Why big government isn't the best answer to nearly anything.

What gay marriage in Idaho, the nationwide COVID pandemic, and fires in California can teach us about what comes of expecting government to do everything for us.

A not-so-uncommon view from my pasture each summer. Don’t get me going about government responses to fighting wildfires.

Gay marriage

This past week, Idaho lawmakers advanced a resolution out of committee rejecting the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling to nationally legalize same-sex marriage. In a 13-2 vote, the House State Affairs Committee voted in favor of House Joint Memorial 1, which calls upon the United States Supreme Court to reverse Obergefell v. Hodges, which would have the effect of restoring the definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman.

The resolution, which refers to Obergefell as an “illegitimate overreach” of authority as well as an “inversion of the original meaning of liberty” as prescribed by the U.S. Constitution, now advances to the full Idaho House for a vote.

As one might imagine, this was not without controversy. The committee hearing kicked off with a mass protest from audience members. In an emotionally charged setting, hundreds testified both for and against the resolution. Those in favor cited federalism and states rights as their main issues Those against cited personal experiences with anti-gay bigotry. As has become the norm in modern politics, each side leveled various accusations regarding Jim Crow, bigotry, morality, immorality, and Article Six at the other, while both sides claimed certitude in occupying the legal and moral high ground. Every newspaper in Idaho with a comments section is currently watching it burn like an out-of-control wildfire.

This should be no surprise, as it is the nearly inevitable result when advocates for a cause become frustrated with the slow pace of winning hearts and minds the hard way and hit upon enlisting government to get out of its lane and tilt the scales on their behalf. It’s all good until it’s not.

Our federal government has almost no business intruding in the private affairs of U.S. citizens in ways that have come to pass. Liberating ourselves from oppressive government is what this country is all about. Government at all levels has almost no business in yours, mine, or anyone else’s personal affairs. Yet various government entities have come to exert a great deal of intrusive leverage into our daily lives because we’ve allowed it to happen. Many people have lazily resorted to encouraging the government to use its power to force change instead of putting in the hard work of changing society through debate, example, and persuasion. That’s both antithetical to freedom and a dangerous path to follow, as progressives may be about to discover in the next few years.

Here’s the problem with sacrificing liberty for convenience to get what you want. Getting the government to weigh in on your side in private matters is all good when the prevailing winds are at your back, like they have been for progressive causes now for decades. But what goes around comes around. When you are on the wrong side of shifting winds and the government is involved, it just might suck to be you. That’s the left right now.

The government has no business determining who you marry or sanctioning any union between people. How you build a family is up to you. If you can find someone out there who’s genuinely loyal, faithful, loving, and really cares about you, that’s my definition of a miracle. Besides, who the hell am I or anyone else to get in the middle of your personal choices? That’s why they are called personal choices. The government has some interest in civil unions (as in helping adjudicate divorce), but that should be about it. As long as you take care of your children and obey other laws, you build your family the way you see fit. Anyone who doesn’t like it can go pound sand.

The civil libertarian view should have prevailed in the original fight over gay marriage all those years ago. Forget about gay marriage, straight marriage, polygamy, all of it. It’s really no one else’s business who you form a family with. Marriage, civil unions, or whatever you want to call them should be civil matters over which the government exercises absolutely the minimal amount of interest and authority. For the rest of us, a free society necessitates a certain degree of live and let live. Keep the government out of it.

But that’s not what happened here. So we now have this move to ignore or repeal Obergefell, enabled by the fact that gay marriage was achieved by getting the government involved where they ought not be. And while I think that this particular attempt in Idaho is going nowhere, it won’t be the last.

The lesson? Well, when it comes to using the power of the state to advance a social cause, as progressives have done for decades, be very careful what you wish for.

COVID

This week, the C.I.A., which has said for five years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the virus that caused the COVID pandemic emerged zoonotically from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, issued a new assessment. This new assessment is not based on new data. It’s a reassessment of existing data involving a closer look at biosecurity issues at the W.I.V.

The C.I.A. now joins nearly every other major American intelligence agency in favoring the lab leak theory, albeit with varying degrees of confidence. The U.S. Department of Energy has concluded for some time that the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic, more likely than not, originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, rather than in wet markets many kilometers away. The DOE conclusion aligns with the FBI’s longstanding assessment along with those of many scientists.

But back during the height of the pandemic, the zoonotic spillover hypothesis was such an article of faith that it might as well have been handed straight to Moses from a burning bush. Anyone who dared question this narrative, regardless of qualifications, was labeled a tinfoil-hat-wearing kook, if not a racist. This was, as it turns out, mostly at the behest of the American government, which leaned on sympathetic media and social media companies to do their bidding. Ignoring the First Amendment in order to control “disinformation” was de rigueur. Biden, Fauci, and their stooges got away with it too.

This should have never been. The zoonotic hypothesis of the origin of COVID-19 was never any better than the idea that it might have originated in a laboratory. The problem with zoonotic spillover is that coronaviruses, which originate in bats, are not transmitted directly to humans; an intermediary species is required. In this particular case, the intermediary was thought to be a small mammal known as a pangolin. Zoonosis is an entirely plausible idea with well-documented antecedents. The problem is that in the case of the coronavirus behind COVID-19, no intermediary species was ever identified (and not for lack of looking). In the absence of an intermediary, the zoonotic spillover hypothesis is no better than speculation.

So the problem with the favoring of the zoonotic spillover hypothesis over the lab leak hypothesis is that there was never any good evidence for the former. None. That's a major problem if the hypothesis of zoonotic origin is the hill that you intend to die on. Sans any evidence, the zoonotic hypothesis is no better than the lab-leak hypothesis. In fact, it was worse given the totality of circumstances. This was a spectacular failure of science and government policy.

The reasons for these spectacular failures aren’t overly difficult to discern. A critical mass of those involved in the scientific examination of the origins of COVID-19 (and crafting our response to it) were either more concerned with ideology than science (woke and politically biased), had extreme conflicts of interest, were incompetent, or were too cowardly to challenge the developing orthodoxy. In some cases, all of the above. Almost no one in our government or it’s appendages covered themselves with any glory during the pandemic.

But that was then; this is now. In the now we have a Friday afternoon announcement that the C.I.A. has finally lived up to the “I” in it’s acronym, greeted with a collective yawn. The lack of official curiosity about all of this is disconcerting. But the why of it isn't all that difficult. It sure looks to me like America funded, through a non-profit, research for manipulating pathogens that were banned in this country in a Chinese lab with abysmal biosecurity measures. It appears that in doing so, we may have aided and abetted the Chinese in creating the pandemic. Then, our government acted on the worst progressive totalitarian impulses, using the disinformation they produced to launch an unprecedented assault on civil liberties and conceal their actions. No wonder Anthony Fauci got a preemptive pardon from the Biden administration.

California Fires

The fires still sweeping through LA are, in my view, among the best examples of the unbearable incompetence of government that exists. What fascinates me right now is the rapid shift in the narrative, even in deep blue California, from it was climate change, an exceedingly rare confluence of weather events, unforeseen circumstances, MAGA, and the dog eating our homework, to gross incompetence. Even though the origins of the fires are complex, the latter explanation is much closer to the truth.

While it's true that not much can be done to stop the Santa Ana Winds, prevent the whipsaw effects of drought and heavy rains, or change the combustible composition of native chaparral, these are all known issues. It’s the job of public officials to deal with these hazards. That’s precisely what Californians tax dollars are supposed to pay for. Fires are bound to occur in Southern California, but they don’t have to be this catastrophic. How much of this is rank incompetence and how much is fealty to flawed ideology is anyone’s guess. But there are some signs.

Janisse Quiñones, the new head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, earns $750,000 a year and can’t explain why the Santa Ynez Reservoir in Pacific Palisades, the second largest in the LA basin, was offline and empty during fire season. Other officials warned of failing water systems in Malibu well before the Palisades fire happened. Many Golden State infrastructure projects related to water and fires that have been approved by taxpayers for years (and in some cases, decades) remain not only incomplete but unstarted due to red tape, distraction, and incompetence. This is an abject failure of government to live up to minimum basic responsibilities. There is no reasonable excuse for this.

Recently re-elected LA Mayor Karen Bass was on a junket in Ghana when the fires broke out. Bass, whose defenders claim could not have possibly anticipated such a disaster (despite the fact that fires are an annual occurrence all around the LA Basin), is the poster child for buyer’s remorse in LA. In addition to being AWOL during the initial days of the fire, there’s the $17.6 million that Bass ordered cut from this year’s LAFD budget. Back in 2020, Bass was, for a period of time, the frontrunner to be Biden’s VP. You can’t make this stuff up.

LAFD chief Kristin Crowley, who approaches firefighting through the lens of DEI, appears to finally understand that firestorms raging through your city prioritize water, fire lines, firefighters, planning, infrastructure, etc., over DEI. But it would have been much better if this epiphany had occurred much earlier in her tenure.

Denouement

I could write another 10,000 words to address the issue of big government malfeasance and incompetence, but there's only so much negative energy I can manage on a Saturday. This is modern big government. You have about as much chance of finding a competent, fair-minded government official when you need one as I do of walking outside right now and jumping from my driveway to the moon in my skivvies and Red Ball Jets. Why would anyone hand government officials any more responsibility than absolutely necessary given their track records? Are these the people you really want dictating how you are going to respond to a major public health crisis or who you get to marry?

Not me.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com