Incivil Unions
Let us take on a light issue, like, say gay marriage. Too sensitive and delicate? No it is not. It is sensitive and delicate only to those for whom sensitivity and delicacy are misunderstood as sobbing and anemia; or moral cowardice and inverse prudishness. It is, after all, advocates of gay unions, most of them with personal stakes in the matter, who have put this farcical subject before the public quite rudely and with complete contempt for the sensitivity and sensibilities of traditional society and its values. In the day of genital herpes commercials in prime time, and everything barely short of literal bestiality on MTV, it is unavoidable. But the social and moral repugnance of pushing the issue isn’t really the danger. Such things come and go all the time and the public, for good or bad, is really not that scandalized by them. Like many thrusts from the Left, the real threat is not to Judeo-Christian religion or values but to democratic norms.
The advocates of gay marriage fight through court cases, not through electoral politics, likening themselves to the civil rights crusaders of the 1950s and 60s (much the anger of many veterans of that campaign). The idea is that the public is not sufficiently wise to see the great benefit and inevitable logic of equating of all things homosexual with those heterosexual; and not sophisticated enough to appreciate the great value of Constitutional rights and the judicial review which render such weighty matters of Inalienable Rights immune to public opinion. That is the same public opinion otherwise known as The Will of the People, or Popular Democracy, which in other contexts the Advocational Left is so deeply devoted to protecting from Republican election-theft and Bushist jingoism. But, the same-sex right-to-marriage claim, unlike some other assertions of protected rights, just does not pass the sniff test.
The most serious-seeming objections to maintaining the restriction (if you can call it that) of marriage to the norm are, as you expect from anti-democratic liberals, legalistic or “constitutional”. They are also easy to dispense with.
First, the right to marry means that you cannot in most cases be prohibited by law from getting married. In the context of the right to marry some one in particular, let alone whomever you want to, or are “in love with” such a right does not exist and never has existed for anyone. Marriage has always been a regulated privilege—that is why you need a license for it—and restrictions abound. You can’t marry a close relative, you can’t marry a minor, you can’t marry someone who is already married, or marry another someone if you are, etc; regardless how you feel about them. Likewise, you can’t marry someone of the same sex as you are. Maybe the law doesn’t actually say that everywhere. Law tends to make obvious assumptions. The law doesn’t specifically say you can’t marry a ham sandwich, either, but you can’t unless you are a good prosciuttor
What about equal protection? The protection is equal. No one, regardless of “sexual orientation” can marry someone of the same sex. Period. Not even if a privileged WASP straight male wanted to marry another privileged WASP straight male. Even it were unequal, the creative courts beloved by the sinister thieves of property rights have told us that equal protection, just like substantive due process, ain’t so important in regard to economic matters. Economic rights, you see, are not “fundamental” and the benefits of marriage are primarily, even entirely as far as the law is concerned, economic. Inheritance rights, tax privileges, benefits entitlements, engraved wedding silver, etc. If the State can override your right to be equally income-taxed at the same percentage as someone who makes less than you do, it can run flat over your right to select the other half of your personal economic team. The standard here is merely rational. It is not remotely difficult for any person who also happens to be merely rational that the state has an obvious interest in protecting the definition of a fundamental multi-thousand year-old cultural pillar. Unfortunately, mere rationality is a standard for the law itself to meet, not its practitioners or judges.
What about Loving v. Virginia? They say. Of course you want to say, “What about Liquormart v. Rhode Island?”.Loving, too, has absolutely nothing to do with gaiety as politico-matrimony. Just ask any black civil rights leader from the movement’s Heroic Age. That won’t suffice for the advocates, of course. But Loving specifically and emphatically stresses the racial aspects of “discrimination” in marriage, nothing else. Every enumeration is so:
To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications…
…[F]reedom of choice to marry [must] not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations.
… the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual.
No implication at all is made that any bases of distinction other than race are unsupportable, must not be restricted, or hinder an individual-resident freedom. Change the words racial and race in the above to the words familial and family. Is that an acceptable analogy? Remember, the specter of banjo-playing mutants as the probable result of any two too close relations mating is extremely exaggerated. And legal prohibitions on such marriages extend to situations where the issue of issue of any kind is unlikely or impossible. So why are such unions barred by law? The answer and its recognition as far as the Left is concerned, are both taboo. Nothing more. Now that is an analogy. Conversely, to suggest that interracial marriage is akin to same-sex marriage is like saying that 2-room houses with different colored roofs are just like 4-room houses with no roofs at all. By anciently accepted and, to most, obvious standards a roof is a necessary component of a house. A roofless structure might even kind of look like a house to the casual, ground-level passerby. But it’s not a house. It’s an odd corral-type thing or somesuch, that there isn’t even a word for.
Okay then, what about this? Social values change. So not to allow same-sex marriage is like not allowing women to vote, or allowing slavery, or allowing domestic abuse. It’s just plain old fashioned. Well, true, social values do change for better and for worse. But in this case, the results of nearly every vote is that the values regarding this have not. By 2 or 3 to 1 in many cases. They may well change, and if it does, then the issue is valid. So far that is not the case. If it were, there would not be such squealing by proponents and they would not be mortally afraid of the ballot box.
Lastly, it is a matter of personal privacy, just like the sodomy and other conduct that is a new constitutional right. The answer to this is simply, No it is not. Marriage, unlike sexual conduct, is by definition not private or personal. It is a public institution. There is no right to commit sodomy either, of course, simply a right to the veiling of some personal space. To oppose gay marriage has no necessary relation to opposing any kind of personal conduct that is private. Privacy is, after all, an important traditional value too.
The bottom line is that this is a political question, not one of justice or constitutionality. And those of us who are citizens of democratic polities do have a right to be part of the democratic decision making process, rather than having policies shoved down our throats by authoritarian elites. The People have a right to be heard and to make these types of consequential decisions unless there is some colossal reason to bypass them. No such reason is here. Let people vote- they have every right to determine what kinds of formal, legal relationships the state endorses, even if that means the law has to acknowledge social taboos. I, for one, do not want my right to participate in such an important debate about my government and my society stolen by selfish radicals who have no interest in the commonweal, and every interest in not just tolerance, but validation of their own deviance. Democracy is a value to be defended, too.
Let us take on a light issue, like, say gay marriage. Too sensitive and delicate? No it is not. It is sensitive and delicate only to those for whom sensitivity and delicacy are misunderstood as sobbing and anemia; or moral cowardice and inverse prudishness. It is, after all, advocates of gay unions, most of them with personal stakes in the matter, who have put this farcical subject before the public quite rudely and with complete contempt for the sensitivity and sensibilities of traditional society and its values. In the day of genital herpes commercials in prime time, and everything barely short of literal bestiality on MTV, it is unavoidable. But the social and moral repugnance of pushing the issue isn’t really the danger. Such things come and go all the time and the public, for good or bad, is really not that scandalized by them. Like many thrusts from the Left, the real threat is not to Judeo-Christian religion or values but to democratic norms.
The advocates of gay marriage fight through court cases, not through electoral politics, likening themselves to the civil rights crusaders of the 1950s and 60s (much the anger of many veterans of that campaign). The idea is that the public is not sufficiently wise to see the great benefit and inevitable logic of equating of all things homosexual with those heterosexual; and not sophisticated enough to appreciate the great value of Constitutional rights and the judicial review which render such weighty matters of Inalienable Rights immune to public opinion. That is the same public opinion otherwise known as The Will of the People, or Popular Democracy, which in other contexts the Advocational Left is so deeply devoted to protecting from Republican election-theft and Bushist jingoism. But, the same-sex right-to-marriage claim, unlike some other assertions of protected rights, just does not pass the sniff test.
The most serious-seeming objections to maintaining the restriction (if you can call it that) of marriage to the norm are, as you expect from anti-democratic liberals, legalistic or “constitutional”. They are also easy to dispense with.
First, the right to marry means that you cannot in most cases be prohibited by law from getting married. In the context of the right to marry some one in particular, let alone whomever you want to, or are “in love with” such a right does not exist and never has existed for anyone. Marriage has always been a regulated privilege—that is why you need a license for it—and restrictions abound. You can’t marry a close relative, you can’t marry a minor, you can’t marry someone who is already married, or marry another someone if you are, etc; regardless how you feel about them. Likewise, you can’t marry someone of the same sex as you are. Maybe the law doesn’t actually say that everywhere. Law tends to make obvious assumptions. The law doesn’t specifically say you can’t marry a ham sandwich, either, but you can’t unless you are a good prosciuttor
What about equal protection? The protection is equal. No one, regardless of “sexual orientation” can marry someone of the same sex. Period. Not even if a privileged WASP straight male wanted to marry another privileged WASP straight male. Even it were unequal, the creative courts beloved by the sinister thieves of property rights have told us that equal protection, just like substantive due process, ain’t so important in regard to economic matters. Economic rights, you see, are not “fundamental” and the benefits of marriage are primarily, even entirely as far as the law is concerned, economic. Inheritance rights, tax privileges, benefits entitlements, engraved wedding silver, etc. If the State can override your right to be equally income-taxed at the same percentage as someone who makes less than you do, it can run flat over your right to select the other half of your personal economic team. The standard here is merely rational. It is not remotely difficult for any person who also happens to be merely rational that the state has an obvious interest in protecting the definition of a fundamental multi-thousand year-old cultural pillar. Unfortunately, mere rationality is a standard for the law itself to meet, not its practitioners or judges.
What about Loving v. Virginia? They say. Of course you want to say, “What about Liquormart v. Rhode Island?”.Loving, too, has absolutely nothing to do with gaiety as politico-matrimony. Just ask any black civil rights leader from the movement’s Heroic Age. That won’t suffice for the advocates, of course. But Loving specifically and emphatically stresses the racial aspects of “discrimination” in marriage, nothing else. Every enumeration is so:
To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications…
…[F]reedom of choice to marry [must] not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations.
… the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual.
No implication at all is made that any bases of distinction other than race are unsupportable, must not be restricted, or hinder an individual-resident freedom. Change the words racial and race in the above to the words familial and family. Is that an acceptable analogy? Remember, the specter of banjo-playing mutants as the probable result of any two too close relations mating is extremely exaggerated. And legal prohibitions on such marriages extend to situations where the issue of issue of any kind is unlikely or impossible. So why are such unions barred by law? The answer and its recognition as far as the Left is concerned, are both taboo. Nothing more. Now that is an analogy. Conversely, to suggest that interracial marriage is akin to same-sex marriage is like saying that 2-room houses with different colored roofs are just like 4-room houses with no roofs at all. By anciently accepted and, to most, obvious standards a roof is a necessary component of a house. A roofless structure might even kind of look like a house to the casual, ground-level passerby. But it’s not a house. It’s an odd corral-type thing or somesuch, that there isn’t even a word for.
Okay then, what about this? Social values change. So not to allow same-sex marriage is like not allowing women to vote, or allowing slavery, or allowing domestic abuse. It’s just plain old fashioned. Well, true, social values do change for better and for worse. But in this case, the results of nearly every vote is that the values regarding this have not. By 2 or 3 to 1 in many cases. They may well change, and if it does, then the issue is valid. So far that is not the case. If it were, there would not be such squealing by proponents and they would not be mortally afraid of the ballot box.
Lastly, it is a matter of personal privacy, just like the sodomy and other conduct that is a new constitutional right. The answer to this is simply, No it is not. Marriage, unlike sexual conduct, is by definition not private or personal. It is a public institution. There is no right to commit sodomy either, of course, simply a right to the veiling of some personal space. To oppose gay marriage has no necessary relation to opposing any kind of personal conduct that is private. Privacy is, after all, an important traditional value too.
The bottom line is that this is a political question, not one of justice or constitutionality. And those of us who are citizens of democratic polities do have a right to be part of the democratic decision making process, rather than having policies shoved down our throats by authoritarian elites. The People have a right to be heard and to make these types of consequential decisions unless there is some colossal reason to bypass them. No such reason is here. Let people vote- they have every right to determine what kinds of formal, legal relationships the state endorses, even if that means the law has to acknowledge social taboos. I, for one, do not want my right to participate in such an important debate about my government and my society stolen by selfish radicals who have no interest in the commonweal, and every interest in not just tolerance, but validation of their own deviance. Democracy is a value to be defended, too.
posted by the wrightist at 2:24 PM
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