{"id":6473,"date":"2015-06-30T19:20:04","date_gmt":"2015-06-30T23:20:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=6473"},"modified":"2015-06-30T19:20:04","modified_gmt":"2015-06-30T23:20:04","slug":"that-piece-of-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=6473","title":{"rendered":"That &#8220;piece of paper&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/GJOYAINT66Y\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>I offer the song above<\/strong>, dredged from my college years, as documentary evidence of the facts I\u2019m about to tell you. Because you won\u2019t hear about this much of anywhere else. This is Lost History, things that happened but are now officially non-things, like Stalin\u2019s old revolutionary comrades and Hillary Clinton\u2019s emails.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA piece of paper.\u201d \u201cJust a piece of paper.\u201d It\u2019s a phrase I first recall encountering in an article about an actress in a magazine (<em>Life<\/em>, perhaps), back when I was a kid. \u201cWhy haven\u2019t we gotten married?\u201d she replied to a question about her love life. \u201cWhat\u2019s a marriage license? Just a vulgar piece of paper.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m sure she wasn\u2019t the first to put it that way, but after that I noticed that I encountered it again and again. Actors said it. Writers. Rock musicians. Poets. Intellectuals. \u201cWhat\u2019s a marriage license? Just a vulgar piece of paper. What does such an object have to do with real love?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This form of expression stopped appearing, I think, sometime in the 1980s. It\u2019s clear now what happened. The Big Heads of the left realized that the promotion of homosexual marriage would be a splendid hammer with which to bash traditional Christian sexual morality.<\/p>\n<p>And suddenly the cry was no longer, \u201cIt\u2019s just a piece of paper!\u201d but \u201cIt\u2019s the Most Important Piece of Paper in the universe! Anyone prevented from having this wonderful, transcendent piece of paper has been denied their deepest human right!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This sudden dialectical U-turn was not accompanied by any admission that they might have been wrong in their old position. No, the old slogan just went down the memory hole, along with Pres. Obama\u2019s college records and Che Guevara\u2019s murders. \u201cOceania has always been at war with Eastasia, and progressives have always revered marriage.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Because it\u2019s all about the political narrative. And the narrative runs in whatever channel will best serve the Cause.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I offer the song above, dredged from my college years, as documentary evidence of the facts I\u2019m about to tell you. Because you won\u2019t hear about this much of anywhere else. This is Lost History, things that happened but are now officially non-things, like Stalin\u2019s old revolutionary comrades and Hillary Clinton\u2019s emails. \u201cA piece of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=6473\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">That &#8220;piece of paper&#8221;<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9,14],"tags":[71,1073,1231,1775],"class_list":["post-6473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-religion","tag-a-piece-of-paper","tag-gladstone","tag-homosexuality","tag-marriage"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}