Supreme Court denies certiorari to gay-marriage case.
Mike Street Station, the first person to leave a comment, writes:
George Washington? Imagine any of the founding fathers looking at what their country had become. To their minds, the US would be a dystopian Bablyon, soon to collapse, and deservedly so. I imagine a peek at the US: 2014, would suck the enlightenment wind right out of their sails.
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George Washington? Imagine any of the founding fathers looking at what their country had become. To their minds, the US would be a dystopian Bablyon, soon to collapse, and deservedly so. I imagine a peek at the US: 2014, would suck the enlightenment wind right out of their sails.
Mike Street Station
October 6, 2014 at EDT am
I think George Washington and all founding fathers would like the law passed last week in Lugansk People’s Republic. 2-5 years incarceration for homosexual activity, 25 years to death for homosexual activity with a minor.
Yakov
October 6, 2014 at EDT am
GW was quite tolerant to gays. When the Prussian general von Steuben, formerly a lover of Friedrich the Great, went to America GW assigned 2 handsome young officers as ‘aides’ to Steuben, fully knowing the Prussian’s sexual preference.
toos is god
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
President James Buchanan was known to be gay when elected (Andrew Jackson referred to him as ‘Miss Nancy’). Even flamboyantly by his time’s standards; he lived with his boyfriend in the White House. .
The Undiscovered Jew
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
True, 18th century elites were quite tolerant of male homosexual behavior. They would have found the idea of gay marriage farcical of course. They probably wouldn’t have been disgusted the way our modern cultural warriors claim to be, but they would have considered a society that allowed such behavior simply unserious and childish. I suspect a lot of the Founding Fathers would have been more disturbed by miscegenation than by gay marriage.
Peter Akuleyev
October 7, 2014 at EDT am
Yes, their positions on women, gays, and race alone would be enough for them to hate this country. I think a president as recent Teddy Roosevelt would feel the same way.
Hepp
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
Actually I think Presidents up until at least Eisenhower would have been appalled at the all-gay all-the-time media, as well as current feminism and immigration policies. Kennedy was kind of the transitional President into modern America, and Lyndon Johnson would have been all over mass immigration for vote farming, as he was a thoroughly corrupt and unscrupulous piece of trash. Like most Presidents since, come to think of it. Either idiots or swine, and sometimes both.
peterike2
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
Wherein Teddy Roosevelt explains why the world is better off with a large white population and why all other races are benefited by white dominance. Don’t expect to see this on PBS. http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/speeches/trwhiteraces.pdf
Curle
October 7, 2014 at EDT am
Great speech, thanks.
Hepp
October 7, 2014 at EDT pm
Or more so America has become the Western Front of the Roman Empire, overrun by barbarians with bread and circuses to keep the masses subdue.
JS
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
Somehow our American elites think NAMs are like the Alans, Vandals and Goths of the past. Barbarians who took over parts of the Roman Empire and got absorbed into the mainstream population and became non-barbarians.
JS
October 8, 2014 at EDT pm
Collapse seems improbable any time in the foreseeable future.
But then again few people in the 70s and 80s would have called the USSR falling apart. And few people in the 90s would have called Russia’s resurgence as a world power in the 2010s under a reactionary regime.
Sal Paradise
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
Russia will yet surprise the world. There is no gay marriage or parades, homosexual propaganda is forbidden, discussing homesuxuality in front of minors is punishable by up to 30 days incarceration. What’s not to like?
Yakov
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
It’s full of Russians
everybodyhatesscott
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
You prefer a country full of gays?
Yakov
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
It’s full of slavs, who are some of the most dysfunctional people.
uatu
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
There are still plenty of active homosexuals in Russia, and active gay bars in every major city. Moreover, Russia is still a very decadent society where drug use and alcoholism is rampant, single mothers are the rule, education is scorned, spending time in prison is a badge of honor, and laws are for the weak. Inner city American blacks also hate gays and suppress black behavior. It hasn’t gotten them very far.
Peter Akuleyev
October 7, 2014 at EDT am
I can vouch for that because, as a kid in the late 80’s, I called both the collapse and resurgence and was told I didn’t know what I was talking about. I called the collapse in early ’87 after demonstrations and protests weren’t crushed but met with capitulation. I knew as soon as that happened that the Soviets were weak and it would snowball. Even before the collapse, I knew that Russia would cut their satellite states loose but that Russia was too large, too smart and had too many resources not to comeback. I figured it would take 25-30 years to rebuild their economy and start flexing. It would have if not for the rising energy prices.
destructure
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
Delete my previous comment Lion but publish my next one which fixes some errors.
eradican
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
The Soviet Union only “collapsed” because Gorbachev was a malicious wrecker. The Soviet economy was stable and strong again by the mid 1980s but his “reforms” murdered the economy on purpose. He also gave anti-communists “freedom of speech” to spread their poison. He then betrayed the sacrifices of the Red Army by abandoning eastern Europe which was a necessary buffer against western attacks on Russia. The Soviet Union itself was illegally dissolved and Yeltsin should have been shot. Russia was impoverished and ruined for the next decade until Chekist Putin rose to power.
For the record the first and only person to correctly predict the demise of the Soviet Union was ironically the man most responsible for it’s existence; Leon Trotsky. Trotsky led the Bolshevik seizure of power, was the first leader of the Red Army, and hero of the October Revolution. Trotsky was Lenin’s rightful heir but his place in history was stolen by Joseph Stalin. Trotsky back in the 1930s warned that the precedents Stalin established killed Soviet democracy in it’s cradle concentrating massive power at the top of the bureaucracy. This new USSR elite would someday crave more privileges and luxuries hence restoring capitalism. Trotsky was mocked at the time but nearly all of his predictions were proven true years and even decades later. In other words there was a bourgeois counterrevolution from above in the USSR. Mao Zedong also coined the term capitalist roaders to describe people like Gorbachev.
eradican
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
If the West is importing Ebola we’re near the peak of Western liberalism.
The Undiscovered Jew
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
eradican — don’t know if you are trolling, so I’ll bite…
Communism is a failed economic model. How many more examples do you need? Are Cuba, East Germany, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Venezuela, pre-1980s China, and every eastern european country not enough to prove the point in addition to the Russian example?
I was in the former USSR in 1991. They were genuinely poor: nothing worth buying on the shelves, no choices, poor development, no beauty. Have you traveled and seen the reality? In most of the former Communist world, they are running away from their old model as fast as possible.
At least in the case of the Germanies and the Koreas, you have a pretty good laboratory control to look at Communism.
Dan
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
The Soviet Union was so awful the vast majority voted to preserve it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union_referendum,_1991
eradican
October 7, 2014 at EDT am
@ Dan
I wrote a lengthy and provocative blog post about communism. It addresses everything on the topic which cannot be conveyed in comment format. The executive summary is communism works and is the most successful political/economic movement of the 20th century.
http://eradica.wordpress.com/2014/05/06/old-and-new-gods/
eradican
October 7, 2014 at EDT am
Russia has not made a comeback. It has turned into “Nigeria with nukes”. It now exports primarily natural resources, and has gutted most of its traditional manufacturing industries. Putin has lost half the Ukraine forever and is losing influence in Central Asia to China’s gain. He has alienated most of Western Europe, which is now busy finding alternate energy sources. Putin has set Russia on a course to be a vassal state of China within 30 years.
Peter Akuleyev
October 7, 2014 at EDT am
To address your points individually East Germany was a buffer state. It’s existence was to absorb NATO attacks and to punish Germany for waging war on the Soviet Union. East Germany was never intended to be a five star resort. The same applies to the rest of eastern Europe their economies were mostly used to pay reparations to the USSR.
Zimbabwe and Venezuela aren’t even communists so I don’t know why you brought them up.
Cuba is safer than most of Latin America and is a popular tourist destination producing world class cigars.
Red China is on the verge of becoming an economic superpower and 21st century successor to the USSR.
North Korean woes have nothing to do with communism but their own lack of arable land, government mismanagement, and permanent state of war as the Korean war has technically not ended. North Korea was actually more advance and powerful than South Korea up until the late 1970s.
eradican
October 7, 2014 at EDT am
erdadican The Soviet Union was so awful the vast majority voted to preserve it.
That’s not exactly what that poll says. It asks Russians if they want to divide the Soviet Union and let the states go. It doesn’t ask them whether they want to get rid of communism. Though they’d probably vote against it for the same reasons old people and single mothers would vote against getting rid of social security and welfare.
As for other comments from you and others, the Soviet economy was very stagnant before the collapse. And while it may be heavily dependent on natural resources today it also has a solid and growing manufacturing base.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Russia
destructure
October 9, 2014 at EDT am
The old Soviet economy was good at creating a powerful military, but very bad at creating the bounty of consumer surplus that we have in the West.
Lion of the Blogosphere
October 9, 2014 at EDT am
@ destructure
The Soviet economy was growing again after Yuri Andropov’s reforms in the early to mid 1980s. Andropov was a reformer and a cold warrior. He was also the longest serving KGB chief and Putin’s personal inspiration and hero. He was appalled at the political/economic decline of the Soviet Union from the late 1970s onward. He tightened the screws, attacked corruption, and cracked down on labor discipline infractions. His investigations were so terrifying people did away with themselves even members of the elite. Sadly he was only in office a brief period until passing away but had he lived longer the entire 1980s were his to command.
However it’s important to remember that a slowing and stagnating economy is better than the massive collapse Russia underwent with NEGATIVE economic growth. Moreover nobody was hurt during this stagnation period and ordinary people look back at it with nostalgia as a time when common people lived best.
You’re dam fucking right people voted for what was good for them. The end of the Soviet Union has brought nothing but misery for most people including middle class types like doctors, teachers, engineers, and security/military officers. The poorer regions of the ex-USSR have simply never recovered. Russia itself is almost entirely dependent on it’s Soviet legacy. Everything including the manufacturing base and oil infrastructure comes from Soviet times.
Had the Soviet Union remained intact the communications revoultion and computerization would have radically improved information gathering, risk management, and central planning. The economy would have received a major rejuvenation in the 1990s. With the rise of commodity prices and improving relations with consumer goods exporters like Red China everything would have been fine. The communist block from Berlin to Beijing would have been a massive economic juggernaut.
eradican
October 9, 2014 at EDT pm
Peter, Russian law aims to protect society and particularly children from the homosexual corruption. It doesn’t try to interfere in people’s private lives.
I would not call Russia decadent. Certainly spending time in prison is not a badge of honor. I’m from there.
Yakov
October 7, 2014 at EDT pm
Actually I think they’d be proud. I sure am. They did actually view man as a decadent and rapacious creature. The thing that actually had to checked and balanced in the first place was man’s lustful and greedy nature. Consequently, if society is truly free to the extent that it is structured such that every individual is able to fulfill his destiny, then that society will be truly sick and disgusting. Because that’s what people truly are.
Our greatest degradation is our greatest triumph.
Half Man- Half Amazing
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
George Washington? Hell, imagine Dwight Eisenhower surveying the scene only 53 years after he left office:
Then: Operation Wetback.
Now: Repeated amnesties for illegal Mexican border-jumpers.
Then: The Gemini project, first manned spaceflight.
Now: Paying the Russians to put our stuff into orbit.
Then: Single motherhood strongly stigmatized, low rate of illegitimacy.
Now: Single mother a sort of secular saint, high rate of illegitimacy and climbing.
Then: Blue collar manufacturing jobs plentiful and well paid.
Now: Manufacturing jobs shrinking.
Then: Homosexuality considered abnormal.
Now: “You’re a homophobe.”
Then: Immigrants expected to make an effort to assimilate, learn English.
Now: “You’re a racist and a xenophobe.”
Then: Own a small business and you’re a respected member of the community.
Now: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that! Somebody else made that happen!”
Then: Traditional gender roles the norm, most believe men and women have different, biologically hard-wired natures.
Now: Women can do anything men can do, and do it more capably.
Then: High levels of trust between unrelated strangers, low rate of crime.
Now: Declining levels of trust more common, crime rate brought down through a combination of fudging the statistics, high rates of incarceration, and the rise of a “surveillance society.”
Then: Being in need of government assistance a source of embarrassment and shame.
Now: Gimmedat.
Then: Virginity or at least a minimal number of sex partners the ideal for women. Low threshold for being considered “damaged goods.”
Now: Promiscuity is praiseworthy; the idea of “damaged goods: is antiquated and misogynistic.
You get the idea.
Sgt. Joe Friday
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
Brilliant, Sgt. Joe.
peterike2
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
All compliments of the European man. Bravo, sir.
corvinus
October 8, 2014 at EDT pm
I don’t know why conservatives would feel they should respect the law at this point.
Most states passed constitutional amendments defining marriage in the 2000s, something which one would think unnecessary since it has fundamentally biological roots. But 33 state constitutions (if memory serves) define marriage as between a man and woman. In 2012, North Carolina defined marriage as between a man and a woman in their Constitution with a massive 2/3 majority of the vote. To say proponents don’t even get a hearing is bold indeed.
Over and over again, due process is simply ignored when the left has a political goal. The proclivity of conservatives to follow the law while liberals ignore it when convenient (other biggies include immigration, right to association, free speech, welfare, O-care, family law, marijuana, voting) is why the ratchet seems to always go one way.
The ultimate example of a tool in this game is Mitt Romney. In 2004 judges in his state went for this by judicial fiat while he was governor. He forced his government to implement the then-unprecedented law while testifying against it before Congress in Washington.
Romney 2016!
Where things move right, it is not due primarily to the political success of conservatives. Instead, the left wins first, implements its policies, and then sometimes sees its dreams dashed upon the rocks of reality (i.e. crime in cities, stagnancy in high tax regions). The rightmost places in the world (China, Russia, Eastern Europe, India) are where the left won utterly in the recent past and brought total disaster.
Dan
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
Russia/China and eastern Europe massively benefited from communism. Communism is why those places aren’t dysfunctional nightmares like western countries today. Not a single current and former communist country has mass immigration, feminism, astronomical crime, and moral decay. Marxists never understood why revolutions didn’t occur in the more advance countries but that’s because the bourgeois were still a positive force in those societies. What you’re witnessing now is a watershed moment in history namely the complete decadence and degeneration of bourgeois democracy.
eradican
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
An interesting perspective. It may be that mass immigration may wreak more lasting havoc than Communism ever could.
But Communism was nothing nice. People liked it so much that they had to kill 100 million of them to keep them in line.
Can’t Communism and mass immigration both be bad? Admittedly Communism may have been a protective against the ravages of mass third world immigration, but that is because they were poor and nobody wanted to move there.
On the hand, you could just choose to have a sensible borders policy, a la Eisenhower.
Dan
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
The horrors of communism on display. This is hell on Earth….
eradican
October 7, 2014 at EDT am
Eradican, have you ever actually been to Russia?
Peter Akuleyev
October 7, 2014 at EDT am
A few months ago in SF a fairy got in my face about some criticism I was offering to a woman, and I asked him when he and his co-religionists were going to pay back those tens of billion$ we str8s spent turning AIDS into athlete’s foot. I’d like to think the father of our country would commend me for my fiscal prudence.
marty
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
I understand that millennials have some real tender feelings towards those sweet little homosexuals. Why??? I can see leaving them alone as long as they’re discrete and not bothering anyone but there are a lot of obnoxious radical activists. So why in the hell have people decided that a government endorsement of butt f****ing is a national priority?
destructure
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
Status whoring? It’s another cost-free way for stupid, lazy people to feel morally superior.
BlizzardOfOz
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
BlizzardOfOz — You’re probably right. Shallow people wear their values like fashion accessories. They care more about being in style than anything else.
destructure
October 7, 2014 at EDT am
Perhaps they don’t perceive gays as monstrous sex demons, but real people in committed relationships.
Fun
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
Fun
There are very few homos in “committed relationships”. That’s my primary objection. I have no tolerance for promiscuity.
destructure
October 7, 2014 at EDT am
When a gay couple enter a contract further committing themselves to each other, how does that promote promiscuity?
Fun
October 7, 2014 at EDT pm
The Supreme court tacitly approved being a man or woman is outdated. “The worst form of inequality is trying to make unequal things equal.” -Aristole
cesqy
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
In terms of religious dogma, Washington and many of the other Founding Fathers were free thinkers. They probably would have taken a free-thinker position on gay marriage, as opposed to the Roman Catholic or Evangelical Christian position.
Mark Caplan
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
Slightly off topic, but George Washington did not have the courage and fortitude to be better than a hypocrite. He had no children. He was an officer pledged to defend the King. He did not effectively criticize his fellow Virginian slave-owners for their selfish and hedonistic crimes against the new generations of Virginians. One does not understand history until one understands two basic facts; First, God has no patience with a society that does not, at least on a prima facie level, care for all its children of the next generation, and two, the leaders of such a society are almost to a man faithless polluters of the very ground they stand on.
helps to understand America
October 6, 2014 at EDT pm
” his fellow Virginian slave-owners for their selfish and hedonistic crimes against the new generations of Virginians—————————-
Are you referring to screwing slaves or the practice of bringing Africans to these shores? If the former, how do you know what he did or did not say? Most conversations of that sort were not recorded.
That keeping a slave as a mistress was common but considered a scandal nevertheless is evident from the diary of Jefferson contemporary John Hartwell Cocke who was a slave-owner but despaired of the practice. http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/small/collections/tj/jhc.html
Curle
October 7, 2014 at EDT am
I admire GW as a soldier, and as a loyal friend to those whom he cared for, and I think he is an interesting example of “l’homme moyen sensuel,” vigorous American version. He was, however, a privileged aristocrat, with an elite education, and with many natural and unearned advantages, and his cowardice about publicly speaking out against some of the evils of his time – the obvious one of chattel slavery, and the one which you mentioned in your interesting response, and another one, which was his cowardly silence in the face of the effective banning of Bible studies for most children who were not 100 percent white (or mostly white and living in white households) – render me, as a fellow Christian, a fellow Virginian, and a fellow military officer, deeply, deeply, disappointed (disappointed in his public cowardice – I am not judging his private affairs). In short, I would care no more for the substance of his opinion than I would for the opinion of the average liberal go-along-to-get-along ex-military sycophant of our day who, Jim Webb-like or John Kerry-like or Jimmah Carter-like, is unceasing in his (or, sadly, her) fealty to the limousine liberals of our day.
helps to understand America
October 7, 2014 at EDT pm
Oh, my. Talking about privilege are we? I think you took a wrong turn at Albuquerque! This site is all about privilege! Neo-aristocratic leisure class of Brahmins if I understand the tone.
Gay marriage is a farce. None of the gays that “married” are actually monogamous. They practice fake marriage or open marriage where you still have sex with anyone you want.
All of you who are horrified by the Whiteness of Western Civilization should read a book sometime. All those specious claims of civilization coming from all over the World ignore that everything called Civilization today came from Europe. Those Mayan and Aztec pyramids were ancient ruins by the time the White man came to America, and the people who lived in the ruins said themselves that they didn’t build them.
Joshua Sinistar
October 8, 2014 at EDT am
From a conspiracy theorist perspective, George Washington would not be surprised at all and would instead view it as the unfolding of pre-ordained history, a planned Hegelian construct calling for the destruction of America (“harvest” in masonic imagery) and a merging into a one world government/ system- “order out of chaos.” Remember Washington was a master mason. He’d perhaps be surprised by the gay twist in this instance, but maybe not. “Liberty” has more than one meaning.
An interesting book indirectly about this, which is more of an art history book, is “The Secret Architecture of Our Nation’s Capital” by David Ovason.
slithy toves
October 9, 2014 at EDT pm