Pubdate: Wed, 08 Jan 2014
Source: Tulsa World (OK)
Copyright: 2014 Creators Syndicate
Contact:  http://www.tulsaworld.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/463
Author: Patrick Buchanan, Creators Syndicate

REVOLUTION: IS AMERICA GOING TO POT?

Smoking Marlboros is now forbidden in Irish bars in New York City. 
But buying, selling, and smoking marijuana is legal in Colorado.

It doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. 
But where are we going? One certain result of the legalization of 
marijuana is that there are going to be more potheads, more dropouts, 
and more deaths on highways from those high or stoned - and more rehab centers.

Coloradans may relish the freedom they have voted for themselves. But 
the costs will be borne by society and the families of future victims 
of potheads behind the wheel.

So it has been with alcohol. All of us can recall classmates injured 
and dead in auto accidents, jobs lost by friends, lives destroyed, 
and families smashed because of booze.

Just as beer opens the door for the young to bourbon, scotch, gin and 
vodka, marijuana is the gateway drug, the escalator drug, to cocaine 
and heroin.

And if marijuana sales bring in the revenue Colorado envisions, other 
states will follow suit, and some state will become the first to 
decriminalize cocaine.

Undeniably, the cultural revolution is gaining converts and picking 
up speed. The haste with which some Republicans are deep-sixing the 
social issues to focus on tax cuts testifies to this.

It was half a century ago that pot first began to replace alcohol as 
the drug of choice for baby boomers arriving on campuses in 1964. Yet 
not until the boomers began moving onto Social Security rolls did the 
first state legalize marijuana for personal enjoyment.

Yet, as with same-sex marriage, now legal in 16 or 17 states, the 
legalization of marijuana appears to be an idea whose time has come.

What does this tell us about our country?

America is not only diversifying racially, ethnically and religiously 
as a result of continuous mass immigration, legal and illegal. We are 
diversifying, and disuniting morally, culturally and politically.

Not so very long ago, the U.S. government enforced Prohibition, 
pronounced smoking a menace to the national health, punished gambling 
as organized crime and declared a war on drugs.

Now the government has shouldered aside organized crime to take over, 
tax and regulate the rackets. At federal, state and local levels, the 
government rakes off vast revenues from taxes on booze, bars, 
cigarettes, casinos and, coming soon, online poker.

Government lotteries have crowded out the old numbers racket.

In the 1965 decision Griswold v. Connecticut, the Warren Court 
discovered a constitutional right to privacy and overturned a state 
law prohibiting the sale of contraceptives.

Abortion and homosexuality used to be scandalous. Now they are 
constitutional rights and popular social causes, and same-sex 
marriage is the civil rights cause of the 21st century.

As Justice Antonin Scalia noted, if tradition, religious beliefs or a 
community animus against conduct is insufficient to restrict private 
behavior, upon what legal ground do we stand upon to outlaw polygamy, 
adult incest or prostitution?

Yet traditional America is not rolling over and playing dead.

"Abortion rights" face new restrictions in state after state, as a 
new generation appears more prolife than its parents.

And as the A&E network discovered when it sought to suspend "Duck 
Dynasty" patriarch Phil Robertson for his biblical reflections, the 
silent majority remains faithful to the traditional morality.

And while a libertarianism of the left appears ascendant, there is 
also a rising and militant libertarianism of the right.

We have seen it manifest in the explosion of "stand your ground" and 
concealed-carry laws, opposition to federal background checks for gun 
owners, and ferocious resistance to the outlawing of assault rifles 
and 30-round magazines.

The triumph of the sexual revolution has not been without its 
casualties, e.g., an endless supply of new HIV/AIDS and STD cases and 
a national illegitimacy rate of more than 40 percent of all births.

And the correlation between that illegitimacy rate and the dropout 
rate, drug use rate, delinquency rate, crime rate, and incarceration 
rate is absolute.

Undeniably, the claims of the individual to autonomy and freedom 
appear triumphant over the claims of community. The clamor of me is 
prevailing over the claims of us.

But in yielding, America has not only tossed overboard the moral 
compass that guided us for two centuries. We no longer even agree on 
what is "True North" anymore.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom