Blowhard, Esq. writes:
- Happy for those who are happy with today’s decision, but I’m still waiting for a logical, principled, legal argument as to why the Court’s SSM decisions don’t also permit polygamy.
- Whoops, hey, that didn’t take long.
- It’s hilarious that many of my smart, progressive friends on the one hand think the Constitution permits the federal government to force citizens to buy a private corporate product (i.e. health insurance) and requires all 50 states to recognize same-sex marriage, yet on the other hand think the Constitution does not permit private citizens to own guns. This despite the fact that the Second Amendment contains the phrase “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” while the phrases “right to privacy” and “gay marriage” appear no where at all in the document.
- I guess the President’s terrible handling of the war, use of drones, warrantless wiretapping, attacks on freedom of the press, and other crimes against the Constitution all fall down the memory hole now. The wise sages at Vox think he’s one of the “most consequential” presidents in history. Looks like his next war is on the terrible scourge that is the KKK. Maybe he should get another Nobel Peace Prize?
- Astonishing how gay marriage has gone from something that no one wanted or cared about, including progressive gays, to something that all right-thinking must be in favor of. It took all of 20 years, which is remarkably fast for such a sea change in public opinion.
“Traditional marriage is a rotten, oppressive institution. . . . marriage is a contract which smothers both people, denies needs, and places impossible demands on both people. . . . Gay people must stop gauging their self-respect by how well they mimic straight marriages. Gay marriages will have the same problems as straight ones except in burlesque. . . . To accept that happiness comes through finding a groovy spouse and settling down, showing the world that ‘we’re just the same as you’ is avoiding the real issues, and is an expression of self-hatred. . . . We have to define for ourselves a new pluralistic, rolefree social structure for ourselves. It must contain both the freedom and physical space for people to live alone, live together for a while, live together for a long time, either as couples or in larger numbers; and the ability to flow easily from one of these states to another as our needs change. Liberation for gay people is defining for ourselves how and with whom we live, instead of measuring our relationship in comparison to straight ones, with straight values.”
— Carl Wittman, “A Gay Manifesto,” 1970
Related
- EP shares a discussion thread on the Jenner transition.
Blowhard, Esq.
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Astonishing how gay marriage has gone from something that no one wanted or cared about, including progressive gays, to something that all right-thinking must be in favor of. It took all of 20 years, which is remarkably fast for such a sea change in public opinion.
History shows other such rapid changes in public opinion. Germany, in the 20’s and 30’s.
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“This despite the fact that the Second Amendment contains the phrase “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”
You conveniently omit the first clause of the Second Amendment. The full text reads:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
We don’t have citizen’s militias anymore.
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Yet the Court determined in DC v. Heller that the 2nd Amendment guarantees individuals the right to carry guns for lawful purposes.
To phrase it better than my original post, I guess the thing that bothers me is the intellectual consistency. When it comes to the 2nd Amendment, libs are literal textualists. When it comes to the “right of privacy,” they suddenly become very living-Constitution-look-at-the-entire-context-penumbras-and-emanations about everything. It’s a very “heads I win, tails you lose” process of Constitutional interpretation.
But I probably shouldn’t pick on liberals b/c conservatives are guilty of it as well. Let’s just admit that Constitution doesn’t matter, the Supreme is a political court, and the justices reason backwards from whatever The Powers That Be determine is most politically desirable and expedient.
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It’s a very “heads I win, tails you lose”
Spot on. And the orc-hordes of both sides of politics are guilty of it due to the phenomenon of my-side bias. The problem yesterday wasn’t that gay marriage was approved rather, as Scalia pointed out, the words written in the constitution were ignored by the same body which was supposed to ensure that the U.S. government adhered to the “letter of the law”. When yes means no and no means yes the Constitution can then be interpreted to mean whatever the person in power wants it to mean. Welcome to Orwellian world where freedom means slavery by the mechanism of “living Constitution” interpretations.
Let’s just admit that Constitution doesn’t matter, the Supreme is a political court, and the justices reason backwards from whatever The Powers That Be determine is most politically desirable and expedient.
Precisely, the Constitution died.
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America is rotting from the inside.
Something broke today.
It’s over.
People used to look at your country as a beacon of hope and liberty and to be called American was mark of honor. That America and American is gone.
Communism destroyed a man’s liberties and fettered him in chains, Americanism destroys his morals and his soul.
The founding Fathers wept.
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Nothing “broke” with the Supreme Court decision. The change in attitudes had been under way for over a decade. The next week will be no different from the previous week.
Since the Court was blatantly just ratifying the shift in popular opinion, people won’t read anything special into it, whether they were pro or con — most had already expected / accepted it as a foregone conclusion earlier this year or within the last few years.
The shameful thing is not a discrete event like a Supreme Court decision or Presidential election. It’s the state of affairs that lead up to it and made it possible. Social climate change.
But we already knew that the state-of-affairs had been decaying away from conservative mores for awhile, so how could the decision have changed our perception of the social climate? Even if they narrowly upheld the right for states to shun buttsex marriage, we’d still know how decadent the culture had still become. It might have been a silver lining, but not much else.
Conservatives have a deep-seated apocalyptic streak that is counter-productive for real-world change (although, if rhetorically gifted, does make for some moving speeches). Our social and cultural integrity, purity, and cohesion is not a black-and-white Paradise / Inferno kind of thing. It steadily degrades, and steadily heals, in a chronic rather than acute manner of infection and recovery.
Viewing the future in apocalyptic terms removes responsibility for stewardship in the here-and-now. The only successfully pro-social apocalyptic movements, such as the early Jesus movement, made it a point that how you behaved in the limited time until the End of the World would determine how your permanent soul would be treated in the aftermath.
But where do we find conservatives preaching anything like that? They aren’t telling people that how they behave before the imminent collapse of America / the West / the whole world is going to affect what happens to them in the aftermath. It’s not only defeatist, but nihilistic on top of it.
The sooner that conservatives ditch the apocalyptic masturbatory fantasies and take up the boring, repetitive tasks of gradual stewardship over their communities, the sooner we can set our world back on the right path.
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The change in attitudes had been under way for over a decade.
Yep it has, but the Supreme Court’s primary role is not to follow social change and attitudes but rather uphold the letter of the law with regard to social attitudes. Congress’s role, on the other hand, is to be a mirror of social attitudes. Yesterdays Supreme court ruling was basically saying “look, we’re here to enforce public (WASPy upper class) opinion, fuck the Constitution. It wouldn’t of mattered if the issue were Gay rights or Bank regulation.
The reason why Conservatives are apocalyptic because they’re usually so much better at forward projection of consequences than liberals. Standing from the vantage point of 1900, who would have ever thought that witch-hunts would be arranged for Christian pizza shop owners who declare that they wouldn’t cater for a hypothetical gay wedding? And yet it has come to pass.
The sooner that conservatives ditch the apocalyptic masturbatory fantasies and take up the boring, repetitive tasks of gradual stewardship over their communities, the sooner we can set our world back on the right path.
100% Agree, the real problem though, is that Conservatism is not Righteousness. Conservatives are just slow liberals and today’s innovation becomes tommorrow’s tradition amongst them. That’s why the Jesus movement needs to come back.
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The one upside of this gay marriage thing is that maybe a few dusky foreigners who were about to wend their way to our shores will decide that it’s just too depraved here, and they’ll stay home, fearing for their children.
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