John Hawkins over at Right Wing News has assembled his 2nd Annual "40 Best Political Quotes Of the Year." Invigorating reading, that's for sure. I drop in below a few of my favorites.38) Liberals don't care. Their approach is to rip out society's foundations without asking if they serve any purpose. Why do we have immigration laws? What's with these borders? Why do we have the institution of marriage, anyway? What do we need standardized tests for? Hey, I like Keith Richards -- why not make heroin legal? Let's take a sledgehammer to all these load-bearing walls and just see what happens! -- Ann Coulter
33) Since the 1960s, much of the American church has been stampeding away from its allegedly "judgmental" past. As we de-stigmatize divorce, our families dissolve. As we de-stigmatize illegitimacy, fathers vanish. In matters public (see, for example, the Christian community's utter failure to oppose no-fault divorce) and private (the reluctance to "judge" our close friends when they stray into manifestly destructive behaviors), the message is clear: "I'm not one of those judgmental Christians."
We need to learn that there's a difference between judgment and reading comprehension. You are not making a judgment when you say that homosexual sex is wrong, that God hates divorce, and that premarital sex is a sin. God made those judgments, and you're merely communicating the judgment He made, not making one of your own. Further, in withholding, watering down, or denying those truths, you are not making anyone's life better. You are making their lives worse. -- David French
28) As has been said, standards are always out of date -- that is why we call them standards. -- George Will
24) Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place. Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing. This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that “bravely” trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force. -- Ross Douthat
18) If there is no moral foundation for a system of laws, then the law is reduced to “These are the rules. They’re the rules because I say so, and I control all of the guys with guns.” We can ask those who survived Pol Pot, Stalin, or Mao how that worked out. (Hitler’s Nazism was not state atheism; it was filled with the occult. Anyone who watches Leni Riefenstahl‘s “Triumph of the Will“ and doesn’t see religion is willfully blind.)
So the law is either codification of morality or it is thuggery. The real argument is about which moral code will be implemented by the law. To claim to reject a moral underpinning for the law is either a wish to live in a place where the law is whatever one guy says it is today, or else it is a disingenuous attempt to substitute your own moral code for the one that has already been codified. -- Beregond
