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Marriage 2.0
“YouTube and Google are proud to celebrate marriage equality” proclaimed the mighty Google search page yesterday. At the rate things are going, June 26 will wind up being a national holiday in the future.
Yesterday’s decision didn’t just extend the legal rights and privileges of marriage to same-sex partners; civil unions began that process a while ago. Yesterday redefined state-sanctioned marriage itself. It’s more than marriage “equality.” This is marriage expansion.
“Marriage equality” was an advertising slogan, a finesse to fit marriage within the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. Marriage is a fundamental liberty. Everyone gets equal liberties. Just as Loving v. Virginia made interracial marriage legal in all states, Obergefell does it for same-sex couples.
In hindsight, state laws against interracial marriage are viewed as a clear form of barbarism from a bygone era. Richard Loving, a white gentleman, and Mildred Jeter, a black lady, were married in Virginia in 1958, and subsequently charged, found guilty, and sentenced to a year in jail. On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court decided 9-0 that the Loving marriage was no crime. “Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Will the 5-4 Obergefell decision seem as sensible as the 9-0 decision in Loving when it has stood the same test of time – almost 50 years?
Obergefell is, of course, different from Loving. The 14th Amendment was about establishing equal rights and protections, especially between the races, in the context of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. Loving ended part of a pattern of racial discrimination dating back to the age of slavery. It’s precisely the sort of thing the Due Process Clause should prevent. Obergefell breaks a pattern of many more years: the definition of the institution of marriage itself. That’s some heavy legal lifting. I’ll leave it to Ricochet’s crack legal team to explain whether the Court just gave itself a hernia.
The pieces of marriage expansion that interest me most are (a) the broad enthusiasm for marriage among gays, a “conservative” lifestyle turn; (b) the unseemly hook-up between the SSM movement and the political Left; and (c) the ongoing decline of religious doctrine’s influence over secular law. These are in part media-created phenomena, and ongoing media narratives.
If there is opposition to SSM in the gay community, you don’t hear much about it in the media. Single partner domesticity wasn’t always the lifestyle of choice among openly gay men. AIDS changed that. Virtues like commitment, fidelity, and love became a way of life for millions of gay men over the last 35 years. Health, happiness, and monogamous (or “monogamish”) relationships are major upgrades over the earlier scene and its consequences. Conservatives should consider welcoming this change, or in the least standing aside rather than athwart.
Conservatives should also be celebrating the end of the same-sex marriage movement. They won, and now they no longer need the brutish tacticians of the political Left as allies. Republicans nationwide shouldn’t hesitate to do what the California GOP has already done: sanction and recognize Log Cabin Republicans as fully enfranchised members of our political coalition. We should do this quickly, publicly, and enthusiastically. Gays and lesbians are often adept capitalists and creative leaders. Welcome home to the political party that will protect your hard-earned dual incomes, and that desperately needs your creativity!
Note that Catholics on the Supreme Court voted 4-2 against the Court’s finding in Obergefell. The secular power of the Catholic Church has been in decline for centuries, and that continues. I respect Justices Alito, Thomas, Scalia and, okay, Roberts enough to presume that their call in this case was made strictly on the basis of law and not their religious beliefs. That is as it should be. It is even clearer that Justices Kennedy and Sotomayor, who voted the other way, did not have their interpretation of the Constitution determined by religious dictates.
As for Archbishop Kurtz, his opinion that “it is profoundly immoral and unjust for the government to declare that two people of the same sex can constitute a marriage” is a bold graffiti on the “wall of separation” between Church and State, a wall that now stands taller and stronger. When the Pope arrives in a few months to address Congress, it will be interesting to hear whether he stirs this pot along with his focus on climate change and wealth redistribution.
My hope is that, however much hue and cry those on the losing side of yesterday’s ruling make, the victors will, in the words of radio host Doug McIntyre “be gracious in victory. Don’t sue churches who won’t perform marriages, don’t go after bakeries. Tolerance goes both ways.”
Published in General
Any Republican politician with the good fortune to be invited to an LGBT wedding should have the courage to attend, dance with the bride/groom/whoever, and smile a lot. Everybody loves weddings.
There are far more votes to be had in the welcoming, accepting center and with the younger demos than among any scowling, far right remnant living in denial, like those Japanese bitter-enders found on remote islands long after WWII ended.
Don’t talk yourself into candidate abandonment based on social issues which the President can’t really control. Too many did that to Rudolph Giuliani in 2008, and that’s how we wound up with Barack Obama.
scowling, far right remnant living in denial, like those Japanese bitter-enders found on remote islands long after WWII ended.
Yes. I can read the tolerance in this.
Did I put it too delicately? I’ll be more direct.
Go read back issues of the Village Voice c. 1979-1982.
Read about the bath houses. Read about the bars and the “glory holes.” Read about GRID. Or talk to the doctors who worked in those neighborhoods, or to a survivor, and all the funerals he attended. Talk with anyone who saw a friend’s name on the quilt.
From all the reports I’ve heard, the gay community went from widespread sybaritic debauchery to living hell in the space of a few years. AIDS wasn’t even really treatable until 1995. Given that history, isn’t it really unkind to begrudge members of that community some socially sanctioned coupling?
I’m trying to come up with an analogy—I don’t think it’s abortion. I think it’s more like women’s rights. When I was little, there were a lot of doors that were closed to me because I was a girl—immediate doors (Little League) and, apparently, future doors—the Marines, Georgetown University, ordained ministry.
But the feminists were on it, and the doors began to open, so that by the time I was an adult, a whole lot of them were wide open. My daughters have had a completely different experience of being female than I had, and in general that’s been great. I’m grateful. Yay! I can serve mankind to the limits of my potential, mas-o-menos.
Remember the Million Man March? And all the feminists who declared themselves “terrified” and “appalled” by a bunch of earnest guys pledging to take good care of their families… (“Can I have a six pack of those to go?” I rhetorically enquired at the time in a letter to the editor). (Hey I was the widowed mother of four, and I needed some help, here.)
So yes, there is the distinct possibility that some number of activists who have made a career of opening this particular door won’t be able to just look around and say: Look! Great! Much better! Now maybe we can do something about all those black murder victims we’ve been neglecting so shamefully?
Yes—or read And The Band Played On by the late Randy Schilts.
Mike, are you allowed to be sarcastic if you’re a community organizer…that is, a community moderator? (If not, then my admiration for you guys increases yet more!)
Actually, I think many gays went to the use of condoms, not to monogamy. And now that AIDS is treatable, it’s back to bareback, at least among many of the young.
I’ll self moderate from here on out. But I do not particularly care to be compared to a Japanese army hold out. Perhaps we should all moderate our tone.
Some leaders of that movement did indeed behave badly. But their troops have left the battlefield and are presently celebrating. There are partners to be found, weddings to be planned, public identities to be affirmed, and then relationships to be maintained.
Other gay rights battles remaining don’t have to be more than small skirmishes. The mailing lists will be leased to the wedding planners and candidates. It’s late 1945. Big dip kisses in Times Square, then domestic tranquility looms ahead.
Now that “sin” business is a private belief of yours, which you are free, of course, to hold, and I apologize for stating the obvious. There it is in your Bible, alright. Cling away. I’ve got no problem with that at all, despite my flippant tone. (In fact, I really enjoy Jeff Foxworthy’s The American Bible Challenge. It’s amazing how well so many people know that book.)
People say “And I’ll fight for your right to hold those beliefs.” Well, I’ll pay taxes for people to fight for your right to hold those beliefs. Some of those people will be gay, of course.
There are greater threats to this country in the world, people who actually would decapitate both of us for our beliefs and non-beliefs. I think we’ve got a better chance of winning that conflict when religious conservatives and social liberals find candidates we can mutually support to win elections.
Certainly fidelity isn’t a way of life in gay couples. From the 1980s, studies showed that as many as 80% did not have monogamous relationships.
More recent 2010 study shows that half of gay male couples have “open relationships”.
So, they certainly don’t. The question is, why the hell do they want “marriage” anyway?
Is it simply for the government benefits? If that’s the case, than this is a system we created in the “secular” world. So no point in arguing religion, when it comes down to taxes!
Anyway, the bigger issue here is that these arguments of trying to define marriage or social relationships on the bases of religious arguments, regardless if they are right or wrong, isn’t going to work when it comes to…government…licensing, taxation etc.
It just ain’t. “We” have been saying this for a while: conservatives are making the wrong arguments in the wrong way, and it will lose. And so it was.
Now hopefully we, can move on from the “social” issues since we don’t have a leg to stand on, when it comes to government. We can’t define licensing and taxation through religious interpretation.
It will never be off the table because male and female will never be off the table. They are so deeply ingrained and central to humans that they will stubbornly not go away. And please answer my question about third party reproduction. That’s the 800 pound gorilla in the room, and it is not a religious issue in any way.
Third Party reproduction isn’t confined to SSM and could be addressed independently of SSM—and if it isn’t presented as an attack specifically on SSM, a debate on TPR might actually gain some traction within the GLBT camp?
What he says.
I’ve seen the movie, and as I recall, it documents a continuous battle between the public health authorities and the gay activists opposed to closing the bath houses. The idea that “socially sanctioned” coupling will convert the promiscuous into the chaste is enough to make even a hardened progressive blush.
Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone.
It’s not as if hetero couples are exactly the paragon of morality and virtue. More than 30% of hetero married couples are estimated to engage in cheating.
So, yeah, gay lifestyle is pretty bad. But it’s not like the lifestyle of everyone else is so pure. It’s almost as bad.
So what’s the point of arguing about their lifestyle? If you want to change it, go talk to them about it, or go talk to regular people around society as well for engaging in almost as much as gays do.
Or you can try and legislate it through government, and fail.
Which one is the more “Christian” or “American” thing to do?
I’ve seen the movie, and as I recall, it documents a continuous battle between the public health authorities and the gay activists opposed to closing the bath houses. The idea that “socially sanctioned” coupling will convert the promiscuous into the chaste is enough to make even a hardened progressive blush.The book is better—partly because it was written by a gay male journalist who watched the crisis unfold. I remember one part in which he quotes a group of (gay) male doctors discussing the alarming incidence of STDs they were seeing in their clinics, and how cavalier their unbelievably promiscuous patients were about these because of antibiotics. “If we got a really bad bug in this population, it would be catastrophic ” one says (or something close to that). Of course, there was already a really bad bug making the rounds—but anyway, the point is that the astonishing promiscuity of the bathhouse culture was critiqued within the gay community even before AIDS. Some indeed had the necessary perspective granted by a monogamous relationship.
Gay male sexuality, it has been said, is what male sexuality is when it is unconstrained by female sexuality. The idea being that, if you could find bath houses full of willing females, any man would be there every night. There is a certain evolutionary argument to be made for this, but the fact that gay men —even in the witless early 80’s— were forming pair-bonds that were or at least attempted to be monogamous might just indicate that male sexuality is a whole lot more complex and nuanced that we, rather insultingly, tend to presume. (We being “women,” I guess?)
Jim Kearney’s argument appears to be that you can change promiscuous homosexual lifestyles by providing “socially sanctioned” coupling legislated by government. I agree with you that such efforts will fail.
I’ve stayed out of these threads this weekend. It’s not a happy time in SoCon land, and even a few kind words from a longtime debate opponent isn’t going to help.
But it seems like Jim and Kate are mostly outnumbered here, so I’d like to support them without tossing a lit torch of controversy into a pool of emotional gasoline. I support SSM on the merits, and most on Ricochet don’t, so I’m not litigating that here.
My question is purely political: how big a deal and how lasting is the hurt? At the moment, the only two answers SoCons can give are “Very Big” and “A Long Time”. Can we try to quantify that through example, at least roughly?
Will this tear up the GOP if it refuses to address the issue in a platform plank in 2016?
Will this be Roe v. Wade, with effects lingering like radioactive Kryptonite?
The last time there was a social conservative revolution (say, from the 1973 SCOTUS decision through the election of Reagan in 1980) it was also broadly popular in the rest of the country. Are SoCons prepared for it to go differently this time? They’ve got a big power bloc, but this time it may not be big enough to be decisive. Or might it?
Again, I’m speaking politically, not religiously or sociologically.
Just because people have deeply held religious beliefs, does not mean that they cannot lobby the government to pass laws based on those beliefs, that they feel will benefit society. That is how we got the abolitionist movement in this country. So this whole oh yea you can have your ” religious freedom” but don’t impose that one the rest of us, is a strange notion in my view.
Interesting point Gary. I guess we’ll have to see how this one plays out politically, this decision could have awakened the sleeping giant and could sweep in a Ted Cruz or could crush the conservative movement, completely. But that is something to think about.
I do not agree with this. Whether winners are gracious or not is entirely up to winners. That’s true regardless of the context, in my opinion.
What a crock. Marriage isn’t for providing joys and dignities. And any “privileges” were developed for the needs of procreative marriage.
A new program with the same name but a different function is not backward compatible; my legal marriage no longer represents what it did when I married: it was unilaterally voided and removed from availability by the Supreme Court. It really is just a tax status.
Your pompous advice that we should get used to it is more obnoxious than Fred’s, which is saying something.
Darn good questions to which we really don’t have answers yet. I think the hurt may be bigger than Roe v. Wade because of some of the hijinks that went on even before the decision came down. As to how long it will last, that depends largely on how the left treats SoCons going forward. If we are to be excised from society, then we’re in for a long war. If, however, we are allowed to quietly bow out of participation in gay marriage I think things will calm down relatively soon. I hope for the latter, but I fear the former is more likely. We seemed to have settled into a restive peace in Wa until a florist told a gay couple I sell you flowers, but I can’t sell them to you for this ceremony. Then the state stepped in and all hell broke loose.
Let’s not forget that for men all the very negative possible outcomes of marriage/procreation are still extant. Heck, even looking at my own reasonably good marriage I can’t say I’d roll the dice on the proposition today.
[speaking as a member, not an editor]
Jim, I agree with a lot you say in the OP, particularly regarding the opportunity this might provide to encourage gay folks toward more bourgeois vales. Some of your comments, however, very much approach telling the losing side to tone it down while the winners party hard. Magnanimity is usually a thing to remind the victors of, not those who lost.
No, not that. Wildly promiscuous gay men tragically died for two decades. More cautious men survived. Subsequent young gay men learned from this tragedy. The community learned, through much sorrow and suffering, to be more careful.
The younger generations, including young straight men today, are more cautious and informed than men were 35 years ago about STDs and other dangers. Nevertheless, in our highly sexualized media culture, physical prowess is still celebrated, while the pharmaceutical industry slyly warns us about multiple hour side effects.
Romantic pairing is still the ideal for many in our culture. This new push for gay marriage suggests that more gay men are at least hoping for what has worked out well enough for the happily married straights, committed lesbian partners, and quarrelsome but living old queens around them.
I’m sure there’s more than a few historians who would disagree with you on your last point.
And certainly you can try to pass whatever laws you want. The point is, is it going to work? Let’s just say that the evidence isn’t pointing in that direction, and hasn’t for a very long time.
Ultimately I see no “loss” of much (other than egos). No one is getting hurt from gays getting a government license. The abortion comparison is not adequate for obvious reasons.
Ultimately, “get with the times Repubs!” isn’t simply about snobbery or an attempt to appear in line with Liberals. It’s a statement on reality. Observed reality. These attempts to legislate behavior always fail. They are also usually argued wrong. And one can argue are also outside of the scope of government in the first place.
And practically, they end up alienating people who otherwise would gladly vote for Republicans.
So in this case the argument becomes: are “conservatives” interested in preserving “tradition” for its own sake? Or do they accept that “traditions” may be changed, and often do change? Was the transfer of the institution of “marriage” from individual/church to the government…not all that long ago…already a step away from the “tradition” we claim to hold on to?
To quote Tina, what’s love got to do with it? Society’s stake in marriage never had a darned thing to do with love. Society doesn’t give a rat’s behind whether a couple loves each other or not. Society only cares that their spawn become civilized. Granted, that is an easier outcome when the couple has an emotional bond, but that is icing, not cake.
I don’t buy this notion that if only the republicans change their view on abortion or now on traditional marriage we’ll pick up more votes from people who would vote republican if their stance on the social issues were more aligned with the democrats. I reject that because the democrat party fiscally speaking is really far to the left, they are pretty much full throated socialists. So you mean to tell me that these folks would rather socialism and live under the same economic conditions of California or New York then not vote for someone who believes that marriage is between a man and woman and marriage licenses should really only be determined by the states, (because that is the stand of most conservatives that the STATES should determine this issue not 5 lawyers) and that babies in the womb have a inalienable right to life and we should restrict some of the abortion done in this country( because due to those lawyers in black robes abortion will never be illegal in this country as long as roe v wade is still in place). So I don’t get it those people are just liberals who want to keep more of their money, the will never vote republican.
Also if the republicans do change their stance they will lose the majority of their base and never win an election again. But they may lose some donors in blue states.
Yes, that’s why I re-tweeted the quote from Doug McIntyre, and closed my article with his thought for the winners.
The “sin” talk and categorical moral judgement about gay and lesbian sexuality per se is something which I do find objectionable at all times.
We are united in our condemnation of gender and orientation-based intolerance when it happens in starker terms halfway around the world. It is disheartening when Republicans would brand the party in a way which makes it easier for Democrats to characterize us as zealots and bigots. Aren’t conservatives the ones who want to identify and fight those who would kill in the name of religious doctrine?
Then there’s the simple pragmatism of this matter, the upcoming election cycle. A quieter social conservative component sensitive to the will of the electorate will enable Republicans to adjust our focus and branding to the more youthful, forward-leaning strategy which I believe will be necessary to defeat the Democrats in 2016.