"The American public has been dutiful to the point of self-harm in heeding the injunctions of the people who manage their lives and livelihoods."

Roger Kimball writes in part in American Greatness,

I am hoping that the deeper and longer-lasting response will be a quiet revolution in sentiment against the people who abetted this wealth-destroying panic: against the media, first of all, but also the obscure bureaucratic elite that stoked the fear and helped spread the hysteria.

...The most awesome toll of this new coronavirus is not the number of lives it has claimed—tragic though the loss of every life is—but rather the stupendous damage we have done to ourselves. The American public has been dutiful to the point of self-harm in heeding the injunctions of the people who manage their lives and livelihoods. I suspect that that deference is evaporating. I regard that as a good thing, for it means that neither the instinct for self-preservation nor the taste for liberty has been entirely bred out of the body politic.

Read much more here.

Freedom, Liberty, and Self-determination

CBD writes today in the Ace of Spades blog,

In fact, Western political philosophy relies on a mindset that is rare, and getting rarer. Every idiot Millennial who waxes poetic about a socialist paradise, and every politician who chips away at free speech, and every soccer mom who embraces socialist policies because "it's for the children," erodes the 2,500 year-old bedrock of freedom and liberty and self-determination.

Are we becoming like the rest of the world? America was blissfully free of the sort of violent but pointless protest that much of the world favors. Sure, we have had our share, but for the most part, when Americans protested we had some sort of concrete goal in mind. But that seems to be changing, and the free-floating aggression that we see in most of the world has been embraced by the current crop of violent protesters. But what are they protesting? "We don't like the status quo?" Sounds rather 3rd-worldish to me.

Read more here.

The One Great Thing!

Andrew Klavan talks about it on his Daily Wire podcasts, but he also writes about it in PJ Media!

The real issue is this: do we want to preserve American liberty and the constitutional machinery that maintains that liberty — or not?

Any two people who agreed that liberty is the central American good and worth preserving could argue productively. We could compromise on redistribution as long as we both acknowledged how essential private property is to freedom. We could make adjustments in gun control if we both understood that an armed populace is our last defense against tyranny. We could easily confirm Supreme Court justices if we acknowledged that their role was not to make law but to ensure laws are in keeping with the Constitution. We could debate anything as long as we both agreed to our right to speak.

But the moment I know I am talking to a socialist — who believes my work, my time, and thus my life belong to the state — the moment I know I am talking to a leftist — who will not concede my right to self-defense — the moment I know I am talking to a cheat willing to have our founding document rewritten from the bench — the moment I know I'm with a censor who thinks it's fine to silence me whether on social media or in the news media or through the courts — I will not give one bloody inch. Because, in that case, each concession becomes another step to the eradication of the one political asset I hold most dear: my freedom.

That is where we find ourselves. To my mind, our news media, our academies, the corporate culture of Silicon Valley, and the Democrat Party have all lost the plot of American liberty. They believe in socialism. They believe in a disarmed populace. They believe in ruling through the judiciary. And they believe in censorship of ideas they don't like.

Under that circumstance, they can catch Donald Trump paying hush money to the entire Rockettes chorus line. They can shed their crocodile tears over every shooting victim on earth. They can whine about Merrick Garland all the want. And they can curse me out and shut me down on every media vehicle they own. I will not surrender to them even a little.

Until we can agree on the One Great Thing — that Americans should be free — we can't agree on anything. And we are doomed to repeat the same conversations again and again.

Read more here.

A day late on this blog, but couldn't pass it up!

Credit: Patrick Cross for PJ Media

In praise of liberty

Guest post by Suzann Darnall

I love the 4th of July! Independence Day! A celebration of America and liberty. Birthday for the land that I do love. And, you know what? With President Trump in office and doing his best to make America great again, I am truly feeling like freedom is alive and well . . . and being restored to American citizens. President Trump is slowly but surely reinstating some of our rights and liberties which had been compromised. Now, that is something truly worth throwing a party to commemorate!!!

While I am no longer much about the fireworks, I do love the picnics or barbecues that frequently happen. It is not that I am against fireworks, but when one lives in Texas’ drought country, one kinda prefers to avoid anything that might set the grass on fire, particularly in the dry month of July. Texas summertime and shooting fire through the air no longer strikes me as a good idea.

I especially love when we can get together with family for the Fourth. I feel that America was created for families. I feel that living in liberty is the best way for families to not merely survive but to actually thrive. It is my profound belief that freedom of religion truly leads to liberty and also aids in the strength of families. Since I also believe that strong families are the cornerstone of a strong society, I am a supporter of the First Amendment, which protects the right of religious freedom, among other freedoms.

I also support the Second Amendment, which I believe is one of the major protections for all of our other rights. Were it not for access to weapons, the early citizens of America would have been unable to gain or retain their freedom from British tyranny. I firmly believe we face tyranny today, just in different forms from days of yore. Once we fought Redcoats, now we fight red tape. The kind of bureaucratic red tape which slowly wrests away our liberty one regulation at a time, until we are no longer citizens of a nation, but merely servants of a government. The bureaucrats keep infringing our rights, including assaults on religious freedom and freedom of speech. And, they are seemingly always trying to take away our right to bear arms. If weapons are ever only in the hands of the government, we are all doomed to nothing more than state-sponsored serfdom.

So, this coming Wednesday, I plan to celebrate my freedom. And, this coming election, I plan to support those candidates which I believe will best support President Trump, ‘cause I believe President Trump is our best hope for regaining and retaining our rights which have been infringed or are under assault.

This 4th of July, take the time to review the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Americans fought and died to grant us the liberty to form a new nation more than 200 years ago. More Americans have fought and died to protect that freedom. Unfortunately, those rights are currently under attack from within our own country’s borders. Even within our own government. So, may God bless my fellow Americans, our President, our military, and our great nation. May we recognize the importance of each and every right we were given under the Constitution. Vote responsibly. Vote to defend liberty. Vote so we may ever celebrate Independence Day. Not just on July 4th, but on each and every day we wake up to a new sunrise in the United States of America!
Suzann blogs at Wooly Mammoth.com

"The sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty."

At Ace of Spades, Misanthropic Humanitarian reminds us that Abraham Lincoln died on this day in 1865. A quote from Abe that seems pertinent today:

Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names, liberty and tyranny. The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty." Abraham Lincoln

Are you getting along well with the Facebook and Google algorithms? What is the difference between liberty and freedom?

Mark talks about the importance of empathy, which he defines as understanding how another person thinks within his own frame of reference.

Muslim female attire exists to remind Muslim women that they are the creatures of their men.

What is the difference between liberty and freedom? Mark says freedom is absolute. Liberty is more than freedom. It is about responsibility and virtue.

The French are on their fifth republic, whereas the Americans are still on their first.

Mark briefly talks about the algorithms being employed by Facebook and Google.

Liberty!

hat tip Bookworm

Has the Statue of Liberty become the Statue Of Immigration?

Mark Steyn wants to talk some more about the Acosta/Miller debate on immigration. Mark says the Statue of Liberty is about exporting the idea of liberty, not about importing masses of people. It is telling the world about our central idea: liberty!

Is there a victim?

"Deconstructionist sleight of hand"

Bookworm continues to educate us about fascism, with a post at American Interest. She even provides a nifty graph:

Given that conservative Republicans, including the majority of Trump supporters, are on the liberty side of the spectrum, far from the world’s most brutal tyrants, what gave rise to the glaringly false syllogism that “Republicans are right-wing fascists and Hitler was a right-win fascist, so all Republicans are Hitler”? You can blame it on a nasty little historic and linguistic trick American communists pulled, which was to make “fascism” synonymous with the political “right.” Once having done that, they could claim that American conservatives, being “right wing,” are therefore fascist. This is pure disinformation.

...Savvy readers will have noticed that fascism sounds remarkably like communism: It’s all about concentrating all power in the state, leaving the individual entirely subordinate to the state. The primary difference between the two ideologies is that in communism the government nationalizes private property, whereas in fascism the government does not nationalize it but nevertheless completely controls — as is the case, for example, with Obamacare, which saw the government establish the rules for the private insurance market and mandate that Americans buy the product.

Without exception, two bad things happen in totalitarian governments: (1) the government ceases to see it citizens as individuals and views them only as widgets who exist to aggrandize the state; and (2) the people who control statist governments fall prey to grandiose delusions and paranoia. Hitler and Stalin went after their own people. Hitler got the negative headlines only because he explosively sought control over Europe, without anticipating Churchill’s refusal to surrender or America’s ferocity when roused. Had Hitler been more discreet, as Stalin was in the Ukraine or in the gulags (or as Mao was in China), Hitler’s fascist, genocidal state could have lasted for decades more.

After the war, Hitler’s grandiosity ensured that “fascism” was a dirty word. American communists needed to move fast to erase Russia’s pact with Hitler and to disguise that “fascism” and “communism” are variations on a theme. Using America’s media and higher education systems, America’s communists associated the word “fascist” with “right wing.” This allowed them to affix the “fascist” label to those who cherish individual liberty, tying them to Hitler, the ultimate madman. It didn’t matter that the new label was deconstructionist sleight of hand. The only thing that mattered was that it stick, along with all the ugly associations surrounding it.

...One more thing: Obama said that the biggest disappointment of his presidency was his failure to grab more guns from American hands. Statists always grab guns because their regimes are fundamentally hostile to the citizens they control, making it impossible for those citizens to defend themselves against tyrannical government. Trump’s promise to protect the Second Amendment is the antithesis of a statist, especially a “fascist,” regime.

Read more here.

The Liberator and the Ghostgunner

"Where is the middle ground between liberty and tyranny?"


h/h Mike Miles

Our liberty, or their elevated positions and ego?

Krakatoa blogs at Ace of Spades,

Aside from rote lip-service, the Left, and the quislings on the Right, are not interested in your health, your lives, or your liberty. Their only truly animating interest is in their own elevated positions and ego.

Nothing strokes one's ego more than forcing someone else to do something they don't wish to do, except maybe forcing someone to do something they don't want to do and then get endless flattering press for it.

As always in our country and throughout the history of civilizations, the ratchet driven by activists grinds almost unfailingly in the direction of empowering the State to dominate its people.

Curtailing first non-enumerated rights such as the ability to simply speak plainly via the creation of cultural stigma for holding opinions or manners of speech that only yesterday were commonplace and common-sense; and then turning that stigma into mob retaliation vis-a-vis getting people fired from their jobs, or outright violence in the streets aimed at people attending political rallies.

Once certain thoughts and often seemingly insignificant liberties have been essentially criminalized, they move on to attacking those concrete rights that were once presumed unassailable, but have entered the realm of "polite debate" by a compliant populace too interested in maintaining some level of nonconfrontational comfort to strenuously object to every inch requested by the so-called "moderates". Inches that in the rear-view mirror turn out to be miles and miles of forgotten or forsaken liberties.

Make no mistake: The never-ending litany for "compromise" requested on gun control does not come close to masking the goal of gun prohibition. They want you disarmed, and cultural inertia has made them less and less reticent to proclaim it.

Assuredly, every step away from our Founder's intentions is framed by its proponents in terms of saving lives, or ensuring some liberty for some defined cohort. Their duplicitous nature is revealed when those exact arguments are dismissed when offered in service of a liberty or cohort the Left isn't championing, such as the rights of the unborn, the health concerns of a populace whose borders are overrun with the non-vaccinated and/or no small number of violent criminals, the freedom of a landowner to manage one's property, et cetera.

And so it goes: Yet another mass murder that could have been prevented simply by maintaining the the laws on the books and the remedies at hand, all ignored or torn down like Chesterton's theoretical fence without truly comprehending the consequences. Or worse, with full comprehension of the consequences, but utilizing a brutal calculus that values the creation more voters for the next election more highly than the long term health and security of one's nation & citizens.

Never trust any legislation proposed in response to the acts of the madman or the thuggish practitioner of a 7th century violent religion.

I would go further: If in response to a situation like this our government should pass legislation that rolls back such an essential liberty of otherwise law-abiding citizens as the right to keep and bear arms, those reasonable people have the inherent right to refuse to comply and to resist as peaceably as possible. And if it becomes impossible to resist peacefully, any blood spilled will be on the hands of those who decided by any rationale to trade said liberty for peace in the first place.

A people whose only powers, liberties & remedies are those strictly defined by the State is not a free people at all.

Are you "over it"?

C. Edmund Wright at The American Thinker is not "over it".

But no, I am not over the Constitution, although apparently many are, because they have thrown in with a man who never mentions it and often runs afoul of it. Donald Trump was born "over" the Constitution and still is. He's never been concerned with it. New York values don’t intersect with the Constitution. No, I am not over the idea of liberty, and thus I'm not quite over the fact that the Republican nominee is a man totally unfamiliar with this concept and a man who never ever looks at increased liberty as the answer for out of control government. Ever.

Please, show me where I am wrong on that.

Nor am I over the related concept of limited government. Nothing, not a single syllable out of Donald Trump's mouth, has uttered a whiff of anything to do with limited government. When Carrier and Ford are forced offshore because of out of control government, what does Donald do? He threatens even more government power as the solution. It never even dawns on the Orange One or his followers to perhaps remove some of the government obstacles in the way of Carrier, Ford and other once free companies. What an idea!

When crony capitalism is destroying our free market, does Donald want to stop government from picking winners and losers? NO! He doubles down on ethanol subsidies. He obfuscates the issue of eminent domain. And he rails against trade, not even considering the obvious conclusion that the big stick of tariffs is centralized planning and government picking winners and losers on steroids.

...the notion that Trump is this great wrecking ball to the establishment would be laughable if it weren't so serious.

Trump is the establishment. His big check to party boss and establishment poster child Mitch McConnell has barely even cleared yet -- a donation he followed up by insulting on Twitter those stupid Kentuckians who were willing to forgo McConnell's crony gravy train to his home state in favor of a principled man like Matt Bevin. Trump brags he has been giving to Republicans lately, but these donations are to establishment Republicans running against outsiders!

So no, I'm not over this kind of House of Cards attitude, and if you are, then you were never really in the fight to begin with. You've been conned.

Alexander Hamilton said “if we must have an enemy at the head of Government, let it be one whom we can oppose, and for whom we are not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures.” He was right. Many of you have not heeded that lesson. I have, and I am proudly not over the nomination of big government New York liberal Donald J Trump.

Read more here.

Our vaunted liberty, indivdualism, and egalitarianism

What is the American creed? In the Wall Street Journal today Charles Murray cites author Samuel Huntington in summarizing our three core values as

egalitarianism, liberty and individualism. From these flow other familiar aspects of the national creed that observers have long identified: equality before the law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and association, self-reliance, limited government, free-market economics, decentralized and devolved political authority.

Today, the creed has lost its authority and its substance. What happened? Many of the dynamics of the reversal can be found in developments across the whole of American society: in the emergence of a new upper class and a new lower class, and in the plight of the working class caught in between.

In my 2012 book “Coming Apart,” I discussed these new classes at length. The new upper class consists of the people who shape the country’s economy, politics and culture. The new lower class consists of people who have dropped out of some of the most basic institutions of American civic culture, especially work and marriage. Both of these new classes have repudiated the American creed in practice, whatever lip service they may still pay to it. Trumpism is the voice of a beleaguered working class telling us that it too is falling away.

...While the new upper class was seceding from the mainstream, a new lower class was emerging from within the white working class, and it has played a key role in creating the environment in which Trumpism has flourished.

...For white working-class men in their 30s and 40s—what should be the prime decades for working and raising a family—participation in the labor force dropped from 96% in 1968 to 79% in 2015. Over that same period, the portion of these men who were married dropped from 86% to 52%. (The numbers for nonwhite working-class males show declines as well, though not as steep and not as continuous.)


...These are stunning changes, and they are visible across the country. In today’s average white working-class neighborhood, about one out of five men in the prime of life isn’t even looking for work; they are living off girlfriends, siblings or parents, on disability, or else subsisting on off-the-books or criminal income. Almost half aren’t married, with all the collateral social problems that go with large numbers of unattached males.

In these communities, about half the children are born to unmarried women, with all the problems that go with growing up without fathers, especially for boys. Drugs also have become a major problem, in small towns as well as in urban areas.

These major changes in American class structure were taking place alongside another sea change: large-scale ideological defection from the principles of liberty and individualism, two of the pillars of the American creed. This came about in large measure because of the civil rights and feminist movements, both of which began as classic invocations of the creed, rightly demanding that America make good on its ideals for blacks and women.

But the success of both movements soon produced policies that directly contradicted the creed. Affirmative action demanded that people be treated as groups. Equality of outcome trumped equality before the law. Group-based policies continued to multiply, with ever more policies embracing ever more groups.

By the beginning of the 1980s, Democratic elites overwhelmingly subscribed to an ideology in open conflict with liberty and individualism as traditionally understood. This consolidated the Democratic Party’s longtime popularity with ethnic minorities, single women and low-income women, but it alienated another key Democratic constituency: the white working class.

...During the same half-century, American corporations exported millions of manufacturing jobs, which were among the best-paying working-class jobs. They were and are predominantly men’s jobs. In both 1968 and 2015, 70% of manufacturing jobs were held by males.

During the same half-century, the federal government allowed the immigration, legal and illegal, of tens of millions of competitors for the remaining working-class jobs. Apart from agriculture, many of those jobs involve the construction trades or crafts. They too were and are predominantly men’s jobs: 77% in 1968 and 84% in 2015.

...As a political matter, it is not a problem that Mr. Sanders doesn’t share the traditional American meanings of liberty and individualism. Neither does Mr. Trump. Neither, any longer, do many in the white working class. They have joined the other defectors from the American creed.

...Who continues to embrace this creed in its entirety? Large portions of the middle class and upper middle class (especially those who run small businesses), many people in the corporate and financial worlds and much of the senior leadership of the Republican Party. They remain principled upholders of the ideals of egalitarianism, liberty and individualism.

And let’s not forget moderate Democrats, the spiritual legatees of the New Deal. They may advocate social democracy, but they are also unhappy about policies that treat Americans as members of groups and staunch in their support of freedom of speech, individual moral responsibility and the kind of egalitarianism that Tocqueville was talking about. They still exist in large numbers, though mostly in the political closet.

...Our vaunted liberty is now constrained by thousands of petty restrictions that touch almost anything we want to do, individualism is routinely ignored in favor of group rights, and we have acquired an arrogant upper class. Operationally as well as ideologically, the American creed is shattered.

Fatter, sicker peasants

Mark Steyn writes,

What does every initiative of the Obama era have in common? Obamacare, Obamaphones, Social Security disability expansion, 50 million people on food stamps... The assumption is that mass, multi-generational dependency is now a permanent feature of life. A coastal elite will devise ever smarter and slicker trinkets, and pretty much everyone else will be a member of either the dependency class or the vast bureaucracy that ministers to them. And, if you're wondering why every Big Government program assumes you're a feeble child, that's because a citizenry without "work and purpose" is ultimately incompatible with liberty. The elites think a smart society will be wealthy enough to relieve the masses from the need to work. In reality, it would be neo-feudal, but with fatter, sicker peasants. It wouldn't just be "economic inequality", but a far more profound kind, and seething with resentments.

Read more here.

Standing apart

Dan McLaughlin writes in The Weekly Standard about the stellar record of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

...This is the second time in three years that Thomas has written the most opinions, and they are not filled with breezy rhetoric, but thick with citation to the roots of our constitutional system, from the Magna Carta to John Locke to Blackstone’s Commentaries.

But mere volume is not the measure of Thomas’s jurisprudence. For that, one must take a closer look at the many times he has stood against the prevailing winds, warning his colleagues that the Court should consider its own errors and limitations. The cases in which he has split from Scalia — his closest colleague philosophically — are telling.

...Clarence Thomas is an affable man, if one who does not forget his scars, and by all accounts he gets on well enough with his colleagues. But given that few of them other than Scalia bother responding to his lone opinions, one wonders if some of them look at him a little funny—“that guy who keeps going on about the Constitution.” He is known to prefer the company of almost anyone to the company of his fellow judges and lawyers; he meets more often than any other justice with groups of visitors to the Court and travels the country in his RV during the Court’s recesses. But that distance makes him uniquely suited among the justices to look at this country not from the perspective of a member of the judicial high priesthood, but as a citizen ruled by it. Some critics suggest that he may be biased by the fact that his wife is active in Tea Party groups, but after his nearly quarter of a century on the Court, suggesting that Thomas’s view of the Constitution is influenced by the Tea Party is rather like suggesting that Newton’s physics were influenced by Einstein.

...Thomas’s opinions this term form a coherent whole, one that places no trust in institutions—in the wisdom of judges, the expertise of bureaucrats, or the evenhandedness of either—but depends instead on clear, written rules and structural checks and balances. And his philosophy, while grounded in the same principles as our Constitution itself, should not surprise us. Thomas is not so far removed from his upbringing in segregated Georgia that he cannot remember what it was like to live in a place and time in which the government was staffed and run by people who had no intention of treating you fairly.

Two strategies are available to a citizen confronted by such a government. One is to keep for himself as large a space as possible free of the government, in which to exercise true liberty. The other is to insist on the punctilious observance of the letter of the law. The whims of administrative agencies and the discretion of judges to fashion new rights and rules according to their own policy preferences threaten both of these strategies, to the detriment of whomever the people in power regard as beneath their concern. It is perhaps a supreme irony, but a fitting one, that the man most concerned with keeping alight the flame of these old concepts of liberty and dignity is the justice of the Supreme Court who grew up under a government that wished to accord him neither liberty nor dignity.

Read more here.

Celebrating the founding of this country

Brent Cochran writes at Ace of Spades,

What does Independence Day stand for? What is it a celebration of? It is NOT a celebration of the country as it exists. It is a celebration of the founding of this country. It is an exultation of the ideals of liberty and an act of veneration toward the men who gave tyranny the middle finger.

Those men risked, quite literally, everything. And they did it for an idea. For a hope. On faith. What they fought for had never been done before. When Patrick Henry declared “Give me liberty or give me death!” no one knew quite what liberty would look like. But they were determined to give it a try. They believed in the ideals of freedom. When our Founding Fathers declared “we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor” they did so not with heavy hearts and trepidation, but with boldness and, dare I say, joy. They were throwing off the yoke of oppression and grabbing their opportunity for a free life.

And by God they won. They succeeded. They were victorious.

Yes, they are likely distraught at what exists. There is much to bemoan, to rail against, to fear even. But not today.

Today, me and mine celebrate. We will eat, we will drink, we will colorfully blow some shit up. We will do so because brave men and women believed in freedom and liberty enough to dare all. They had far less than us, but still they had hope. Still they had faith. No one had shown them what liberty looked like, yet still they fought for it. I honor their memory today with that same hope, with that same faith. We have seen liberty, we have tasted freedom. We have done so because of those men and women and I will honor them and their memory and their sacrifice not in moroseness or anger, but in celebration and hope for the future.

Read more here.

Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission

In the Washington Post Carlos Lazada reviews Charles Murray's new book "By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission." Murray contends that

an army of federal bureaucrats and administrators has conspired with a corrupt political process to make the United States a near kleptocracy. Murray highlights zoning regulations, employment laws, rules governing professional “best practices” and regulations restricting risky personal activities as just a few unnecessary intrusions against liberty. Because of their economy-wide mandates, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Environmental Protection Agency and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission are the three “most visible intruders.”

Read more here.

Do you really stand for liberty?

In my never-ending quest to catch up on what's happening in the world, I just listened to a vigorous debate on radio station KLZ in Denver. Two talk radio hosts whom I admire and respect, Kris Cook and Ken Clark, debated the decision by Colorado Christian University not to accept money from the Log Cabin Republicans to host a booth at this summer's Western Conservative Summit.

Since the debate was aired, a compromise has been reached. Steve House, the newly elected leader of the Republican Party in Colorado, approached John Andrews, the man who puts together the Western Conservative Summit for Colorado Christian University. House offered to have the Log Cabin Republicans exhibit at the Colorado Republican Party booth. His offer was accepted by Andrews.

Now the question in my mind is, will the leftist gay movement accept the compromise? I doubt it.

Kris was arguing another, related point: Does the government really have any right to have anything to do with defining marriage? Ken replied that government first got involved because of interracial marriage, and he agreed with Kris that government should have no involvement in defining marriage. Kris termed it using government to promote a theocratic, Biblical worldview, and that it is hypocritical to then say you are doing it because you stand for liberty!

Ken pointed out that Christians are being persecuted. They are actually being killed by jihadists, and persecuted here at home. He wants Christians to stand on their principles, and he admires John Andrews for doing just that.

Kris noted that the Conference is trying to get conservatives elected "so they can use the guns of government." She does not want the Republican Party to turn away allies, like the Log Cabin Republicans. Her point is that government needs to be rolled back, and we individual Americans need more, not less liberty! She further points out that gay Republicans have many allies, especially among Millennials and Generation Z citizens (That's the first time I have heard that term), and Republicans need every citizen they can get in order to promote liberty. She argued that the Republican Party needs to be inclusive, rather than exclusive.