Here's a little piece that I fired off yesterday. It's already been bounced by CanadaFreePress.com, but they were nice enough to send me a rejection email so I wasn't left hanging. CFP (which I highly recommend, btw; they're a fun site that's published my rants in the past) said that I got bounced because of the high volume of articles and the speed of posting of same...which is legit, 'cause I was a bit slow at getting this out (I had other things to do yesterday before I got around to this). I thought about sending it to a few other places, but then decided nah, why bother? After all, why have a blog if you're not going to use it, right?
At any rate, here's my little rant about the US v Windsor decision. It's not so much about gay marriage per se as it is about the flip-flop in the usual stances of the Left and Right vis a vis Federal power. I really haven't seen this angle talked about yet, and hope to get some good (non-idiot) feedback about it...and by that, I mean fulsome, gushing praise for my brilliant analysis, sparkling wit, and pithy comments.
Here it is, in all it's windbaggy glory:
State’s
Rights and the Demise of DOMA
The
Supremes have spoken, and now (if the fire and brimstone merchants are to be
believed) it’s only a matter of days before we have men marrying goats, women
marrying other women (who look like men), and the nation is consumed by the wrath
of Almighty God in such a way as will make the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah look
like a covered dish supper.
Having
seen the social approbation and censure that was brought down on the occasional
poor soul dumb enough to bring a sack of Krystals to a covered dish supper, I think
Sodom and Gomorrah got off easy. But
then again, I was born and raised Southern Baptist, and the TaliBaptists don’t
play about their church feedings.
Personally,
I’m not terribly worried about any of the abovementioned horrors. I suspect that either the social order or the
currency will collapse before God gets around to noticing that a small percentage
of our citizens are able to marry the person they love. No, it won’t be homosexuals in wedding
dresses or tuxes (for some reason, lesbians don’t generally go for the wedding
dress thing, go figure) and saying “I do” that does the republic in. It’s much more likely that the government’s
profligate spending, the overarching regulations of the nanny state, or the
creation of a permanent dependency class over the last few decades—or all of
these together—will bring the country crashing down around our ears before too
long.
That
being said, I will admit to a certain enjoyment of the sturm und drang the opinion in United States v. Windsor has created
on both sides of the issue. While the
social conservatives have been bemoaning the demise of “traditional” marriage, the
social progressives have been trumpeting the triumph of equality with a “gee,
ain’t this great?” smugness that is more than a bit annoying.
It
has been amusing these last few months to ask the social conservatives if, in
lieu of 50 silver shekels, I can give them pre-1963 dimes when I rape/marry
their virgin daughters, in accordance with Deuteronomy 22:28-29. Yes, I realize that I won’t be able to
divorce the girl afterwards—unlike many supporters of DOMA, who are on Wifey-Poo
#2 or #3—but hey! It’s ‘biblical’! Somehow, they haven’t really appreciated my
scriptural acumen, nor my honest question about the whole shekel/silver dime
conversion thing. But, I digress….
What
neither side seems to realize is just how the Windsor ruling turned the usual
Left-Right polarity on its head, and the obtuseness about of this flip-flop is
what I find so amusing.
To justify overturning DOMA, the majority opinion stated “DOMA is unconstitutional as a
deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth
Amendment.” While I agree with the Court that the Defense
of Marriage Act was constitutionally indefensible, I find the use of the Fifth
Amendment in this case to be a bit thin.
To me, the applicable bits of the Constitution are the Tenth and Fourteenth
Amendments. Nowhere in the Constitution
is ‘marriage’ mentioned as an enumerated power of the Federal government, and
to deny the more than 1000 Federal benefits of marriage to a subset of the
population based solely on gender clearly violates the ‘equal protection of the
law’ clause of the Fourteenth.
Be that as it may, the truly
interesting thing to note about the actual decision (rather than what the
various talking heads and televangelists have said about it) is that the core
of the majority’s argument is good, old-fashioned States Rights! Time after time in the opinion, the sovereign
power of the State is invoked against the Federal DOMA. Since DOMA stepped on the toes of New York
State, so the majority reasoned, it had to go!
Think about that, and the opposing
arguments of the DOMA supporters, for just a minute. Because they were determined to throw down
DOMA, the liberal Justices were forced to take what is (for them) a highly
unusual stance: namely, that DOMA
represents an overreach by the Federal government into an area that is exclusively
the province of the several sovereign States.
The Justices obviously realize this, and do what they can to deny the
logical implications of this stance with statements such as “it is unnecessary to decide
whether this federal intrusion on state power is a violation of the
Constitution,” and that “[t]he State’s power in defining the marital relation
is of central relevance in this case quite apart from principles of federalism”,
as Justice Scalia aptly points out in his dissent. This is crap, and they know it. Either a State is sovereign and the Tenth
Amendment holds, or not. A more clear
case of “either/or” would be hard to imagine…but the liberal majority in this
opinion would want us to do just that.
The same
discordant reasoning is heard from the supporters of DOMA. It’s interesting how the very same people who
insist the Federal government is too big, has too long an arm, and needs to
stay out of their business nonetheless scream for Leviathan to intercede to
enforce their own personal beliefs in all fifty States. Even worse, there seems to be a greater
degree of blindness about the inconsistency and illogic of these positions on
the side of the alleged conservatives than on the part of the progressives.
Let’s be brutally
honest here: the underlying reason that
social conservatives wanted DOMA is because of their religious beliefs. Everything else is window dressing, jazz
hands and glitter glue to distract from that simple fact. The truly conservative, Constitutional
position is that this is a matter for the several States to decide. DOMA assumed a power NOT given to the Federal
government in the Constitution, and did so in direct violation of the First
Amendment, by making what is, at its core, a religious decree. To counter this, the liberal majority of the
Court was forced to do what is generally anathema to them, and take the
position that there are some places where the Federal government may not go.
And that, in a
nutshell, is what I find so funny. To
get what they wanted, both sides had to take up positions which they typically
rail against, and thus show themselves to be the great flaming hypocrites they
truly are. The liberals have now been
forced to admit there are limits to what the Imperial Federal Apparatus can do,
and the social conservatives are butt-hurt that the Court wouldn’t give them
the theocracy they so desperately crave deep down in their black little
hearts. Neither side will admit this, of
course; which is why I intend to point it out to all and sundry as often as I
possibly can over the coming days. This
article is just my opening salvo, and I expect to be tipping sacred cows left
and right until the fun wears off…which it never will.
Feel free to join
the fun with me! Oh, and the whole ‘men
marrying goats’ thing? As all we good
little libertarians know, this is impossible because a goat is not a sentient
being, and thus unable to enter into a legally binding contractual arrangement
such as marriage. To suggest otherwise
is a specious argument (more jazz hands & glitter glue), or can be taken as
prima facia evidence of the unspoken
desires of the person making the statement…and I say that as an old retired
shrink with some degree of expertise in that kind of thing.
Feel free to
point that out, too. The goat
fornicators need to be called on it, ‘cause that’s just nasty…not to mention,
cruel to the goat.
