Morning Briefing
For March 27, 2013
1. The Silver Lining
There are many, many people denying that gay marriage and religious freedom are incompatible. Many of those who deny it are, in fact, hostile to religious freedom to begin with or, when the fight becomes more clear, will be against the church.
That is a silver lining in the gay marriage fight. Many pastors in America who long ago decided they didn’t want the state telling them what to do, so they didn’t want the church telling anyone else what to do now realize just what fools they’ve been. The left will use the state to tell churches what to do or force churches to give up their primary purpose of going and teaching in Jesus’s name.
If gay marriage advocates are successful, churches will not be able to open their doors to the unchurched unless they include everyone. . . . please click here for the rest of the post →
2. The Argument For “Marriage Equality” Is Not A Conservative One
This week the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on same California’s Prop 8 and a section of the Defense of Marriage Act which deals with benefits for same sex couples. Same sex marriage is front and center once again and I’ve heard some interesting arguments on how supporting government involvement in defining marriage is a “conservative” ideal. During the Sunday morning talk show circuit, former Bush communications adviser took the moderate position emerging within the GOP against American Values’ Gary Bauer. Nicole Wallace tried to argue that supporting “marriage equality” is a conservative position. No, it is not. . . . please click here for the rest of the post →
3. Return-free filing and interest-free politics
An interesting story at ProPublica, prepared with assistance from NPR, chronicles efforts to bring “return-free tax filing” to the United States. It’s a system already used in a few other countries, and more-or-less duplicated by a few business partnerships in the U.S., but it’s something the Internal Revenue Service could implement nationwide. . . . please click here for the rest of the post →
4. Victims of Government: Stephen Lathrop and the Army Corps of Engineers.
Short version: Stephen Lathrop lives in an area in Illinois that routinely floods and is just as routinely gets declared to be a disaster area. The Army Corps of Engineers – a group that I had hitherto thought, perhaps foolishly, to be somewhat more competent than it’s appearing here – had drawn up a bunch of plans to alleviate the problem. As the Corps had never actually fixed the problem, Mr. Lathrop eventually did it for his local area by buying an old dump, getting the permits to convert it into a lake, and doing the conversion on his own dime (‘dime’ being defined as ’200,000 dollars’). As a reward, the Corps responded in 1990 by suing Lathrop, despite the fact that his conversion was roughly similar to the Corps’ multiple plans (and, more importantly, worked in 1995 to prevent flooding in Mr. Lathrop’s neighborhood). The Corps eventually handed the entire issue over to the EPA for prosecution, and then the EPA… essentially said to make the lake bigger, and everything would be fine*. So Lathrop spent another 100,000 dollars to expand the lake property… only to be told by the Corps that he couldn’t do that. Now the guy’s almost in bankruptcy… over twenty years after deciding that it’d be great if his neighborhood stopped flooding.
Even shorter version: The Army Corps of Engineers has spent the last two-plus decades punishing a guy for the crime at being better at flood prevention than it is. . . . please click here for the rest of the post →
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