That means somebody out there would like to stop barring homosexual men from donating blood.  The reason homosexual men are now barred is that they’re far more likely to carry the HIV/AIDS virus than any other segment of the population.  If you receive a blood transfusion from somebody who has AIDS, you’ll get AIDS.  The nation has made the judgment that the potential benefit isn’t worth the risk.

Reliable statistics on homosexuality are hard to find because it is a matter of deep shame to most people who have ever done something, ahem, unusual even one time.  And if people won’t admit to it, how can you trust the stats?

Still, here’s what we do know about homosexuality and AIDS from the Centers for Disease Control:

CDC estimates that approximately 50,000 people are newly infected with HIV each year in the United States. In 2009 (the most recent year that data are available), there were an estimated 48,100 new HIV infections. Most (61%) of these new infections occurred in gay and bisexual men.

From the CDC web site, here are new AIDS cases in 2009 by the mode of transmission:

23,846    Male-to-male sexual contact
3,932     Injection drug use
1,131     Male-to-male sexual contact and injection drug use
12,860   Heterosexual contact
76   Other

Okay… so there’s not much debate on whether the danger is real (It is.), nor whether the danger is concentrated among “MSM” (It is.).  In our age of “intolerant tolerance,” it sounds almost freakish to state unwelcome facts plainly, but the deeds which homosexuals perform upon one another do, in the aggregate, tend to increase the spread of the AIDS virus.  Long gone are the days when the disease was called GRID for Gay Related Immune Deficiency.  A celebrity of national fame would get boxed around his ears for reminding anybody about this.

If your logic detector connects to your indignation switch, you’re already sputtering in protest, “Why would anyone lower the threshold for the safety of the blood supply by inviting homosexuals to donate?”

Not actually knowing the motives of the ‘crats who want this, I can only state the obvious and allow the Duck Theorem to pull the reader to his own conclusions.  The homosexual activist community is fanatically bent on erecting legal structures to compel Americans to accord them the same respect that normal relationships have.  They insist on having sexual orientation treated the same as ethnicity, enlist Hollywood support in demonizing people who suggest homosexuality is sinful, sue to overturn laws and constitutional amendments defining marriage as heterosexual and monogamous, and so on.

Allowing gay blood donors looks to me like it’s cut from the same cloth.  Why do I think so?  For one thing, the blood of needle dependent drug users appears to be no worse than homosexuals’, yet nobody is seeking to have their donations accepted.  And not even gays themselves are claiming that including their blood would make the blood supply safer.  Their argument seems to be that it probably wouldn’t make things a lot worse.

And that brings me to a question where public safety, politics, pragmatism, culture, traditional morality, and religion all intersect: Can western society maintain the position that the unique health problems associated with homosexuality means homosexuals must be treated differently from heterosexuals?  A society whose TSA insists it must harass Henry Kissinger lest they be accused of treating him differently from a potential terrorist is a society too demented to get the right answer on this question.  Lord, please grant us leaders with good sense, good humor, and a lot of guts.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

Oil shale deposits in the Green River Formation are estimated to contain up to 3 trillion barrels of oil, half of which may be recoverable, which is about equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves. (Emphasis mine.)

Only one thing stands in the way of these resources being developed: Democrats.  The Democrat party is, like any other political party, a coalition of people with disparate interests.  Electoral margins in our era are usually quite thin, so thin that a tiny faction of committed voters can control a political party by threatening to sit out an election.  Some organized lobbies are very effective at this, which is true of the environmentalists.  When they order the president to kill off the Keystone pipeline deal, he obeys them.

So now our nation lifts its fuel-starved eyes to the Green River and finds the radicals have built a Maginot line of regulations across the western frontier.  A giant regulatory phalanx is the ultimate weapon in passive aggression.  All they have to do is go stupid and sit there, and the treasures of the Green River Formation will remain forever sealed beneath America’s desert sands.

When the Nazis faced the Maginot line, it was militarily impossible to penetrate it.  So they just went around it.  In the case of our environmental radicals, it’s time conservatives bypassed them by doing a little passive aggression of their own.  Congress needs to slash the EPA budget until it’s too small to cause trouble.  That can be done by a little clutch of committed patriots who are willing to stall the budget process and shut down the government for however long it takes until the victory is won.  After all, the government is shutting us down!  What would be wrong with returning the favor?  And that can be done by men who don’t care if the left hires a covey of media consultants to invent uncharitable names to call them.

And this is why it’s so critical that the House of Representatives elect more constitutional conservatives who understand what is at stake.  The EPA is strangling the life out of American industry.  It has long ceased to matter whether they are doing this because they are Marxists bent on seeing America fall or just misguided idealogues hoping to establish the New Eden by making everybody stop doing everything.  Fact is, they’re killing America one ream of idiot regulations at a time.  They will stop doing that when the job doesn’t pay.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

Back in those days, soft drink bottles were all made of glass and had a two-cent return deposit. My brother and our cousins occasionally busied ourselves combing road ditches to collect enough bottles to buy a Coke and candy bar at the Piggly Wiggly. Since the Coke and candy were a dime each (long time ago, I know), we’d need ten bottles per kid for the full meal deal. That was usually not too hard to manage since people used to throw trash out their car windows all the time. Even on a lazy day, thirty minutes’ work would net you at least five bottles to swap for a Coke.

Once the Coke and candy were gone, we’d climb the cliff behind Piggly Wiggly and start looking for rock targets.

Now, it so happened that the Piggly Wiggly employees dumped all the returned drink bottles into open bins behind the store. I guess that’s where the bottling company picked them up. The bins were nasty, open top cubes made of wooden slats, maybe four feet square and as many deep. Little dribbles of syrup collected at the bottom and nourished colonies of flies and roaches. It should have discouraged anyone from ever drinking out of a returnable bottle.

To us, open top bins of glass bottles just sitting there in the presence of rocks was begging for a martial response. It was the Ultimate Boy Achievement. Nothing in all the world is so sweet to young boys as smashing glass. Nothing.

Yet we drew back. A meaningful smash would cause a great noise, would it not? But then Lucifer whispered that this was all the more reason to do the deed. Might we be seen? Yes, but he challenged our courage with the wily claim that fun without risk is no fun at all. Glory gathers not to the gutless.

Fear won out for a while. Those were the days when fathers could beat the crap out of you with a belt and get by with it. The whole adult community would approve. The word “stripling” to describe a boy meant something totally different to a Southern dad in 1966 than it did to King James in 1611.

But eventually the temptation overcame the fear. On a muggy summer’s day, my evil cousin Jimmy West and I ascended the ridge of slate, loosened a rock the size of a toilet, and shunning all hesitation lest we fail, heaved it over the side of the mountain. It was a direct hit, though we did not see it. Jimmy and I were already running down the back side of the ridge in full afterburner at Warp Factor Ten.

We heard it, though, the juggernaut sound of stone bashing glass all the way to the bottom of the bin. The sound startled us into laughing so hard we collapsed, went ataxic and couldn’t run. Staggering into a little patch of bushes and muscadine vines, we laughed until bladder control failed and we gasped for air with our sides cramping for relief.

Relief came in the form of a rising fear of discovery. Five minutes later nothing was funny at all.

We took the long way back to my grandmother’s house. The adults were all in the kitchen, talking, relaxed, one or two casually tapping ash from a cigarette, acting like nothing had happened. Jimmy and I strained to look normal. Mostly we avoided eye contact with anybody over 12. Once Jimmy realized word hadn’t reached the grown-ups, he didn’t care any more. His dad was in the Air Force, and they were headed back to Michigan and wouldn’t return for a year or two. But I wasn’t so far away and would be returning sooner. So I had to worry about it for a while.

My parents never did find out about it, though. Till now.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

But the news from North Carolina is a mixture of good and bad. The good news is that gay marriage lost, lost again, and lost big, as usual. Why any of that might be bad needs some explaining.

Why have government at all?

Liberals and their secular constituents see government as the tool for empowering them to boss the rest of us around. In this case, they want to order everyone to show respect for homosexuals.  Typically, liberals are opposed by libertarians and conservatives, a good many of the latter being Christians.

Libertarians and conservative Christians share a lot of political common ground, but here’s an instance where they differ based on what they believe is government’s most fundamental reason for being.

Libertarians view government as a human contract arising out of the social need to keep people from hurting one another. Their basic rule is that government should curtail human activity only if the activity will deprive somebody of life, liberty, or property, either by fraud or force, or when there’s conspiracy to do that.  Truth is, if our government would do this, it would be a drastically better government than it is.  As far as that goes, I’d gladly vote for most libertarians.

Christians view government as a divine obligation ordained primarily for the purpose of avenging crimes against persons and property. In practical effect for most matters, these two positions end up being nearly indistinguishable.

Where things go different in a big way

Conservative Christians and libertarians disagree mostly about matters concerning the treatment of the human body.  Since government is ordained of God and its founding text in (Gen 9:6) finds obligation rooted in the imago dei, the Christian argues that there are certain moral things government may not permit.  To pick an easy example, government may not permit people to have sex with animals.  Libertarians have a tough choice on this one.  They must either revise their basic principles to address this, or else they must shrug it off and say that sex with animals is simply none of society’s business and hence is off limits to government interference.  To a Christian, this is an obvious matter where government can and must legislate morality.  God doesn’t want people doing this because he doesn’t want his image polluted by people committing perversion, and government is his instrument for using force to prevent it.

You could easily assemble a list of other immoral acts where the Christian answer is easy to justify but where our libertarian friends would be forced either to revise their principles or else squirm like crazy.  If a family member dies of natural causes, can relatives cannibalize the body?  Some primitive societies do this.  Why not ours?  Or suppose a woman has been sterilized by a complete hysterectomy such there is no possibility of her conceiving or carrying a child; could she then marry her son, brother, or father?  And of course there are other matters of public order and decency such as outlawing, ahem, reproductive acts or bathroom functions in public.  Even in private, what about that recent Moslem thing involving sex with the dead?  All of these are matters where the libertarian knows what is right but can’t accommodate it by his godless principles.

So now back to gay marriage…

And that brings us back to the matter of homosexuals getting married.  The libertarians ask why this is a big deal since, they rightly argue, nobody’s life, liberty, or property are harmed by it.

The Christian argues two things in return: First, we argue that our libertarian friends are mistaken on their basic principles.  Government is more than a social contract.  It is a divine obligation, so life, liberty, and property are not the only things government is obliged to protect. There are other matters, and we all recognize this to some extent, where government ought to act, and some of these are matters of public decency where the government’s failure to act would undermine its own legitimacy.  Second, since some standards of decency will be enforced, the libertarian has a sort of three-way Hobson’s choice to make.  Either he brings these standards out of a dictator’s head, or he punts the question to a majority rule, or he adopts some sort of outside moral standard by which things can be judged.

Both of the first two options presuppose a government that can impose its own morals upon the populace at will.  Though liberals fervently believe this, it’s inimical to both libertarianism and genuine conservatism.  Moreover, both of those options are subject to a moment’s whimsy regardless of whether the whim is in the mind of the dictator or a whipped-up mob.  For libertarians to have any hope at all, therefore, something has to limit government.

The third option sits squarely the Christian camp where the libertarian discovers (perhaps to his surprise) the only true and lasting basis for limiting government power.  Unhappily for him, though, it involves the government in some moral decisions, although I should add that limiting the power of government is itself a moral decision.

Now for the bad news

I previously said the North Carolina vote is good news and bad news.  It’s good news in that not all Christian feeling in the population is entirely gone.  So yay for the nay on gays.  People know what homosexuality is, and they’re against it, and they’re against allowing homosexuals to coopt the apparatus of government into forcing the rest of us into a show of respect for it.

But the news is bad in that the whole basis for voting on it in the first place shows a dangerous lack of understanding about what the best kind of government really is.  It is an agent ordained of God for a very limited set of purposes.  North Carolina has acted correctly on the morality question, and thank God for that.  But the victory won’t last long unless there’s a real resurgence of understanding about why we have such a thing as government in the first place.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

The Bible focuses a great deal of attention on what kind of people we are, quite a bit less on the greatness of our attainments. That’s not to say that great works, humanly speaking, don’t matter. I’m glad America has tall buildings, personal computers, and nuclear power plants. Having lived in some places that were not nice at all, I often thank God for the fact that my family has a nice house to live in.

But when God judges a city, it’s on the basis of moral character, not secular achievement. There are little towns he will exalt and great cities he will condemn. Many that are last shall be first, and first that shall be last. Yes? And won’t the hills be brought low and the valleys exalted before him?

So when setting goals, a Christian man should ask, Goals for what? A wise person realizes he needs good goals for his goals.

I knew a man who set goals for his finances but none for his family, another who set goals for his early retirement but expressed no concern for how he did his work. Trash businessmen who cheat to get ahead are a cliche’ because they set goals for getting your money without setting any goals for their own integrity.

What, then, about the ordinary sinner who just doesn’t get his priorities right? He thinks hard work is a virtue, failing to realize that it’s good to be zealous, but only about good things.

What’s the profit, said the Master, if you gain the whole world but lose your soul? A Christian man should set good goals for his goals. It’s one thing to be an expert marksman, quite another to take aim at the right target. Or to borrow from one of the internet’s best writers (Doug Wilson), it doesn’t matter how much horsepower you have under the hood if you’re on the wrong road.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

1) Gas is cheap right now.
2) Gas plants are easiest to site and build.
3) Gas plants require the fewest personnel to operate.
4) Gas plants are the easiest, quickest way to meet the emissions limits imposed by hard-left radicals in the EPA.

The problem comes later down the road. Consider this fact about Minnesota’s large, coal-fired Sherbune County Power Station. This plant produces 2400 MW of electric power, or about 3.2 million horsepower — which is a huge amount of power.

If Sherco were converted to a high efficiency natural gas powered plant, the natural gas consumption would be 80 percent of that used by all Minnesota customers combined.

This why Mr. Obama and his fascist economy planners are such a threat to the energy security of America.  They appear to be sincerely uncomprehending of the dangers inherent in sourcing too much of our electric power from any one kind of fuel. To modify the Sherco plant to burn gas instead of coal would mean effectively doubling the amount of gas being piped there.  That’s a big change for matters on the industrial scale.  Could the existing pipelines and distribution system handle such a change?

Plus, there’s a vulnerability. If there were an interruption to Minnesota’s supply of natural gas, not only would the land of 10,000 frozen lakes lose its vital gas heating, the same interruption would disable much of its electric power also.

For a hundred years, the electric power industry has wisely persuaded local regulators concerning the importance of maintaining a diverse fuel supply tailored to each particular region of the country.  The Obama administration’s top-down approach is not only bringing destruction of the American-made coal industry, but is aggressively foisting unprecedented risks upon the stability of the electric power grid.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

It is impossible to mock leftards beyond the deeds they do themselves.  To say it “defies caricature” is literally true, but it somehow feels like it’s falling short.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

In truth, the Obama administration has been a drain on America. The economy is still slogging through the Great Recession, and now the feds appear to be jiggering the numbers to cover that up. There are literally millions fewer people working than when Mr. Obama took office, yet we’re being told the economy is on the uptick. Not one person in America believes this, not even the people saying it.

The regulatory establishment appears to be headhunting, and people in industry loathe being shoved around under a presumption of guilt. A high ranking EPA official who boasts of abusing his power by “crucifying” people is just the tip of the iceberg.

Regulation has always been a business risk, but businesses now must view government as an outright threat, one they cannot manage. Businessmen didn’t like hearing Mr. Obama refer to them as “the enemy,” and they didn’t like it again when Mr. Obama left the insult lying there without a retraction or even an explanation. Job creators don’t like being demonized for being successful, and they angrily resent having to defend freedom against Marxism. Earners and savers don’t like living under the constant threat that an unnoticed wording tweak on page 2500 of an obscure omnibus bill will result in their property being confiscated and handed over to the “Occupy” mobs. So businesses won’t hire until the threat diminishes, and investors are sitting on the sidelines.

The entire energy sector is under sustained attack. Gasoline costs twice what it did when Mr. Obama took office. Obama said he’d regulate the coal industry into oblivion, and he’s doing it, permanently annihilating ten thousands of jobs. Green-gadget energy companies like Solyndra are walking away from hundreds of millions in bad debts with scant accountability. New efforts at domestic energy production are getting “slow walked” to death by regulators.

The Keystone pipeline was first rejected, then after a political firestorm, a fraction of it was approved in a cynical political ruse designed to ensure Canadian oil could never actually reach Gulf coast refineries through a pipe. Gigantic swaths of federal land still cannot be accessed for energy exploration or extraction. Meanwhile, another military build-up is underway in the Middle East to protect our access to overpriced oil drawn from the sands of terrorists. Voters don’t understand everything about all that, but they don’t like the parts they do understand.

And voters don’t like being pushed into tiny, unsafe cars to save gas which has been made scarce on purpose, or battery-powered cars that can’t make it to work and back on one charge. They didn’t like it when the government bought General Motors, and they didn’t like it again when the government regulators attacked GM’s competition, Toyota, for what later turned out to be car owners’ mistakes. They still don’t like the government subsidizing cars nobody wants to buy.

ObamaCare is disapproved by a lopsided majority, and the more people learn, the less they like. Voters didn’t like it when ObamaCare was passed, didn’t like how it was passed, didn’t like it when the administration duped Congressman Bart Stupak into voting for it, didn’t like it when it abortion funding got in there anyway, didn’t like it when a health care bill required thousands of new IRS agents, and they didn’t like it when voters got the bum’s rush for asking what was in the 2700-page bill and were told it had to be passed before they could find out. And most recently, they didn’t like it when “constitutional scholar” Obama said the “unelected” Supreme Court would commit an unprecedented act if it found ObamaCare’s individual mandate unconstitutional.

Obama’s signature fiscal accomplishment is his trillion-dollar giveaways called “stimulus packages.” These are deeply unpopular because 1) they went to reckless, irresponsible rich men, 2) some of whom turned out to be heads of foreign banks, 3) who are now unable to tell us where the money went, and 4) the giveaways did more harm than good.

Not every voter is on familiar ground talking in trillions, but voters do understand, and don’t like it, that a two-trillion dollar package amounts to $6500 for every man, woman, boy and girl in America. If you have a family of four, you now owe $26,000 to pay for Obama’s gift to the richest wastrels on the planet. And voters know another Obama administration will mean more of these giveaways are yet to come. And tax payers know the money will never return to them. They didn’t like being told the banks were “too big to fail,” and they don’t like the fact that the administration has neglected its anti-trust duty to break up these monopolistic banking behemoths into smaller, safer institutions.

The “climate change” hoax, which underpins Obama’s radical environmental agenda, has been widely discredited by successive revelations of ClimateGate. Voters aren’t happy that Obama’s federal minions insist on using climate change as an excuse to strangle industry and kill off thousands of jobs with stupid excuses such as solar panels in the Mojave desert interfering with frogs mating. They aren’t happy with the administration’s apparent failure to understand that these industries they’re killing are staffed with hard-working, tax-paying American people.

Voters never cared much about Gitmo, but they heard the president swear to close it, and then they watched him break his word.

Americans were generally proud of NASA’s manned space program, so they aren’t happy that Obama has overseen its demise and let thousands of the world’s best technical personnel get kicked to the curb.

The Obama administration has been treating the voting public as if they’re stupid. And truth be told, there are lots of things the voters don’t understand about this administration.

They don’t understand why, after three years in office, so much of everything is still George W. Bush’s fault. In light of the horrific mess the president claims to have inherited from Mr. Bush, they don’t understand Obama’s relentless golf schedule. They don’t understand his wife’s relentless and extravagant vacationing. They don’t understand why the taxpayers have to pick up the tab for her solo flights on Air Force jets. They don’t understand the massive entourages and traffic-snarling caravans of black SUVs that accompany the Obamas everywhere they go.

While voters don’t mind paying temporary unemployment to a neighbor in distress, they don’t understand unemployment lasting year after year. They don’t understand why the feds will make house payments for overextended deadbeats while responsible citizens have to pay their own way.

Voters don’t understand why the feds refuse to stop illegal immigration, and they further don’t understand why the feds are suing Arizona for trying to plug the gap. Nor do voters understand why illegals can walk freely into America while citizens get routinely search-raped by the TSA.

And people don’t understand why gangsters in paramilitary garb, armed with clubs, can be filmed at a polling place physically threatening voters without ever being prosecuted, yet requiring a voter ID is a civil rights violation.

They don’t understand why men who work for Obama can supply guns to Mexican drug lords and not have to answer for the lives of the agents killed by those same guns.

Voters don’t understand the GSA partying in Las Vegas. They don’t understand the Secret Service partying in Colombia. A good many of them are struggling to understand the Obamas partying with the lapdog press in Washington.

And voters don’t understand why the Obama administration cannot muster the leadership needed to produce a budget. Voters don’t understand these gargantuan spending deficits, the even more gargantuan pile of federal debt, nor the breezy complacency of Mr. Obama and the entire federal establishment in the face of a looming economic disaster that could literally bring down the nation. Despite the debt, voters don’t mind extending a hand to the poor, but they don’t understand why they feds don’t know any better than to hand out cash.

And even with the small matters, voters lack understanding. With everything else that was going on at the time, voters failed to grasp why it suddenly became urgent to force employers to pay for workers’ birth control. And regular people who live in the real world didn’t understand why the government’s discussion was all about “access” to birth control — as if anyone was ever actually denied access — while failing to note that birth control pills are available at Wal-Mart for $4 per month.

Most of all, voters don’t understand why the president doesn’t know that the buck stops at his desk.

So in the face of three years of this kind of performance, what’s there to talk about in a presidential campaign?

Well, we can’t show you any proof of it because showing pictures would be “spiking the ball.” But take our word for it, Osama Bin Laden is still freaken’ dead. Wahoo.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

There is hardly a cleaner industrial enterprise than shipping bulk materials by rail or barge. Nevertheless, a full environmental impact review could take years to complete, particularly if Kitzhaber can glom onto the climate change canard. Delay, of course, is all that’s necessary to slay any production industry. The coal industry has mines, men, and machines which must be paid for continuously. All Kitzhaber needs to score a kill is to maneuver one bureaucrat into standing on their oxygen hose long enough for the coal miners to die. Once dead, they’ll stay dead.

This shows once again that barbarians can destroy in a day a civilization that took centuries to build. Only now, America’s barbarians have advanced degrees and run the government.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com

One of the things pre-teens learn is that when the conversation wanders away from your pet topic, you should drop the subject even if you wanted to talk about it some more. Rather never got that.

Only a few people with Bush Derangement Syndrome believed him when the accusation was first made. After Little Green Footballs exposed the deception, nobody will ever believe him again on anything. A superstar journalist became a credibility amputee (both legs above the knee). Now he’s just another member of the leftstream media.

otherbrothersteve@gmail.com