Laurie Higgins does some of her best writing answering critics in the comments sections beneath her articles. Last time we started looking at some of what she had to say at one of the websites where her articles about this year’s governor’s race were posted.
When one critic described Higgins as a single issue voter, she responded with this:
Seriously? I’m a one-issue voter? What about those who claim ad nauseum that the only issue that matters is the economy?
In the relentless quest to marginalize and ridicule conservatives into silence and acquiescence, liberals, social “moderates” and Libertarians continually lie by labeling conservatives “one-issue” voters. It is strategically useful to misrepresent conservatives who care about a whole host of cultural and political issues.
Social “moderates” don’t really believe conservatives care only about the social issues. They know better.
What social “moderates” object to is that conservatives care at all about the social issues.
It’s not that “moderates” desire that conservatives care about multiple issues. What “moderates” desire is that conservatives care about all issues except the “social issues”–you know, those pesky trivialities like feticide, the dismantling of marriage, and loss of religious freedom.
Doesn’t sound very moderate to me.I wonder if “moderate” Republicans harangue Log Cabin Republicans for their concern with the “social issues.”
When someone talked about the future for Illinois children, Higgins wrote this:
Yes, I worry about the actual future of actual children in IL who will be harmed by the actual Republicans leading the IL GOP in an ideologically deformed direction.
I worry about the actual religious liberty of actual children living in IL, including my own actual children and grandchildren, who because of men like Mark Kirk will experience less religious liberty than previous generations. And religious liberty matters more than even our indefensible debt.
I worry too about the actual children living in wombs who will actually be killed because men like Mark Kirk and Bruce Rauner are transforming the only party that has sought to protect them.
I worry too about the actual children who are being treated like commodities with half their DNA being purchased, and who are being denied their inherent right to both a mother and a father.
I worry about actual children in actual government schools being indoctrinated with Leftist assumptions about marriage.
Where will a Republican leader be found to express outrage about censorship of conservative ideas in our government schools when we keep electing men like Rauner and Kirk?
Where will a Republican leader be found who will fight for the rights of actual preborn babies?
Where will a Republican leader be found who will fight to restore sexual complementarity to the legal definition of marriage?
Where will a Republican leader be found who will stand up for the right of Catholic Charities to place actual children in homes with both a mother and a father?
Yes, I too worry about actual children being harmed by Republican leaders who lack vision, wisdom, and spines.
Here’s another critic:
I find it quite predictable that “social conservatives” have assumed the circular firing squad formation. They simply don’t know against what/who they struggle, failing to identify the Constitution as their enemy, not any particular candidate. Women have the right to privacy – even if you find what they do with that privacy unacceptable. Gays have the right to marry, to exercise and participate in a civil contact, even if that act is just one more of many on which the Constitution trumps the Bible.
The first order of your business is to identify the so-called “enemy” of your beliefs, and it’s not Rauner nor his wife. Your enemy is much less transitory. You fight our Constitution even while, in your mad dash to irrelevancy, you shoot good Republican candidates and messengers.
Here is Higgins’ response:
So much nonsense, so little time…
1. If conservatives are forming a circular firing squad (which is getting to be a very tired cliché), what are social “moderates” doing? What are social “moderates” doing every time they call conservatives “idiots,” “silly, blathering wingnuts,” and the “dumbest people on earth”?
2. Where, pray tell, in the Constitution do you find the “right to marry”?
3. Before any society decides who may legally marry, citizens need to define marriage. What is it? Even Leftists argue that marriage has a nature. They don’t argue that society created something called “marriage” out of whole cloth. Most Leftists argue that marriage is inherently binary. Where do they get this magic number two? Could it be from the twoness of the sexes?
Sexual complementarity has been central to any understanding of marriage in any society throughout history. It is more enduring and cross-cultural than either age requirement, numbers of partners, or consanguinity. If we jettison sexual complementarity, there is no rational reason to retain the requirement regarding numbers of partners. And if two brothers are in a homoerotic relationship, why should they not be permitted to marry?
4. All unmarried adults are currently free to marry regardless of their sexual predilections and peccadilloes. Those who choose to put their unwanted same-sex attraction at the center of their identity are not asking for the right to marry. They’re demanding the unilateral right to redefine the institution of marriage by jettisoning sexual complementarity. Should sibling-lovers and polyamorists be afforded that same privilege? If marriage is just about love and has no connection to sexual complementarity than what possible justification is there for prohibiting plural marriages?
5. Oddly, Robert George, Princeton University law professor, seemed to miss what you have discerned in emanations emitted by the Constitution’s penumbra: a right for those with disordered sexual inclinations to recreate marriage in their own image.
Yes, there’s more…click here to keep going…
Image credit: www.businessinsider.com.
