Don't call it marriage

One of the bright spots in the recent election was the rejection of same-sex marriage in three states, most notably California. Voters there amended the state constitution to define marriage as being between one man and one woman.
Immediately gay activists marched in protest and threatened to appeal it to the courts, which they now have. To be sure there will be an effort to repeal it in the next election.
Knowing the pattern of California courts, it’s a safe bet to say that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will overturn it, only to have the Supreme Court overturn the Ninth Circuit Court. Remember, you read it here first.
Personally -- and I’m only speaking for myself here – I think if homosexuals want “equality” they need to define their domestic relationships in terms other than “marriage.” What they want is not marriage. They want a legal sanctioning of their domestic relationships.
Marriage involves the union of a man and a woman as the base for a family and the procreation of the species. Gay relationships do none of those things. That’s not to say that there cannot be loving and nurturing gay homes.
A gay relationship can be nothing more than two people of the same gender living together. It cannot by itself produce offspring nor continue a family line. Such unions are unnatural and perverse. Even if you keep religious objections out of it, living creatures were simply not designed for same gender intimacy. We’re not built with the right parts to function that way.
Alas, I am straying from my point. Marriage has a very specific design and purpose – a purpose that is not met by people of the same gender. It is a spiritual, holy and sanctified relationship that goes much deeper than the legal definition.
While I oppose same-sex unions for biblical purposes, I can see and understand the point gay advocates make on behalf of wanting equality and the same rights as heterosexuals. This is America and as Americans they should have the right to live their lives as they wish, no matter how repulsive it is. They should have all the legal trappings of a formal relationship that men and women do. But don’t call it marriage.
Don’t put it on the same level as marriage, which is at the core of a family. The family is the building block of all society. If you diminish marriage and family, you rip the very fabric of society.
If gay people are so adamant about being “married,” then let them pow-wow with the lawyers and come up with a new term and definition for what they want. Let them come up with their own ceremony, their own traditions and their own form of a legal relationship.
What they want should be set apart from what is, because it is not the same. There is also the issue of forcing employers to provide benefits to same-sex partners. That’s touchy because it does border on discrimination, but it also violates an employer’s freedom of religion to force him to provide it.
It’s my opinion that benefits are not a Constitutional right and an employer should not be made by the government to provide them if the employer doesn’t want to. At the very least there should be a religious exemption for an employer to claim in refusing to hire or insure homosexuals, especially for churches and other ministry organizations where such relationships violate core beliefs.On a final note, those who say rewriting a state constitution to define marriage as being between one man and one woman is building discrimination into law, I disagree. It is not discrimination, but protection of something very sacred and important to who we are as a people. To violate that sanctity would be an act of discrimination.

Automakers impact gas prices

With a 90-mile round-trip commute each weekday, I doubted there were few as happy as I was to see the price of gas drop below $2 a gallon.
Apparently I was mistaken.
When gas was more than $4 a gallon just a couple months ago, there were fewer vehicles on the road. SUVs, vans, pickup trucks and other gas hogs were replaced by more practical modes of transportation.
T. Boone Pickins was going around pushing his wind-energy plan down everyone’s throats. Presidential candidates were promising that their plans would free us from dependence on foreign oil.
My, what a difference a few bucks at the pump can make. The SUVs and giant pickup trucks are back with a vengeance. Pickens has put his plan on hold and, now that the election is over, no one is promising to break our addiction to Middle Eastern oil.
Hello!? Did somebody forget that we’re not growing anymore oil? Does anyone remember how just a year ago we were screaming about how outrageous $2 a gallon gas was? Now that it’s down to $2, we’re forgetting what life was like in August.
If we quit conserving just because the price drops, the oil barons will get greedier and the price will shoot back up, way past the $4 mark for sure.
During the presidential debates, I found it annoyingly humorous to hear Barack Obama and John McCain go on about eliminating our dependence on foreign oil by developing alternative energy sources domestically. Do these men think the American public is that stupid?
Apparently so.
We do not use foreign oil to heat our homes, produce electricity or to provide for any of our energy needs. We use it almost exclusively in our vehicles. Most of it is burned up as fuel for our cars. If we truly want to slake our thirst for oil, we need vehicles that don’t use it, or much of it. Drilling for more domestic oil, building nuclear power plants, developing wind energy and putting clean-coal plants online will do nothing to reduce our dependence on oil.
What will free us from the chains of dependency is the same thing that will help the Big Three automakers: developing and producing vehicles that run on something other than gasoline.
Ford, GM and Chrysler need to stop going to the government with hat in hand looking for a bailout and start looking toward their own scientists and engineers to come up with practical, affordable cars that do not depend on fossil fuels.
Show me a car that will carry my family of six that retails for less than $15,000 and uses no gasoline and chances are I will buy one, along with a few million of my closest friends.
That doesn’t mean we should no longer look to develop alternative sources of energy. By all means, that should be a national priority. But so should development of gas-free vehicles. That’s the only thing that will truly allow us to stop nursing from the spigots of the Middle East. And it will put America back to work building those cars and put more money into our pockets that would normally go into our gas tanks.

Author has reason to diss Hereford

“Don’t Go There.”
No, let’s go there.
On Nov. 11, the public can get its hands on the book “Don’t Go There: The Travel Detective’s Essential Guide to the Must-Miss Places of the World.” I got my preview copy on Monday.
The book, from Rodale, is written by Peter Greenberg, travel editor for NBC’s Today Show. It came with a red tab on page 53, which begins a segment about Hereford. The city is second behind Putnam County, Mo., to be skewered by Greenberg in chapter 4, “Places that Really Stink.”
It’s no secret that Hereford is known for its “smell of money.” That’s one of the side-effects to being in the center of the Beef Capital of the World. And yes, there are times it makes your eyes water and nose wrinkle just to walk outside.
As anyone who lives here knows, it’s not like that every day. In fact, the sweet smell of grain permeates the air much more than cow dung. I also happen to find the smell of the ethanol plant to be quite pleasing.
In reading Greenberg’s description of Hereford, you would think the whole town reeks of manure and that we practically bathe in it. He makes it sound like cows roam free in town and that the streets are paved with cow patties.
I don’t know about you, but I haven’t stepped in a fresh one in, oh, about three or four weeks now. And it wasn’t in town either. And the last time I had to bathe because of cow chips was in the early 1980s, but that was at a Scout camp and I was on the losing end of a cow puck chuck contest that got out of hand.
After reading the blurb about Hereford in Greenberg’s book and thumbing through other parts of it, I kept asking myself why on earth anyone would write such a negative book. Why would a travel editor focus on places NOT to go? Surely he must know that he is insulting peoples’ homes and their livelihoods.
I found the answer in the introduction. For him, it’s a matter of honest, responsible journalism. As a journalist myself, I have to respect that. Still, this isn’t the kind of book one writes to make friends and influence people.
(OK, maybe it will influence people, but not for the right reasons.)
In his introduction, Greenberg talks about how irresponsible it is for travel writers to not give the bad with the good in their reports. He talks about living in Houston while a correspondent with Newsweek. “I hated Houston,” he said, before going on to gripe about the dirty beaches of Galveston. It shows a clear bias against Texas.
Greenberg said the purpose of his book is to point out to people places they may not want to consider for their next vacation, or to at least make them aware of things (crime, odor, political corruption, etc.) that they won’t find in travel brochures.
“Now, I know I will be accused of being unfairly subjective, and there will be claims that I inserted facts out of context, that I somehow violated the spirit of travel journalism by not being a promoter of travel.
“Well, guess what? I have never worked for the travel industry. I report on it – good (and sometimes very good), bad, and yes, quite often ugly. Travel writing is not about being part of a popularity contest. Like all other reporting, it’s about presenting – no promoting – facts that allow people to make reasonably intelligent, independent decisions about the choices available to them,” he wrote.
I do have to respect his writings about dirty hotels, lousy airports, crime-ridden communities, dangerous roads and other things travelers should know about. And while I find what he had to say about Hereford a slap in the face, I have to confess my own guilt of writing about Hereford’s lack of appeal as a tourist destination just a few weeks ago.
Maybe this book is the wake-up call our civic leaders need to start thinking about things and events that could make Hereford a travel destination.
The alternative is to let Greenberg stand unchallenged and let the rest of the world go on thinking we’re just a stinky little cow town out in the middle of nowhere – even if it is true.

Never vote under the influence of a girl

Blame it on puppy love.
The year was 1976 and I was all set to cast my vote for Jimmy Carter. As a fifth-grader at Niwot Elementary School, I didn’t know squat about politics, elections or, apparently, girls.
Niwot Elementary was holding a mock election. Each class was called one at a time to come down to the library so we could cast our vote for president. Secrecy was not an issue.
I was in line behind Leann Root, the girl that I had a crush on since kindergarten. Every time I was near Leann, I would shut down. My heart would race, my tongue would get tied and I’d melt inside.
I watched her, all atwitter, as she took her turn and placed her mark next to Gerald Ford’s name. She walked off and I, my head spinning, promptly placed my “X” by Ford’s name.
It wasn’t until later when we returned to class that I realized my mistake. I never blamed Leann for leading me astray. I took that responsibility myself. As the results were announced over the intercom, I mentally subtracted one from Ford and gave it to Carter. It really didn’t affect the outcome, but I felt better about it.
For the rest of my life I could never imagine how the process of voting could get any more frustrating. Then came the elections of 2000 and 2004. I don’t know what the people in Florida and Ohio have to blame, but I doubt it was anything or anyone nearly as cute as Leann.
In two days it will be time to go to the polls again (unless you were smart enough to cast an early ballot). I really can’t tell you who to vote for. I can tell you that it is important that you do vote. I have voted in every single election I was eligible to vote in since I turned 18. I’m proud to say that my first-ever vote was for Ronald Reagan.
I’ve voted a lot of split-tickets since that time, especially since my journalism career has put me into contact with more politicians and wannabes than an undecided voter during the New Hampshire primaries. I’ve met more senators, congressmen, governors, state legislators and local elected officials than you can shake a ballot at.
I have yet to meet, or even see in person, a president or vice president. I did see Dick Cheney once when he was Secretary of Defense. He wasn’t nearly as cute as Leann, so I wasn’t impressed.
What has impressed me is the caliber of some of our nation’s leaders. There are some that I feel are genuine, principled men and women of integrity. There are plenty, however, who give us reason for term limits.
I’ve been watching the U.S. Senate race in my home state of Colorado between Republican Bob Schaffer and Democrat Mark Udall. I’ve met both men. I find Schaffer to be a real, honest hard-working man with good leadership skills and solid family values. Udall, on the other hand, is a poster boy for the aforementioned term limits.
Here in Texas, I have not met Sen. John Cornyn or his opponent, Democrat Rick Noriega. I have contacted Cornyn’s office a couple times and have been satisfied with the response. I used to get the daily barrage of press releases from Noriega’s campaign, but finally had to ask to be removed from his mailing list.
Noriega’s propaganda was incredibly negative and often wrong. I just couldn’t stomach it anymore. He was more focused on bashing Cornyn than he was promoting his own cause. That’s the same mistake I see John McCain making with Barack Obama in this year’s presidential election. McCain is coming off like a babbling idiot compared to the smooth, refined approach of Obama.
For all of McCain’s experience and his commitment to service of our country, he should be clobbering Obama in the polls. If you believe all the surveys, this county is about to hand the leadership of the free world to a man with less than one term of experience in the senate. This man has done nothing but run for office. He hasn’t been in one place long enough to actually do anything.
Now, I know there are those who would say that McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, isn’t anymore experienced than Obama. That may be true, but she is as cute as Leann – you betcha!
Seriously though, as much as I don’t want Obama to win, I do have to admit he would be better than George W. Bush. (Oops, did I say that out loud?)
I voted twice for Bush and regret it once. He was a man of principle and good moral character. He listened to people and was a uniter – before he became the decider.
They say absolute power corrupts absolutely. I feel that is what happened to Dubya. In the wake of 9/11, he went on a power grab and hasn’t let go.
One thing is certain, this election is about change. My life has changed a lot since I pulled that first lever for Reagan. So has this country. To be sure, it will change a lot under an Obama administration. I have to ask, however, if change for the sake of change is good.
I don’t know what happened to Leann, and I certainly don’t know or care who she’s voting for. I do know that I will be casting my ballot with my mind rather than my heart. I hope you will too.