The Wrong Side of History II

(Opposition to Same Sex Marriage)

We have a massive collapse of marriage ongoing, a collapse that is rooted in our cultural inability to address the ways in which gender matters.

The next generation’s endorsement of gay marriage is going hand in hand with a massive retreat from connecting marriage and childbearing. Almost six in ten women with only a high-school diploma now become mothers out of wedlock. It’s the new normal.

[If the Supreme Court overturns DOMA and throws out Proposition 8] the Supreme Court takes away the core civil rights of 7 million Californians to vote on the marriage question. 

And the Left cares only about gay marriage.
(Maggie Gallagher on Marriage)

Since all the legal rights of marriage are already available to homosexual couples, it is clear that this proposal is not about rights, but rather is an attempt to redefine marriage for the whole of society at the behest of a small minority of activists. (Keith O'Brien)

The same would happen if same sex unions were defined as marriages, further aberrations would be taking place and society would be degenerated further than it has already degenerated into immorality. (Keith O'Brien)

In saying this we are not arguing that the current legislation on civil partnerships should be
repealed. That is a route that the State has chosen to go down and it is not the issue at
stake here. Indeed there are those who wonder what all the fuss is about – given that civil
partnerships already give all the same legal rights as marriages.

We do not however think that instigating gay marriage and thus undermining even further the Christian foundations of this society will lead to a better or fairer nation.   Indeed in our view, it will lead to further social disintegration, sexual confusion and greater intolerance, where any in public life or service, who dare to uphold the Christian view of marriage, will be ostracised and discriminated against. (Gordon Wilson and Rev. David Robertson)

See The Wrong Side of History I.

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The Wrong Side of History I

(Opposition to Racially-integrated Education, responses to Brown v. Board of Education.)

It is high time we thought of normalcy and routine for our young. We decry such [a] state of affairs in the home and constantly blame juvenile delinquency etc. on this lack of security and home balance. (Letter from Ainslee B. Dohme and Alvin R. L. Dohme)

In the belief that a public school system here consisting of an admixture of colored and white children will bring unending violence and strife to the detriment of both races, we earnestly petition you to make every effort to devise a means of maintaining public education without a comingling of the races. (Petition from the citizens of Halifax County)

 (Mourning card from Warren Spitler Covington to Governor James Lindsay Almond)

(Telegram from L. S. Key, Charlottesville, to Governor James Lindsay Almond.)

White and Negro children in the same schools will lead to miscegenation. Miscegenation leads to mixed marriages, and mixed marriages lead to mongrelization of the human race. (Jackson Daily News, Mississippi.)

The 17 Negro children have adequate and convenient schools to attend, most of which are much more modern and attractive to the students than the older school buildings occupied by a great many of our white children. (C. Edgar Winn, letter to The Virginian-Pilot)

Does the Negro have more right to force his way into a white school than a white person has to go to a 100% white school? In ruling he has, the Supreme Court brought out a radical sociological edict that upset every previous Supreme Court decision that bore specifically on the problem of mixing young children at the impressionable age. (Garland B. Porter, letter to The Virginian-Pilot)

One needs only to read the newspapers to note that there is a continuous struggle between national Democrats and national Republicans to curry the favor of the Negro vote in the North. For this reason, at the instigation of American leftists, the South is being sacrificed on an altar of politics. (John W. Ball, letter to the Richmond News Leader)

Sounds eerily familiar.

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Wealth Inequality in the UK

Watch this excellent video which illustrates something that many people find difficult to picture - the extraordinary inequity of wealth distribution in the developed world. This graphically represents US inequality:

The US is close to the most unequal country in the world, by wealth; here's the key graphic again, this time from Mother Jones:

Now, things aren't so bad in the UK, so I thought I would just re-draw that top graph, the actual distribution of wealth, for the UK*, for comparison:

So we can see that the UK distribution of wealth is not even better than what Americans think their own distribution is, let alone what they think it should be.

EDIT: The UK figures are - Top 20% own 69% of the wealth, next 20% the next 18% (top 40% own 87%), next 20% the next 9% (top 60% own 96%), next 20% the next 3.5%. The bottom 20% own 0.5% (that's half of one percent) of the country's wealth. That's right, the bottom 1 in 5 only own a two-hundredth of the wealth, and the bottom 2 in 5 only own a twenty-fifth of the wealth. Half the population own less than a tenth of the wealth. I think, apart from the measurable bad outcomes that result, everyone with a sense of fairness would concede that is not fair, as the bottom chart shows.

For the reason why this matters, check out the Equality Trust.

* I calculated the figures from this data, which listed the wealth of each percentile except the top 1%, for some reason (ungraphable!). I guestimated the wealth of the top 1% from this article, which cited data saying they owned 25% of the wealth in the UK (it's 40% in the US, according to the video above). Not terribly scientific I agree, but I doubt the actual figures are much different.

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