"Reasonable people can differ, and there are good people on both sides of this debate. No one, on either side, deserves to be disparaged or maligned because of who they are or what they believe," Pence said.
I kinda goggled at the TV screen. Mike Pence is exactly what it says on the bottle: a social- (and fiscal-) conservative Republican. Like him or loathe him for it or just shrug, "Meh," it's never been a secret that he's a traditional-marriage guy.
He continued:
"Let's protect the rights of Hoosier employers to hire who they want and provide them with benefits that they earn. And let's resolve this issue this year once and for all."
Ah, there's the Governor. Still, all manner of props to him for striking a conciliatory tone. He'd clearly like to be rid of this hot potato, especially if it can be done gracefully. To judge from comments at the linked article, the fed.gov may yet fix it for him, if he and the legislature can keep on shuckin' and jivin' long enough; then they can all point and say, "'Tweren't us!"
(Speaking of grace, State of the State started on the dot at 7:00 p.m. and the entire speech ran something like 28:30, leaving stations carrying it just enough time to tag it, run a station ID, a commercial, and start the next show. Don't think for a minute the timing wasn't carefully planned. The days of pols leaving any room for pontificating pundits are long past.)
I mostly identify with a small L libertarian, rather then a straight and true Social/Fiscal Conservative these days.
ReplyDeleteBut even social/Fiscal conservatives should - if they think about it hard enough - realize that the solution is simple.
Nullify Government involvement of any type in marriage. Marriage is a Religious institution. At that point, Religions or subsets of religion who want to marry people of whatever gender or genders can, and those that don't, won't - and it won't be the Governments place to say boo, and everyone will have the same 'rights' under the law.
I know why Government got into the Marriage business in the first place - its the same reason, pragmatically that Putin has been pushing his anti-gay retoric/positive hetero retoric. Straight Couples make babies. (Russia has a serious population deficit problem) When you need a country to grow (to grow the tax base and make sure that your country remains, well, a populated country) you offer incentives for the behavior you want to grow.
Depending on which way you look at it, and your goals, the government might want to keep incentivizing the behavior - but it doesn't work as originally designed anymore (Assuming it ever did). And, my belief in smaller government says it, along with a bunch of other things, has to go.