Until fairly recently I had been very much on board with a libertarian compromise on the same-sex marriage question: get government out of the marriage business.  If, the thinking goes, government would merely cease solemnizing couples as married, and simply award Generic Civil Union certificates to all comers, we could sidestep the Due Process and Equal Protection questions entirely.  Nice and neat, right?

Well, no, I’ve come to think.  Rather than have government extricate itself from something that’s freighted with cultural and religious significance, clerics should extricate themselves from something that’s freighted with secular, legal signifiance.  By this I mean that, while they should continue to perform religious matrimonial ceremonies as normal, they should expunge the “by the power vested in me by <insert jurisdiction here>” phrases from those ceremonies and otherwise cease acting as duly-authorized agents of the state, instead recommending that couples interested in the legal incidents of marriage should consult with the relevant county official.  I think this is the superior approach for at least three reasons.

First, it’s considerably more practical.  The government will never “get out of the marriage business” because “the marriage business” is part of the spoils system through which politicians buy votes.  You may as well suggest that hopeless addicts “get out of the meth business,” just like that.  But convincing, say, a Catholic priest that he shouldn’t befoul a beautiful wedding ceremony by giving it a grubby political/legal dimension?  That’s an argument you can win.

Second, it much more cleanly avoids inevitable litigation by anti-religious bigots and political grievance industry parasites.  As long as a minister is conducting weddings that are in any respect civil commitment ceremonies, it can be argued that he is effectively an agent of the state who can be compelled to serve all comers under state public accommodation/anti-discrimination laws, notwithstanding his religious views.  There may be respectable First Amendment defenses to such claims, but why expose yourself to a lawsuit in the first place?

Third, people generally get married because they care about one another, not all the legal perks and obligations that accrue from marriage.  I expect that there is a non-trivial constituency that would be perfectly content not to bother with a civil marriage once they were wed in the eyes of their god.  As that constituency increases, it would declaw the spoils system mentioned above.

At the outset of this post, I want to make something abundantly clear: I do not deny the existence of right-of-center groupthink.   There are certainly people on the right who do not trouble themselves to consume a balanced diet of news and opinion, and who succumb to an echo chamber effect that leaves them reeling when they come into contact with reality.  But a HuffPo column by Chez Pazienza, ascribing to groupthink and echo chamber effects the explosion of center-right rage over the healthcare reform bill, is itself an example of groupthink and echo chamber effects — on the left.

The first clue is Pazienza’s largely-favorable linkage to proven liar Eric Boehlert, a guy who makes a living dispensing sanctimonious Gorillas In The Mist-style commentary on conservatives for the consumption of other smug liberals.  Boehlert, who has spent his entire career in a creche of left-wing conformity, is no more qualified to engage in a psych diagnosis of conservatives than I am to perform open-heart surgery.  The next time he makes a good-faith effort to understand a conservative’s or libertarian’s worldview and motives will be the first time.

Pazienza’s thesis, borrowed from Boehlert, is that the right is so infuriated by the passage of ObamaCare because, basically, they get all their news from Rush, from Hitler’s cable network (i.e., FOX), and from right-wing blogs.  These information sources provided a completely distorted view of reality — principally, that ObamaCare was “destined to fail and fail miserably because this is America and in America the good guys always win — and we’re the good guys” — such that conservatives were completely poleaxed when the thing advanced through Congress and ultimately passed.  This, says Pazienza, explains why conservatives are now working their way through the Kübler-Ross grief cycle, lingering in the denial and anger stages.

The story, like most of Boehlert’s œuvre, is compelling if you’re a lefty looking for reinforcement of your prejudices.  Ha, ha, those stupid wingnuts, who only listened to FOX and were repeatedly blindsided.  We smart, sophisticated liberals would never fall thrall to a partisan narrative and throw a very public tantrum when reality intruded.

The other thing that it has in common with most of Boehlert’s work is that it’s complete horseshit.  Practically from Day One there were influential conservative commentators and high-profile right-of-center blogs predicting that the thing would probably, eventually, pass given the political juice available to its proponents.  Even Rush allowed for the possibility that the bill might pass by threatening to move to Costa Rica if it did (something that lefties are having no end of fun with).  Sure, outfits like FOX and right-of-center blogs reported on — and conservatives were buoyed by — the various legislative setbacks and problems the bill experienced along the way, and conservatives were certainly optimistic that it could be stopped.  But only in Boehlert’s and Pazienza’s strange alternate universe is optimism the same as being unrealistic or delusional about either the political math involved or the modern Democratic Party’s damn-the-torpedoes ideological commitment to statism.  Perhaps the only thing that conservatives are truly surprised by is the number of Democrats from competitive districts willing to walk the plank for party leadership given how the midterms are shaping up.

Besides, the Boehlert-Pazienza thesis cuts both ways: if conservative optimism was delusional, what of liberal pessimism?  Which wingnut echo chamber was President Obama thrall to when he grew so concerned for the bill’s survival that he begged House Democrats to save his presidency by passing it?  Was Jane Hamsher under the influence of a Sean Hannity Mind Meld when she predicted that bipartisan populist outrage would kill the bill?  What right-wing false consciousness befuddled Paul Krugman to the point of sackcloth-and-ashes despondency over prospects for reform, and of very nearly washing his hands of his secular savior?

The fact of the matter — which either escapes Boehlert and Pazienza, or which they wish to hide under their beds from — is that passage of this bill was a very near thing, and its defeat always a serious possibility, due to divisions in the Democratic caucus owing to the bill’s widespread unpopularity.  (And yes, yes, individual components of it poll favorably, but that’s like polling people about whether they like free ice cream; the bill in aggregate, which is what Congress was actually considering, has consistently polled around ten points underwater since last year.)   Even given the amount of political juice the Democrats could bring to bear, it was hardly an inevitability that this monstrosity would lurch across the finish line.  Yes, there are lots of dashed hopes on the right, but nominally right-of-center folks are not, by and large, infuriated because their favored news sources lulled them into thinking this day would never come and now the hangover sucks.  Rather, they’re pissed because they think the bill is both substantively and procedurally wretched: that it will do incalculable damage to the country’s fiscal position and irrevocably worsen its laws and its character, and that it was passed under false pretenses via one of the most corrupt legislative processes in recent memory (several Bush-era shenanigans notwithstanding).  And they’re not without ammunition for those views, contrary to what Boehlert and Pazienza might (and probably will) try to claim.

So if the Boehlert-Pazienza thesis is such transparent horseshit, why would Boehlert and Pazienza peddle it?  Simple: projection.  They’ve succumbed to the same failing that they ascribe to conservatives, and are so enmeshed in a partisan narrative — conservatives are laughably ignorant victims of a false consciousness that liberals see right through, and so it’s scarcely necessary to address their arguments on the merits — that they’re unable to deal with reality.

“First, the view that the government should censor the speech of people who do business in the form of corporations is rooted in the idea that free speech is an instrumental good that serves ‘democracy.’ That is the Progressivist interpretation that sees ‘democracy’ as the central value of the Constitution, and sees individual liberty as a privilege that is created by the government in order to promote ‘democracy.’ This is the opposite of the view of the Constitution’s authors: they believed that the fundamental constitutional value was liberty, and that democracy existed only to serve liberty. That’s why the first sentence of the Constitution declares that liberty is a ‘Blessing,’ and why the Constitution goes on to impose serious limits on democracy. In their view, speech is protected because individuals have the right to express themselves–not because speech has a relationship to democracy. Obviously they understood that free expression was good for democratic decision-making, but their primary concern was protecting the rights of individuals, not with preserving some vague conception of ‘democratic society.’”

“The central contradiction in modern liberal politics is that Otto von Bismarck’s entitlement state for cradle to grave financial security is no longer affordable. The model has reached the limit of its ability to tax private income and still allow enough economic growth to finance its transfer payments.”

The Political Math guy is back, this time with a visualization of President Obama’s proposed spending freeze:

Again, I’m not opposed to the freeze.  But it should be understood as a baby-step concession to fiscal reality by an administration that has long been living in la-la land, rather than as a serious attempt to wrestle with the country’s budgetary trajectory.

“In other words, as a result of the Watergate-era campaign finance restrictions, it is now settled law that congressmen are sufficiently corruptible that they can’t be trusted with campaign donations of more than a few thousand dollars.

Which raises the question: How can they be trusted with our tax dollars?“

I am pointed by a wonderful friend of mine to this column at the Huffington Post, penned by a colleague of his who is a chaplain for Planned Parenthood.  It is a thoughtful, interesting read.

As I told him, though, I find myself nonplussed that “reproductive justice for women” has come to encompass not merely the right to end a pregnancy, but taxpayer subsidies for elective abortion (or, for that matter, taxpayer subsidies for the care and feeding of not-aborted anklebiters).

I am largely indifferent to what a woman does with her own uterus on her own dime.  While I am frequently discomfitted by the antiseptic denialism in the pro-choice ranks (you are destroying nascent human life, folks, not simply “terminating a fetus”), there are two hard realities, here:

1. The ultimate question — when, if ever, does a woman’s right to sexual and reproductive self-determination give way to her unborn child’s right to exist? — is freighted with moral ambiguity, such that reasonable people of goodwill can and will reach wildly different conclusions.
2. Even assuming a moral consensus that prohibiting or sharply limiting the practice is appropriate, every legal prohibition comes at an intolerable cost to our other civil liberties (see also, the War On Some Drugs).

Accordingly, my view is that the government ought to butt the hell out.  Individuals, not the state, are the best arbiters of whether, if ever, abortion is right or wrong, proper or improper.

But when you begin demanding that public dollars be used to subsidize your healthcare needs, my indifference fades, and I recite the subject line of this post: he who pays the piper calls the tune.  American taxpayers are not required to supinely accept indentured servitude to the functioning of your uterus, and the fact that some of them are motivated by a religious conviction that abortion is a moral horror is entirely irrelevant.  Either pay your own way, or accept the strings that your benefactor attaches to his largesse.

UPDATE: Reason #1 I hate discussing abortion — it’s perfectly obvious and uncontroversial that in much of the country women have ample access to accurate and fairly comprehensive reproductive health and family planning information.  For goodness sake, one can find safe-sex PSAs on the Big Three networks in prime time.  And yet, dare to point this out, and someone is sure to start in about the tragically-ignorant girls in the rural wastelands of Insert Bible Belt State Here, who still think storks bring babies and live 30 miles from the nearest drugstore, never mind a Planned Parenthood clinic.

It is not to deny the existence of these women to observe that many, many others don’t have tragic ignorance as an excuse, and yet make poor family planning decisions resulting in unwanted pregnancies anyway.  Many, many others, in other words, end up pregnant as the result of their own sexual irresponsibility.

That sounds a good deal more judgmental than I mean it to be, and so I want to make clear: I am not unsympathetic to any woman faced with an unwanted pregnancy, under any circumstances, and considering her options.  It’s an awful situation, and there but for the grace of God, and my gender, go I.  But even if a woman ends up hostage to her own body as the result of some sort of systemic injustice, one does not right that wrong by doubling down, as by forcibly confiscating private wealth to pay for her ob/gyn care.

Nick Gillespie of Reason, who needs a haircut, nevertheless nails UPS and the federal government straight to the wall:

Exit question: will the Obama administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress be on the side of good, or evil?

Yesterday the Congressional Budget Office finally gave ObamaCare some good news, “scoring” the Senate Finance Committee proposals as reducing the deficit by about $81 billion over 10 years.  But as the Cato Institute helpfully reminds us:

The CBO report that said the health care bill won’t raise deficits makes it clear that the Baucus bill’s reduction in future budget deficits comes not from controlling government spending or reducing health care costs, but because of a rapid escalation in tax revenues.

The bill imposes a 40 percent excise tax on health-insurance plans that offer benefits in excess of $8,000 for an individual plan and $21,000 for a family plan. Insurers would almost certainly pass this tax on to consumers via higher premiums. As inflation pushes insurance premiums higher in coming years, more and more middle-class families would find themselves caught up in the tax.

In fact, overall, the tax increases in the bill are more than double the amount of deficit reduction. This isn’t a health care efficiency bill or a cost containment bill. It is a tax and spend bill, pure and simple.

Emphasis mine.  Also:

The CBO score of the Baucus bill is like a mystery novel with the last 50 pages missing. It fails to reveal both the full cost of the bill and the budget gimmicks that Mr. Baucus uses to hide that cost.

The Baucus bill will not reduce the deficit, and it would ultimately cost taxpayers more than $2 trillion—just like every other bill Congress has produced so far.

The biggest gimmick employed by the bill is that its individual mandate pushes more than half of the legislation’s cost off-budget, and onto businesses and individuals who will have to shoulder that burden. A real-world parallel already exists in the Massachusetts health care plan, where private-sector mandates account for 60 percent of the cost. In 1994, CBO counted those mandated private payments in the federal budget, and it helped kill the Clinton health plan. This time around, Democrats were very careful to craft their mandates so that they just barely avoided having the CBO include those payments in the federal budget. But the CBO’s decision does not change the fact that those private-sector mandates are part of the cost of this bill.

The second-biggest gimmick is assuming that Congress will let the “Sustainable Growth Rate” cuts in Medicare physician payments to occur. Starting in 2003, Congress has repeatedly blocked those cuts, and there is no reason to think that Congress will behave any differently in the future. So yes, provided that the sun rises in the West, the Baucus bill would reduce the federal deficit.

In other words, this entire thing is an exercise in smoke and mirrors.  Simply put, it is impossible to reduce the costs of health insurance while increasing insurers’ exposure to risk (through community rating and guaranteed issue mandates).  The increased risk costs money, and somebody has to pony up.

I am struck dumb by someone else’s eloquence on a subject.  Geoffrey Lawrence, writing in the Washington Examiner:

Harold Meyerson is right in his Sept. 30 Washington Post column. But he doesn’t understand why. Free-market economists do theorize about a world that doesn’t exist.

They theorize about a financial industry that isn’t arbitrarily manipulated by the intervention of a central bank operating under the moral suasion of government. They theorize about a world with private property rights where politically connected bankers cannot afford to make unsound loans by forcing investment risks onto taxpayers.

That world doesn’t exist. The world that exists, the one that has plummeted into economic recession, is one in which interest rates are arbitrary and money has no backing. It is one in which the well-connected can make a fortune at the expense of the little man by socializing all the risks and privatizing all the gains.

It is one in which hard work and prudent decision making no longer pay. It is one where the free-market economy — the most extraordinary system of peaceful human cooperation ever devised — has long since disappeared.

Read the whole thing.  To Lawrence’s fine article, I can add only this: no matter how thoroughly pinioned the economy by government intervention, people like Harold Meyerson will inevitably condemn whatever tiny slivers of freedom remain for any and all economic upheavals that roll down the pike.