, as forecasting that this awful realignment of social values must precede a communist takeover. According to this long dead communist theoretician, these changes were required before communism could succeed. Now that many of them are here, communism must be on the horizon…so assumes Pat Buchanan.

Pat howls about the “illegitimacy rate” in the black community and wonders if “any connection exists between these fatherless boys [He doesn’t mention girls] and the soaring drug use and dropout rates and the near quadrupling of those in jails and prisons over the last third of a century.” First of all let’s get some terms straight: an illegitimate child is not a fatherless child; it is a child whose parents are not married. In many cases these unmarried fathers are very much around.

Consider this “soaring” drug use. It’s soaring because poor blacks are booked for using marijuana while wealthy middle class whites aren’t touched. Another factor in the increased incarceration is the monetization of crime. Prison Corporation of America has contracts with government units that specify at least a 90% occupancy rate for the prisons they control. That’s how they make a juicy profit. If that’s the case is it any wonder that poor blacks find themselves convicted of “drug” offenses and then sentenced to increase the profits of a major American corporation.

Then Buchanan gets to another favorite right wing complaint: the decline of the white population here and in Europe. Because of abortion and contraception whites will no longer be in the majority. The appropriate response to this bit of racist intelligence is…So what?

Finally Pat bemoans the incontrovertible fact that “we can no longer even agree on good and evil, right and wrong.” That’s right Pat, we can’t, and we have never been able to do that…and again.…So what?