Author’s Warning
THE MOST UNCOMFORTABLE CIVICS LESSON YOU WILL EVER READ
A proposal nobody has the guts to say out loud — so I will.
I have been a combat medic. I have held dying men together with my hands in Iraq. I have worked inner-city streets as a civilian paramedic at three in the morning with a vest on. I have stood in front of classrooms full of kids that the public school system already wrote off and taught them science while the rest of the world forgot they existed.
So when I say what I am about to say, understand it is coming from a man who has EARNED the right to say uncomfortable things.
Universal suffrage — the complete untethering of the vote from any obligation to the nation granting it — has helped collapse the American family. There. It is written. Come at me.
Now put down whatever you just picked up to throw at me. Because you are about to make the exact argument I am NOT making. This is not about women being inferior. It is not about race. It never was. It is about something the founders understood and we have spent a century deliberately forgetting.
The question was never ‘should women vote?’ The question nobody will ask is: what should entitle ANYONE to vote at all?
— THE HISTORY THEY STRIPPED OUT OF YOUR CIVICS CLASS —
The 19th Amendment passed in 1920. The suffragist movement that fought for it was, ironically, REPUBLICAN at its core — yes, look it up, it will ruin someone’s dinner party talking points. Susan B. Anthony would not recognize the party currently claiming her legacy. She would probably sue them.
But here is what your teacher never told you: the original structure of the American franchise was not designed around sex. It was not designed around race. It was designed around OBLIGATION to the civil body that protected you.
One vote per household. Not because women were property. Because the FAMILY was the foundational unit of the republic — one stake, one voice, one vote cast on behalf of everyone in that home bearing the consequences of how the government behaved. The philosophy was sound even where the execution was flawed. And when we corrected the flaws, we threw the philosophy out with them.
That was the mistake.
We should have expanded who could EARN the vote. Instead, we simply stopped requiring anyone to earn it at all. And then we handed it to politicians who figured out that a vote with no price tag attached is the easiest thing in the world to purchase — with someone else’s money.
— WHAT HAPPENED NEXT (THE DATA PART, BECAUSE I AM A SCIENCE TEACHER) —
Correlation is not causation. I teach this concept to teenagers. I know the difference better than most of the people who will argue with me in the comments. But a scientist does not dismiss a correlation this consistent across six consecutive decades — a scientist investigates it.
In 1960, the out-of-wedlock birth rate in America was approximately 5 percent. Today it exceeds 40 percent. In that same window, the federal government built the most sophisticated father-replacement machine in human history. Food stamps. Section 8. WIC. TANF. SNAP. The check arrives whether there is a father in the home or not. In fact — and this is the part that makes people genuinely furious — the architecture of several Great Society programs actively penalized TWO-PARENT households. If Dad was present and working, benefits were reduced or eliminated. So the government did not just offer an alternative to the father. It financially incentivized his absence.
I do not blame women for this. I blame the system. Specifically, the politicians who built that system and kept winning elections by expanding it — funded by people who had no mechanism to hold them accountable, because the people PAYING were outvoted by the people COLLECTING.
Quinn’s Law Number 22 is not subtle about what happens next: the more dependent on government people become, the more reliably they vote for whoever promises to keep the dependency funded. The system does not just survive. It BREEDS.
The government did not accidentally replace the father. It reverse-engineered the family and rebuilt it with a government check at the center. That is not policy failure. That is policy success — if your goal was a permanent voting bloc.
— THE CIVIL SERVICE QUESTION NOBODY WANTS TO ANSWER —
Here is the part of this conversation that makes people’s heads spin.
Men are still required to register for Selective Service. Not women. Men fill military combat roles in numbers that are not even close to comparable. Men die in law enforcement at dramatically higher rates. Men make up the overwhelming majority of career firefighters and urban paramedics — the ones wearing ballistic vests because the neighborhood they work in requires it. Not hospital nurses. Not clinic administrators. The people running toward the thing that is actively trying to kill them.
These people are fulfilling the STATE’S obligations. Defense. Order. Safety. The founders tied civic participation to civic contribution precisely because they understood what happens when you separate the two: people who bear none of the burden start voting to increase it on people who bear all of it.
I spent 23 years in that world. In Iraq, I plugged holes in my friends like a glorified plumber. And then I came home, took a job as a paramedic, and went back to doing the same thing in Cleveland at 0300 with because the neighborhood required it.
So yeah. I have opinions about what it should cost to vote. You will forgive me if I am not particularly moved by the argument that requiring anything at all is unreasonable.
— THE ACTUAL PROPOSAL (AND IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUR SEX OR YOUR RACE) —
Here is the framework. Four pillars. None of them involve gender. None of them involve ethnicity. Try to read all four before you compose your outraged reply.
PILLAR ONE: The government gets out of the marriage business entirely. Marriage is a sacrament — a covenant between two people before God, or before whatever they hold sacred. The state issuing a marriage license makes as much sense as the state issuing baptism certificates. What the government can legitimately do is recognize a CIVIL UNION for legal purposes. Property rights, inheritance, hospital visitation, tax filing status — the bureaucratic mechanics. Fine. Do that. But call it what it actually is: a civil contract. Leave the word ‘marriage’ to the institutions that have been defining it for three thousand years. I guarantee the churches will manage without the county clerk’s involvement.
PILLAR TWO: One vote per civil union. Not per individual. Per household. Two people who chose each other, built something together, and live under the same policy consequences — they have one stake. They decide between themselves who casts it. No government input required. For divorce with children involved, the vote follows primary custody, as determined by the courts, because the children are the reason the whole exercise matters.
PILLAR THREE: The vote is earned, not automatic. Who earns it? Anyone who put their physical safety on the line to fulfill the functions of government. Active duty military. Guard and Reserve. Honorably discharged veterans. Law enforcement at every level. Career fire. EMS providers working in jurisdictions where the risk is real and documented. This has NOTHING to do with sex. A female combat medic who did two tours in a forward operating base earns that vote every bit as much as the man next to her. A male civilian who spent his whole life safely behind a desk does not earn it automatically just because he has a Y chromosome. The service is what counts. Period.
PILLAR FOUR: One vote per primary residence landowner — regardless of how much land or how many properties they hold. One vote. For the home they actually LIVE in. Not a rental portfolio. Not a vacation house. The primary residence. Because the person who OWNS the roof over their head has a direct and irreversible financial stake in property taxes, zoning decisions, eminent domain, infrastructure spending, and every regulatory scheme the local and state government dreams up. They cannot simply move when it gets bad without losing the investment they spent years building. That is skin in the game. That is exactly what makes you vote like the decision actually has consequences — because for you, it does. Before the Left starts salivating over this… NO, a grave plot is NOT a permeant residence. Dead people do not get a vote!
And let me be brutal about the wealth question before someone misrepresents it: the single mother who scraped together a down payment on a 1,100-square-foot house in a working-class neighborhood has the exact same vote as the man with the estate. Billionaires with six properties still get ONE vote — their primary residence, same as everyone else. The double-wide on a quarter acre counts. Ownership is the threshold. Not acreage. Not assessed value. Not net worth. The guy who owns his home and the guy who owns a ranch cast the same weight. Equal.
The paths to earn your vote: put your life on the line for the republic, add to the republic as a family, or put your savings into permanent roots in it. Each one is enough.
— THE INCOME TAX WHILE I AM ALREADY IN TROUBLE —
The 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913. The first modern federal income tax touched roughly one to three percent of Americans. The exemptions were $3,000 for singles, $4,000 for married couples — real money in 1913. The top rate was 7 percent on income over $500,000. It was NEVER designed to reach working people. That was not an accident. It was the explicit intent.
Then World War II happened. Withholding was introduced in 1943 as a temporary wartime measure. The government got its hands on your paycheck before you did. And predictably — with the reliability of every government power expansion in human history — they never gave the mechanism back.
My proposal: the federal government taxes the STATES, not individuals. Flat per-capita rate, based on the census, paid quarterly as a single bill four times a year from the state to the Federal treasury. The state then decides how to fund its federal obligation however it wants — income tax, sales tax, cutting spending, whatever the citizens of that state will tolerate. States compete. People move toward better governance. The federal government gets permanently out of the business of auditing your personal finances.
This is not a radical idea. Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution originally required direct federal taxes to be apportioned among the states by population. The 16th Amendment dismantled that entirely. Look at what was built in its place and tell me the trade was worth it.
— THE OBJECTIONS (GO AHEAD, I HAVE BEEN WAITING) —
‘This disenfranchises millions!’ Yes. And so does the requirement to be 18. So do felon disenfranchisement statutes in most states. So does the citizenship requirement. The franchise is ALREADY conditional — we already agree it is not automatic. We just disagree on which conditions are legitimate. I am proposing conditions tied to obligation rather than tied to the simple fact of existence.
‘Renters can’t afford to buy! This punishes them!’ Two things. First: the civil service path is always open, regardless of income or housing status. Serve, and the landowner question is irrelevant. Get into a committed relationship with someone who will assist you with your life, the Civil union gets one vote. Second — and this is the part that should genuinely make people angry — the reason so many Americans CANNOT afford to own a home is a direct, traceable consequence of the exact policy agenda that keeps getting voted in by people with no financial stake in the outcome. Zoning laws that ban affordable construction. Environmental regulations that double building costs. Federal spending that drove inflation that crushed purchasing power. The government manufactured the renter class. The renter class votes to expand the government. The loop is self-perpetuating. Someone has to break it.
‘Women lose the vote!’ Not under this proposal. A female veteran votes. A female police officer votes. A female firefighter votes. A woman who owns her home votes. The pathway has nothing to do with sex. Nothing. You want to vote? SERVE. Or OWN Or be the one in the Civil Union casting their vote. That is it.
‘You want the 1800s back!’ No. I want the PRINCIPLE the 1800s had right, extended correctly. We had two choices when universal suffrage expanded: expand who could EARN the vote, or eliminate the requirement to earn it. We chose elimination. And we are living in the rubble of that choice.
— THE PART THEY REALLY DO NOT WANT YOU TO READ —
On January 10, 1963, Congressman A.S. Herlong stood in the chamber of the United States House of Representatives and read into the Congressional Record a list of 45 Communist Goals for the conquest of America, drawn from Cleon Skousen’s ‘The Naked Communist.’ Goal 40 called for discrediting the family as an institution and encouraging promiscuity and easy divorce. Goal 25 called for breaking down cultural standards of morality. Goal 26 explicitly named the normalization of degeneracy as a strategic objective.
I am not calling everyone who ever questioned traditional family structure a communist. I am pointing out that in 1963, somebody sat down and explicitly identified the American family as a TARGET — and then asking you to look at the scoreboard 62 years later.
Quinn’s Law Number 1 is worth reciting here: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. They said they wanted to empower women. They built a system that made women permanently dependent on government instead of permanently partnered with men who had shared stakes in the outcome. The family was not a casualty of this project. It was the OBJECTIVE.
Out-of-wedlock births: 5% in 1960. Over 40% today. Marriage rates: historic lows. Fatherlessness: epidemic. The data does not care what your politics are.
— THE BOTTOM LINE —
Strip all of it down to the foundation. Here is what I am actually saying.
The vote should mean something. It should COST something — not in money, but in obligation. You are a productive family with a near permanent Civil Union to another person and NOT the government, you are not a drain on society. You earn it by serving the republic with your body, or by planting permanent roots in the community whose government you are shaping. One vote per civil union household. One vote per primary residence owner. Both paths race-blind, sex-blind, and wealth-blind. No government marriage licenses — the state does not belong in sacraments. And no federal individual income tax — tax the states per capita and let the states compete for their citizens’ trust.
Will this happen in my lifetime? No. Does it require constitutional amendments? Several. Is it politically viable in the current climate? Absolutely not. Am I saying it anyway? Obviously.
Because the conversation nobody will have is the one we most desperately need. The American family is in freefall. Not metaphorically. Statistically, demographically, generationally. And the feedback loop that produced that freefall keeps winning elections because it produces voters who depend on it continuing.
That is not a republic functioning as designed. That is a republic being consumed from the inside out. And the only people who seem surprised by it are the ones who built the machine.
You can disagree with every word of this. That is your right. But you do not get to look me in the eye and tell me the family is fine.
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But what do I know — I am only a medically retired Army combat medic who opened a school and a fire station in Iraq, a former civilian paramedic who wore a vest to work in Cleveland, and a science teacher who has spent a career watching the consequences of bad policy land on the kids nobody else wanted to teach.
Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.
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