Chad’s Morning Brief: The US Chamber of Commerce Wants Amnesty Passed Now, Live and Let Live Laws, and Other Top Stories
Here is your Morning Brief for the morning of February 25, 2014. Give me your feedback below and tune in to The Chad Hasty Show for these and many more topics from 8:30 to 11am. Remember, you can listen online at KFYO.com or on your iPhone/Android with the radioPup App.
Amnesty Now
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants amnesty now. Why? According to Breitbart, the President of the Chamber fears that in 2 or 4 years, the political climate won't be the same.
Saying the political landscape will not be more conducive to amnesty legislation in two or four years, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue wrote on Monday that immigration reform must happen now.
Donohue has previously said that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would "pull out all the stops" to get immigration reform this year. The group reportedly plans to spend $50 million to blunt the influence of the Tea Party, largely because it opposes amnesty, and millions more to push for immigration reform legislation that the Congressional Budget Office has said would lower the wages of American workers.
Donohue wrote that "a system in which more than 11 million undocumented immigrants are living and working in our communities in de facto amnesty is indefensible" and claimed that "immigrants do not typically compete with Americans for jobs" and "serve as a complement to U.S.-born workers and can help fill labor shortages across the skill spectrum and in key sectors."
He claims that "support for reform has never been stronger" even though Gallup found that only three percent of Americans view it as a top issue. He also said amnesty proponents "include lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, as well as labor, business, law enforcement, ethnic organizations, religious groups, and the high-tech industry" without mentioning that many of these groups are front-groups supported by left-wing donors like George Soros.
"There will never be a perfect time for reform. The political landscape isn’t going to be any more conducive to reform in two years or four years," he wrote. "The case for immigration reform is clear. The need is undeniable. The time is now."
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) has repeatedly emphasized that big-business interests want immigration reform legislation to get cheaper labor at the expense of the those in America's working class that are struggling in Obama's economy.
“House leaders should support—not ignore—the immigration officers pleading for help,” Sessions has said. “They should stand with—not against—unemployed American workers. And they should expose—not join—the president’s campaign to pass an immigration plan that will hollow out our shrinking middle class.”
Amnesty proponents have a sense of urgency after momentum for the House GOP leadership's "immigration principles" stalled after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) blasted it as amnesty. Democrats who want amnesty like Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have said that this year is the last chance for amnesty legislation to pass.
One has wonder how many small business owners out there, that are part of the Chamber of Commerce, feel comfortable with the Chamber lobbying for amnesty.
Live and Let Live
Arizona's state legislature has adopted a new law in response to the numerous examples of bakers, photographers, and other wedding-related businesses that have been sued because they don't want to participate in a same-sex wedding. The Editors at National Review have an excellent piece that should be read by all.
In response to a number of lawsuits in which such providers of wedding-related services as bakers and photographers have been threatened with conscription into participating in same-sex ceremonies to which they object on religious grounds, Arizona’s state legislature has adopted a law under which businesses that decline to provide such services will enjoy protection.
It is perhaps unfortunate that it has come to this, but organized homosexuality, a phenomenon that is more about progressive pieties than gay rights per se, remains on the permanent offensive in the culture wars. Live-and-let-live is a creed that the gay lobby specifically rejects: The owner of the Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado was threatened with a year in jail for declining to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. New Mexico photographer Elaine Huguenin was similarly threatened for declining to photograph a same-sex wedding. It is worth noting that neither the baker nor the photographer categorically refuses services to homosexuals; birthday cakes and portrait photography were both on the menu. The business owners specifically objected to participating in a civic/religious ceremony that violated their own consciences.
And the so-called liberals answer: “To hell with your consciences.”
In T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, the nature of totalitarianism is captured in the motto “Everything not forbidden is compulsory.” Gay marriage has made the sprint from forbidden to compulsory in record time; the day before yesterday, a homosexual marriage was a legal impossibility — and today it is a crime to sit one out.
Gay Americans, like many members of minority groups, are poorly served by their self-styled leadership. Like feminists and union bosses, the leaders of the nation’s gay organizations suffer from oppression envy, likening their situation to that of black Americans — as though having to find a gay-friendly wedding planner (pro tip: try swinging a dead cat) were the moral equivalent of having spent centuries in slavery and systematic oppression under Jim Crow. Their goal is not toleration or even equal rights but official victim-group status under law and in civil society, allowing them to use the courts and other means of official coercion to impose their own values upon those who hold different values.
Which is to say, what is regrettable here is not Arizona’s law but the machinations that have made it necessary. It seems unlikely that those religious bakers and photographers were chosen at random, or that their antagonists will stop until such diversity of opinion as exists about the subject of gay marriage has been put under legal discipline.
One of the defects of our civil-rights law is the overly broad concept of “public accommodation,” which has been expanded to include virtually every business that is open to the public. But a business is not public property; it is private property. People of good will ought to allow fairly broad leeway for how people conduct their own lives and their own business — private autonomy is, after all, a large part of the case for gay rights. If gay leaders were willing to extend to those who do not share their views the same tolerance to which they feel themselves entitled, then a modus vivendi could emerge through the healthful operations of civil society. Those who do not wish to participate in gay weddings or other events could decline to do so — and those who believe them to be bigots could take their business elsewhere. In fact, one protester of the Arizona law has precisely the right idea: Outraged by the passage of this bill, a pizza-shop operator hung a sign in his door announcing that members of the state legislature were personae non gratae in his establishment. That, and not the micromanagement of secular divines in black robes, is the way to sort out this kind of social controversy.
It is our hope that the people of Arizona will treat their gay fellow citizens with decency and respect. It also is our hope that they will be repaid in kind. Insofar as legal intervention is required in the matter, the need for legislative preemption of judicial coercion is an unhappy fact, and the Arizona legislature is right to act on it.
Thoughts?
Other Top Stories:
These and many more topics coming up on today’s edition of The Chad Hasty Show. Tune in mornings 8:30-11am on News/Talk 790 KFYO, streaming online at kfyo.com, and now on your iPhone and Android device with the radioPup App. All guest interviews can be heard online in our podcast section after the show at kfyo.com.
More From News/Talk 95.1 & 790 KFYO
