Oct 8
To Joe Carter and his blogpost on the Columbian Exchange. That exchange includes the benefits enjoyed by Europe and the suffering and loss of life brought to the natives of the New World by Europeans like Columbus. This appeared in the Acton blog.
It's sad that when listing the parts of the Columbian Exchange, the atrocities committed by Columbus and other Europeans are not mentioned. Atrocities such as mass killings, slavery, and exploiting workers were not mentioned alongside the loss of life from European diseases. How could such an omission exist in a Christian blog written by a Christian?
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To Allyson Wieringa and her blogpost questioning the call for the government to put Church charities out os business and to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour. This appeared in the Acton blog.
What is wrong with the government making Church charities not needed? Whose loss is that anyway? And if the Church no longer needs to worry about providing charity because those in need are receiving help elsewhere, then doesn't that mean that the Church can focus more on preaching the Gospel?
Though I can't speak for England, right now, we are in an Ayn Rand coup of the American government. In that coup, those with the most wealth use their wealth to seize power over the government. Then they use that power to continually reduce fulfilling their social responsibilities. As a result, tax burdens are shifted more toward those who have less and that results in sharp increase in deficit spending. The Ayn Rand opportunist try to use their arguments and power to reduce or even eliminate social safety nets even if those safety nets are self-funding and thus do not contribute to the deficit.
We should note here the kind of government in which Ayn Rand's family financially succeeded: the government of the Tsars. And the Tsars were dictators who enforced the belief that to oppose the Tsar is to oppose the nation. That is similar to the declarations made by Lenin and the Bolsheviks with respect to the workers.
One other point must be made here. Though raising the minimum wage is good, it leaves a major issue unaddressed. Seeing that socialism, from a Marxist perspective, relies on the dictatorship of a proletariat democracy, letting the gov't alone to set all increased wages does not empower the workers. Rather, it establishes a particular group of people in government as the vanguard for the workers. And like most vanguards such as Lenin's Bolshevik Party right after the Russian Revolution, they will declare that anyone who opposes them opposes the workers whom they say they represent. And then we are right back where we started from with the Tsars and Lenin. Not that we don't need the government to raise the minimum wage. What we do need is a minimum wage that is high enough to help and low enough to require workers and owners to continue to meet together to see what each side needs and then to start making decisions that benefits both sides.
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Oct 9
To Thomas Ascik and his blogpost about some Supreme Court decisions on same-sex marriage and laws that addressed inheritance. In that blogpost, DOMA, the Defense Of Marriage Act, is referred to. This appeared in the Imaginative Conservative blog.
I want to comment on one part of the article above: the references to DOMA. DOMA stands for the Defense Of Marriage Act. But the name itself is ambiguous. Which or whose marriage is being defended? The answer is simple: no one's marriage is being defended. Instead the desire of same-sex couples to be legally married is being attacked by those who claim to have a monopoly on the definition of marriage. Thus, perhaps we should call DOMA, OBTMAA-- the Offensive By Traditional Marriage Activists Act.
The legalization of same-sex marriage does not threaten any traditional heterosexual marriage. Claims otherwise are based on fears that those moving in to the marital neighborhood will bring down the property values. On the other hand, despite the results of inhibiting monogamous relationships and thus reducing promiscuity in the LGBT community, those opposed to same-sex marriages by other people are threatening the marital prospects for those in the LGBT community. Why do they do that? It is simply because they want to impose their own religious/cultural beliefs on others. That imposition would appear to violate the 1st Amendment regardless of how democratically the legal definition of marriage was determined. Why the imposition? There are a number of reasons one can find when talking to DOMA apologists.
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