Beware the Rainbow Inquisition!
"Ordinarily, as one of billions of gay people who were once, ipso facto, criminals I would rejoice to see the White House swathed in the colours of the rainbow; instead, I shudder to realise those colours would now be more appropriate on a swastika."
The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The Supreme Court of the United States has just ruled, 5-4, that under this Amendment, states may not ban same-sex marriage; that "same-sex couples may exercise the right to marry. ... the reasons marriage is fundamental under the Constitution apply with equal force to same-sex couples."
At the end of its finding, SCOTUS offers this veritable panegyric:
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed.
Chief Justice Roberts, in a scathing dissenting view, demurs:
The majority’s decision is an act of will, not legal judgment. The right it announces has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s precedent. The majority expressly disclaims judicial “caution” and omits even a pretense of humility, openly relying on its desire to remake society according to its own “new insight” into the “nature of injustice.” Ante, at 11, 23. As a result, the Court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the States and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs. Just who do we think we are?
Justice Scalia is also mortified at what he considers grotesque judicial over-reach:
When decisions are reached through democratic means,some people will inevitably be disappointed with the results. But those whose views do not prevail at least know that they have had their say, and accordingly are—in the tradition of our political culture—reconciled to the result of a fair and honest debate. In addition, they can gear up to raise the issue later, hoping to persuade enough on the winning side to think again. “That is exactly how our system of government is supposed to work.” But today the Court puts a stop to all that. By deciding this question under the Constitution, the Court removes it from the realm of democratic decision. There will be consequences to shutting down the political process on an issue of such profound public significance. Closing debate tends to close minds. People denied a voice are less likely to accept the ruling of a court on an issue that does not seem to be the sort of thing courts usually decide. ... however heartened the proponents of same-sex marriage might be on this day, it is worth acknowledging what they have lost, and lost forever: the opportunity to win the true acceptance that comes from persuading their fellow citizens of the justice of their cause. And they lose this just when the winds of change were freshening at their backs.
It should be noted that "closing debate" is exactly the intent of most career gays (as it is, indeed, of many evangelical Christians on the other side). They are not interested in getting married and would regard SCOTUS's lofty paean to the institution as derisory. They applaud as a matter of ideology the penchant for severing sex from romance and treating conquests as notches in belts; they are aggressively anti-monogamous and dismissive of idealism in relationships (or anything else). Even many monogamous career gays are not interested in open discourse; they are interested in closing bakeries on the most insidiously risible of pretexts. The vicious fascist lesbians who shut down an Oregon bakery that refused to bake a cake for their wedding did so on such grounds as "acute loss of confidence"; "anxiety"; "apprehension"; "crying"; "disbelief"; "discomfort"; "excessive sleep"; "insomnia [go figure!]"; "indigestion"; "impatience"; "moodiness"; "pale and sick at home after work"; etc., ad nauseam. In saner times such a ludicrous litany would have been assumed to be satire; in the Orwellian state that America has become, PC Thought Nazis can actually drum people out of business by repairing to such arrant nonsense. America, and much of the West, has become an asylum in which patients will be subjected to didactic ECT for such heterosexist, racist, classist "micro-aggressions" as eyebrow-twitching and nostril-flaring.
Ordinarily, as one of billions of gay people who were once, ipso facto, criminals I would rejoice to see the White House swathed in the colours of the rainbow; instead, I shudder to realise those colours would now be more appropriate on a swastika. Gay marriage may be an advance, but Homofascism is not. It is no accident that career gays are silent on the Hitlerian persecution and murder of gays by Muslim regimes; they find nothing exceptionable in such regimes—to the contrary, they find the anti-Americanism of Islamofascism admirable. One of their doyens, Hillary Clinton, runs a Foundation that accepts huge sums of money from Muslim tyrannies. (Ironically, this is the self-same Hillary whose horrendously hetero husband Bill passed the Defense of Marriage Act that defined marriage as between a man and a woman and made it possible for states to ban gay marriage!)
The nub of this matter, of course, is that the state should have nothing to say about adult relationships, marriage included, at all. The inalienable right to pursue happiness clearly subsumes a right to form relationships with whomever one chooses. That right is not created by tradition, ideologies, majorities, courts or legislatures; it inheres in autonomous, sentient beings. Laws should simply identify and uphold it. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Thomas was onto it:
Our Constitution—like the Declaration of Independence before it—was predicated on a simple truth: One’s liberty, not to mention one’s dignity, was something to be shielded from—not provided by—the State. Today’s decision casts that truth aside. In its haste to reach a desired result, the majority misapplies a clause focused on “due process” to afford substantive rights, disregards the most plausible understanding of the “liberty” protected by that clause, and distorts the principles on which this Nation was founded. Its decision will have inestimable consequences for our Country.
I have added here elaboration on the "get the state out of marriage" theme in the form of earlier writings by me on the subject on SOLO. They include this, written when NZ's gay marriage laws were a mere private member's bill:
My point is: gay marriage doesn't make everything all right. I say this as the person whose private ear-bashing of Heather Roy enabled the Civil Unions legislation to pass. Everything remains all wrong: Nanny State's tentacles slither and suffocate in the most intimate circumstances of our lives. Whether gay marriage passes or not—and on balance I hope it does, notwithstanding the truth of my headline here—the most important imperative remains: Strangle Nanny!