Triumphalism…Yes, indeed we want to beat you forward-thinking city-dwelling types into submission. We just love fighting. What a shame that the great Amer – excuse me – European ideal of Progressive sophistication had to be interrupted by the dictates of defeating totalitarian hegemony and mass murder. And having successfully acomplished that on more than two occasions in the last century, we brutes have nothing better to do than keep you sophisticates from your artisanship and experimental sociology. Is that about it? You are going to argue that the attractiveness of attaching cultural goals to policy began in 1980? With Social Conservatives? Seriously?

Conflation would be Acat saying social conservatives want big government to bail them out, when actually that is a liberal trait. In fact, I think 864 federal judges is about 840 too many, What social conservatives want is a purposeful government, much as what stockholders want in a corporation is a purposeful corporation. No, I don’t think that calling attention to the fact that mocking conservatives by calling them triumphalists, whether done by libertarians or done by liberals, is conflating anything. Mocking conservatives is mocking conservatives. “Primitive, culturally-influenced civic morality.” Do you mean the civilization that the founders gave the pioneers to spread across the land, often in very adverse conditions? Yes, it probably was a little coarse back then, but if you want to ‘conflate’ it with a lack of virtue, you may do so from your ivory tower. In the flyover states, good behavior is not complicated. If it is complicated in your city, then perhaps it needs more light.
No, what piqued our curiosity was the business about the policy and the 1980 thing and the hitching cultural goals to policy thing. We were previously led to believe that thatattachment was trendy among academics and operatives who said Reagan was a liar about soviet communism. They were the ones pushing for socialist bureaucracies, not normal people. If you are talking about the Moral Majority/Christian Coalition thing, a lot has been spoken about that, but my take is that whatever cultural rights, traditions, principles, mores, practices, ways of participating in government those groups wanted, they were not new. They were merely restorative. If Madeline Murray O’Hair is your champion, of course, then never mind.

Wish it hadn’t been necessary, and it’s not bailing anybody out, it was fighting fire with fire, which I more or less said in my reply to Cinco. Wish it hadn’t been necessary. The value of marriage to civil society should have been apparent. But militant anarchist homosexual activists were, and are, bent on destroying it, and so. It is not a power grab; it is not an expansion of government; it is not an overture to ‘big government’; it is a return to normalcy
and to maintain the moral underpinnings of the government. That someone wants to cleverly equate a moral social order with the tyranny of ‘big government’ trivializes tyranny. I am talking both about you and to you when I say that you, and whoever it is whose interests you claim to represent, risk losing not only what freedoms you think you have, but freedoms you don’t even realize you have, when you insist your government operate without a moral authority. And calling for the church to ‘pull its sacraments back from the government’ which you have done, is a thin disguise for calling on the government to operate without a moral authority.

…something the liberals kept pounding in our heads that we just couldn’t quite grasp! It is the fair people who write laws creating government! No, it is moral people who write laws for fairness thus creating an amoral government! Got it! It’s the Fairness Doctrine! So the people who write our laws are creating a government, and they are doing it fairly because they are moral, but they are not moral because they are creating government, they are moral because they go to church, which has forgotten how to change the culture. Okay, I’m getting a little bogged down here. Are they changing the culture to be more moral or more fair? The church, I mean. Okay, we’ll say to be more moral, because fairness is the government’s province, right? The church’s function is to change the culture to be more moral and they shouldn’t go running to the government to do it, but they should provide moral people to the government to write laws for fairness. And fairness means everybody getting what they want, even if it doesn’t belong to them, right? Marriage should be from the church and not from the government – you have said so. So if everybody gets what they want, which is fair and like, social justice, dontchaknow?, then(yeah, fair, like it says in the Constitution, and getting what you want, like it says in the Constitution, and Social Justice, like it says in the Constitution right? No? Forget the Constitution? Okay) for everybody to get what they want,the culture has to change, because the people who write the laws are moral and they get their morality from the church, which has forgotten how to change the culture, so the government is going to have to step in and do it and since the people who create the government are the people who write the laws, they are just going to have to change their morality. See that fair thing was the part I was leaving out. That’s what brings the whole argument into complete clarity.
Sorry, Acat! Sorry, Cinco! Sorry, Aesthete! If Acat hadn’t remembered to bring up that fairness thing I would still be barking up the wrong tree!