Some lessons

From Taipei Times:

Democrat Senator Barack Obama won most of the votes from women, blacks and Hispanics and siphoned off enough white support to leave Republican Senator John McCain with no way to win.

[. . .]

Obama drew the votes of two-thirds of Hispanic voters — heavily courted by both candidates — and 95 percent of blacks who went to the polls.

A healthy lead among women voters typically is key to a Democratic presidential victory, and Obama attracted 56 percent of their votes. He split the overall male vote with McCain.

[. . .]

Obama, who will become the first black president and at age 47 one of the youngest, ran away with the youth vote. He won the under-30 crowd by 34 percentage points, even better than Democrat Bill Clinton’s 19-point advantage when he defeated Bob Dole in 1996.

First lesson. I and the others who screamed from the rooftops that it was a mistake for the GOP to embrace amnesty and open borders have been vindicated. John McCain was the leader of the amnesty movement and Hispanic voters rejected him by an overwhelming margin.

Second lesson. Women's suffrage was a mistake if you judge its results by the standards of the women who originally advocated for it.

The women who began the push for granting women the right to vote argued that because wives were already accustomed to managing the household budget that women voters would be fiscal conservatives who would hold the government to strict standards of fiscal discipline and accountability.

They also argued that because women tended to be more sincere and devout in their Christian religious faith that women voters would cause the government to hew more closely to Christian morality and more effectively uphold Christian values and principles.

Today we know that women voters are the biggest supporters of the legalized murder of children and the most fanatical supporters of the ruinous welfare state. If Susan B Anthony and the others were telling the truth about what they hoped for women's suffrage to achieve then they must surely be turning over in their graves.

The fact is that the Founders realized that a universal franchise would destroy the nation so they limited the vote to those who they believed had the greatest stake in the survival of the nation as a free and prosperous place and at the time of the founding that was white male landowners.

The "white" part of the equation is now obsolete but not the "male" part and not the idea behind the "landowner" part.

Taking these criteria in turn we first come to "white". This was simply an artifact of 18th century attitudes about race which we have moved beyond.

"Male" we have already touched upon but the question is why do women tend to vote in ways which will destroy the nation? The answer is revealed in the fact that most married women vote Republican while most single women vote Democrat. Women are hardwired to seek a protector and provider. This is because pregnancy and caring for small children makes them vulnerable and limits their ability to gather their own food. This doesn't mean that all women will always act the same way just that there is a predisposition to act in a certain way among the entire population of women which will make the majority of them act in certain ways most of time.

Single women are tend to place government in the place of protector and provider, causing them to vote for the party which seeks to make government richer and more powerful. But when a woman marries a man whom she loves and trusts a chemical switch trips in her brain and she stops seeking a protector and provider. This allows married women to engage the political process with their intellect rather than their emotions and tends to make them Republicans.

All humans have this biological programming. It is God's way of ensuring that the current generation creates the next generation and that we take proper care of them until they are able to take care of themselves.

Then we come to "landowner". At the time of the founding the gentleman farmer sat at the top of the social pyramid. Professional men like lawyers and doctors and skilled workers like blacksmiths and carpenters saved their money against the day in which they could buy their very own farm and till the land.

This attitude was why George Washington wished for his epitaph not to be "father of his country" but simply "he was a farmer".

So the Framers restricted the franchise to landowners because the land holding farmer was the backbone of the economy in their day and they wanted the only people voting to be those who had a stake in the preservation of the nation as it was then constituted.

Who comprises the backbone of the nation's economy today? The answer is the investor class. Whether you are investing in your own business or holding publicly traded stock the fact that you have risked your capital to build something makes you the 21st century gentleman farmer.

Final lesson. Obama ran away with the youth vote. That is those who are least knowledgeable, least experienced and most immature chose Obama. Hardly a ringing endorsement.

If you want to achieve liberty and prosperity for the United States of America and lock those conditions in to as near a state of permanence as possible the best way to achieve that goal is to restrict the franchise to men and married women who either own successful businesses (successful being defined as generating a profit large enough for the owners to live on) or have a significant part of their net worth invested in stocks or non-government bonds. The age when one becomes eligible to vote should be 30 unless you join the active duty military, in which case you should receive the franchise immediately even if you are 17 and joining under a parental waiver.

Many will complain that this is not fair and they will be right. However "fairness" is not the goal The goal is to achieve the maximum amount of individual liberty and prosperity. "Fairness" expressed as universal suffrage has gotten us nothing but the welfare state, massive national debt, sky high taxes and Barack Obama in the White House.

Clearly "fairness" is not a worthwhile goal and we should abandon it for the much more desirable rewards of freedom and wealth.

The most serious threat

Our good friend Liz who blogs at The White Trash Republican often observes "There's nothing more dangerous to a child than Mommy's new boyfriend." It seems that the AP has reached the same, or nearly the same, conclusion:

NEW YORK — Six-year-old Oscar Jimenez Jr. was beaten to death in California, then buried under fertilizer and cement. Two-year-old Devon Shackleford was drowned in an Arizona swimming pool. Jayden Cangro, also 2, died after being thrown across a room in Utah.

In each case, as in many others every year, the alleged or convicted perpetrator had been the boyfriend of the child's mother — men thrust into father-like roles which they failed to embrace.
[. . .]

Every case is different, every family is different. Some single mothers bring men into their lives who lovingly help raise children when the biological father is gone for good.

Nonetheless, many scholars and front-line caseworkers who monitor America's families see the abusive-boyfriend syndrome as part of a worrisome trend. These experts and observers note an ever-increasing share of America's children grow up in homes without both biological parents, and say the risk of child abuse is markedly higher in the non-traditional family structures.

"This is the dark underbelly of cohabitation," said Brad Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia. "Cohabitation has become quite common, and most people think, 'What's the harm?' The harm is we're increasing a pattern of relationships that's not good for children."

[. . .]

• Children living in households with unrelated adults are nearly 50 times as likely to die of inflicted injuries as children living with two biological parents, according to a study of Missouri abuse reports published in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2005.

• Children living in stepfamilies or with single parents are at higher risk of physical or sexual assault than children living with two biological or adoptive parents, according to several studies co-authored by David Finkelhor, director of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center.

• Girls whose parents divorce are at significantly higher risk of sexual assault, whether they live with their mother or their father, according to research by Robin Wilson, a family law professor at Washington and Lee University.

"All the emphasis on family autonomy and privacy shields the families from investigators, so we don't respond until it's too late," Wilson said. "I hate the fact that something dangerous for children doesn't get responded to because we're afraid of judging someone's lifestyle."

Census data leaves no doubt that family patterns have changed dramatically in recent decades as cohabitation and single-parenthood became common. Thirty years ago, nearly 80% of America's children lived with both parents. Now, only two-thirds of them do. Of all families with children, nearly 29% are now one-parent families, up from 17% in 1977.

The net result is a sharp increase in households with a potential for instability, and the likelihood that adults and children will reside in them who have no biological tie to each other.
"I've seen many cases of physical and sexual abuse that come up with boyfriends, stepparents," said Eliana Gil, clinical director for the national abuse-prevention group Childhelp.

"It comes down to the fact they don't have a relationship established with these kids," she said. "Their primary interest is really the adult partner, and they may find themselves more irritated when there's a problem with the children."

The AP story goes on, in fact goes out of its way, to point out that "there's no going back" meaning that there is no way to recover the past in which single parent families were a tiny percentage of the whole and where cohabitation was virtually unheard of outside of the very lowest strata of society.

But how true is that statement? Societies change, people's attitudes change and what seems lost at one time can be recovered. After the fall of the Roman Empire Christianity waned in its influence throughout Europe. Many people noted that the Empire did not fall until it became Christian and blamed Christianity for the decline and dissolution of the Empire.

During the period known as the Dark Ages (some politically correct historians have begun calling it the Early Medieval Period now) a parade of pagan barbarian tribes overran much of the old Empire and Christian England seemed on the verge of being overwhelmed by the pagan Danes. The impartial observer of the time could have been forgiven for concluding that Christianity, at least as far as the West was concerned, was a failed experiment destined to take it's place alongside the worship of Zeus and Baal in the pantheon of failed and forgotten faiths.

Yet we all know that is not how history played out. The Church survived and prospered. The barbarians, from the Danes to the Magyars (modern Hungarians), became Christians and today there are 2.1 billion people in the world who identify themselves as "Christian".

It seems to me that those who insist the most stridently that the "clock can't be turned back" are simply the people who least desire any kind of return to more traditional attitudes for their own lives. The most recent statistics indicate that the abortion rate as well as the rate of teen pregnancy is falling as is the divorce rate. Given that the trends which lead to children living with step-parents or mom's live-in boyfriend are all headed down it could very well be that we, as a culture, have gotten the message.

Craig sticks around

WASHINGTON (AP) - Idaho Sen. Larry Craig defiantly vowed to serve out his term in office on Thursday despite losing a court attempt to rescind his guilty plea in a men's room sex sting.

"I have seen that it is possible for me to work here effectively," Craig said in a written statement certain to disappoint fellow Republicans who have long urged him to step down.

Craig had earlier announced he would resign his seat by Sept. 30, but had wavered when he went to court in hopes of withdrawing his plea.

The third-term lawmaker issued his statement not long after Idaho Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter relayed word he has selected a replacement for Craig in the event of a resignation.

"He is ready to act should we receive a letter of resignation," said Jon Hanian, Otter's spokesman in Boise, in what seemed like a calculated signal that home-state Republicans want Craig to surrender the seat he has held for 17 years.

In his statement, Craig said he will not run for a new term next year.

But in the meantime, he said: "I will continue my effort to clear my name in the Senate Ethics Committee - something that is not possible if I am not serving in the Senate."

The ethics committee has already signaled it is reviewing the facts of Craig's case, taking the step after the Senate Republican leadership requested it.

Craig's decision to stay and fight raises the strong possibility of public hearings - virtually certain to be televised live - centered on the issue of gay sex.

In other words he is pissed off at the Republican Party for not sticking by him (translation - going down in flames with him) and is damned determined to see that his Senate seat goes to a Democrat in the next election.

Homosexuals inhabit the deviate fringes of society. This is territory which I know well because I also live there. As a heterosexual man who has chosen to remain unmarried and childless I represent a minority a bit larger than the homosexual community, but I recognize that my lifestyle choice is, in its own way, just as sub-optimum as the gay lifestyle.

My lifestyle is suboptimal because in a time of falling birthrates in the Western (civilized) world the United States is only just managing to maintain a birthrate at the replacement level. Those cultures which are breeding at above the replacement rate (sometimes well above) are those which range from merely dysfunctional (Mexican) to downright evil (Arab/Muslim).

Fortunately our culture is resilient enough to absorb a certain minority who chose to live outside the norm. The difference between me and most of those in the homosexual community is that I recognize that my life choices are less than the best from a cultural point of view and I support tailoring the laws, customs and attitudes of society to support the better choices.

For example unwed motherhood is a bad idea and society used to discourage it through social pressure, by stigmatizing women who became pregnant out of wedlock. In the interest of compassion and a desire not to be judgemental we removed that stigma and instead made unwed motherhood a job description through various social programs which give unmarried mothers subsidized housing, food, medical care and even spending money. The predictable result (at least to sane people) was an explosion of single parent families and all the social pathologies that go with it.

I'm not suggesting that single motherhood be criminalized any more than we should put homosexuals or confirmed bachelors in jail. However we should never become so afraid of hurting somebodies feelings that we fail to make the distinction between those choices which we encourage and support and those we merely tolerate.