Joseph Farah does have a habit of recycling his old columns, and he has essentially done that twice in the last two days.
Farah’s July 29 column is a retread of a rant from June complaining about the Southern Policy Law Center. This time, it appears to have been spawned by the SPLC hurting Farah’s feelings by accurately describing WND as having “grown its influence by peddling paranoia about the president’s birth certificate and AmeriCorps’ ‘domestic armies.'” At no point does Farah challenge the description — thus conceding its accuracy — but rather calls it an “epithet” and was off on yet another anti-SPLC rant about how it’s purportedly “raising hundreds of millions of dollars through fanning the flames of phantom threats posed almost exclusively by those who love America and its Constitution.”
Farah goes on to complain that SPLC chief Morris Dees “pays himself more than $280,000 a year from the ‘charity.'” How much does Farah pay himself to run WND? That’s not an answer we’re likely to get voluntarily. Nevertheless, Farah may as well be talking about himself when he writes, “Fear-mongering is what the SPLC is all about – and turning it into a profit center.”
Farah’s July 31 column finds him still complaining that Rick Perry doesn’t hate gays as much as he does, which is what Farah was doing three days earlier, even repeating his earlier assertion that gay marriage is grounds for secession:
In case you missed his remarks to Republican fat cats in Aspen, Perry said: “Our friends in New York six weeks ago passed a statute that said marriage can be between two people of the same sex. And you know what? That’s New York, and that’s their business, and that’s fine with me. That is their call. If you believe in the 10th Amendment, stay out of their business.”
So, let me get this straight, Gov. Perry. If the New York state legislature decided to legalize polygamy or to eliminate the age of consent so pedophiles could legally target “consenting” children, you would have no problem with that?
I assume your 10th Amendment-trumps-all position would be the same?
By the way, this is not just some hyper-theoretical question. You might recall, Gov. Perry, that Utah couldn’t join the Union until it outlawed polygamy – the 10th Amendment notwithstanding. Do you think a territory that permitted same-sex marriages even 20 years ago would have been admitted into the national covenant?
Of course not. You know that, and I know that.
In fact, when an existing member of the Union redefines a sacred, 6,000-year-old cultural institution like marriage, the very building block of civilization, it is an implicit violation of the values of that national covenant. It’s ground for the national political equivalent of divorce.
Farah repeated another old complaint against Perry for “his advocacy of mandatory HPV vaccines for children.” As before, Farah does not explain why it’s a bad thing to vaccinate children against a certain type of cancer.