Politics & Power Quote by James Inhofe

Inhofe’s line is less an argument about family than a rehearsal of an old political magic trick: turn private lives into a public bill. The phrasing “I do not think our priorities are misplaced” is a preemptive scold, designed to frame disagreement as moral confusion. He’s not just staking a position; he’s policing what counts as responsible citizenship.

The real work happens in “creating a whole new class of children.” That’s bureaucratic language (“class”) welded to panic (“whole new”), implying social engineering rather than ordinary parenting. It quietly imports the fear that LGBTQ families are an experiment with unsuspecting kids as subjects. Then comes the engineered endpoint: children who “could end up completely dependent on the State.” The conditional “could” provides legalistic cover while still planting the image of future welfare recipients. It’s a move that replaces evidence with insinuation, and it places blame not on economic structures or policy, but on the legitimacy of the marriages themselves.

The closing pivot to “taxpayers - the American people” is a classic populist merge: taxpayer as moral protagonist, the nation as the aggrieved party. It invites listeners to experience gay marriage not as a rights question but as theft-by-proxy. Contextually, this sits in the late-2000s/early-2010s culture-war playbook, when opposition to same-sex marriage increasingly leaned on “think of the children” and fiscal dread after outright moral condemnation began to sour with the broader public. The intent is to launder stigma through budget rhetoric, making discrimination sound like prudence.