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Made to Care: The Illiberality of LGBT Politics
The subtitle to this piece could have been: We Told You So.
We marriage defenders said, “You can either have religious freedom/freedom of conscience or same-sex ‘marriage,’ but not both.” You may be asking, “Why is she bringing that up again? Does she want to restart the SSM wars?” It’s because the Culture Wars are back in the news, and not just in the US, but throughout “advanced” (beyond the truth) societies of the West.
Here at home, the Colorado baker is going to have his day at the Supreme Court. It only remains to be seen if Justice Anthony “Obergefell” Kennedy will decide in favor of the First Amendment or his own misguided redefinition of marriage. Even if he decides the baker gets to keep his freedom of conscience, he may do so on very narrow grounds that the baker has freedom of “creative expression” as an artist, and not so much freedom of association as implicitly guaranteed by the First Amendment.
And then there’s Rocklin Academy. Even kindergartners must be made to conform to the ascendant transgender confusion. Their teacher read I am Jazz and Red: A Crayon’s Story before the big reveal of their classmate as a trans-girl. Neither the teacher nor the administration thought it important to inform the students’ parents before teaching the kids that blue is red, or boys can be girls, if they feel like it. Notice a trend here?
LGBT politics isn’t about “marriage equality” or transgender rights. It is an attack on objective truth and an empowerment of authorities at all levels to coerce speech and thought. Marriage has always been a legitimization of male/female conjugal unions because it is in the interests of individuals and society to attach the naturally occurring offspring of such unions to their parents in family units. That was widely understood as the truth of marriage – the accepted social reality. Up until Obergefell (and, leading up to it, gay adoption), we, as individuals and as a society, were allowed to remain indifferent to naturally sterile relationships between homosexuals. No more. We are being forced to care.
It’s the same with the minuscule fraction of people with gender dysphoria. While their condition is tragic for these individuals and the people who love them, their impact on society was negligible until now. Now laws are being passed to compel speech in the form of “preferred pronouns” (ref: Jordan Peterson, Canada), and children are having their world turned upside down by the revision of what is so obviously true: a person with a penis (and XY chromosomes) is a boy, and a person without a penis (and XX chromosomes) is a girl. One might even say, “it’s science!”
These are just isolated anecdotes, you say? Ha! Let’s look at what happens when a nation caves to the LGBT agenda.
In Great Britain, the slide into unreality moves apace. The “Ministry of Equality” has expressed support for a proposal to allow gender reassignment surgery without any medical consultation as building on the “progress” of same-sex “marriage.” Also from an “equalities” minister: “I feel we’ll only have proper equal marriage when you can bloody well get married in a church if you want to do so, without having to fight the church for the equality that should be your right.” The leader of the Liberal Democrats was forced to resign despite voting for SSM, because his Christian belief that marriage is between a man and a woman is intolerable in politics and must be publicly denounced. Further, Christians are being excluded from foster parenting because, “The equality provisions concerning sexual orientation should take precedence.” You can’t make this shtuff up. So now homosexual couples will be able to foster and adopt, but people of religious conviction won’t. “Family” is now anything but a man and a woman loving their children in a faith-filled home.
We live in such stupid times.
Published in Culture
I know you do. That’s why it’s my assessment. And in any event, I hope it illustrates that I’m not equating marriage deprivation with slavery, which is what I was accused of.
I am. I will not reopen the ssm debate, and going further would require it. So you are correct that there are taxes applicable to non married people which married people can avoid. I would say it’s not and never was completely unavoidable, so therefore not patently wrong. To the extent you are correct, I don’t think changing civil marriage was the answer, I think there were better answers and fixes.
Well, now, Scalia is an interesting case, because he could really be quite deferential to precedent, even when he thought the precedent bad. Certainly, Scalia was deferential to precedent on economic matters (annoyingly so, is my impression). By now, one very well-received precedent is the “right to privacy” based on the 4th Amendment “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects”. Public indecency is one thing. Expecting to have a right to the quiet enjoyment of corrupting a child in one’s own home is also one thing. But once a right to privacy is established, it does seem very strange to punish sexual behavior that’s neither publicly indecent nor involves minors.
I was happy with the Lochner-era approach that relied on substantive due process to protect economic rights. I know some consider substantive due process an oxymoron, but I don’t, although it certainly can be abused. Incorporation seems the natural consequence of including the 14th Amendment, as both critics and supporters of ratifying the 14th Amendment supposed it would do. And apparently,
Is the law limited to statutes, courtroom procedures, and just the enumerated bits of the Constitution, or is the law also meant to include what’s alluded to in the Ninth Amendment? Is our law meant to inherit the deference to “common right and reason” that holds statues that violate it unlawful? I think it is. (It’s interesting, though that an article proposed to be included in the Bill of Rights didn’t get any farther than it did, but maybe not surprising, considering no state had requested it:
It’s well and good to say it’s better when legislatures take care of these matters rather than the courts. I agree. But the caricature of judges as vultures thwarting the will of the people by keeping legislators (who are somehow not vultures in this scenario) in check is not one I happen to agree with. If judges are vultures, so are legislators. If left to their own devices, legislators will infringe on “the Rights of Englishmen” which our Constitution seems to take for granted rather than repudiate. Judges are supposed to keep that from happening. That Progressive judgery has perverted this purpose doesn’t mean it’s right for judges to abdicate their duty to it. Conservatives seemed pretty happy with McDonald v Chicago, and we’re evidently very dependent on religious-freedom exemptions (especially now that courts are over-deferential to the legislature on several important rights). We see the point of one set of vultures pecking down the other set when the pecking goes in our favor.
The first side that plays the slavery card owns it. Them’s the rules.
Thanks for the thousandth introduction to the incorporation fiction created 135 years after the ratification of our Constitution. Created 60 years after the 14th Amendment. Substantive due process is a liberal myth and the seventy-five year relentless campaign to incrementally impose a leftist conception of the Bill of Rights on every state and local government in a manner which does not “shock the conscience” (in Frankfurter’s stage directions) has been disastrous for conservatism, especially conservatarianism.
Dude, that is harsh!
Basil Fawlty, an you accept I lay a geas on you to write a fabulous original post, because I like your writing and I think that I and the rest of Ricochet would immensely enjoy it.
Midget, you are working out of a pleasant, personal Constitutional grab bag. A little bit of precedent here, some well-received recent discoveries, some retrieved dicta, a little shadowy penumbra, a few learned dips into English common law, a false dichotomy with repellent behavior and a quick bypass of the distinction between elected legislators and judges legislating from the bench.
You accomplish it with very appealing erudition and intellectual liveliness.
But you don’t arrive at anything like conservative constitutionalism.
You arrive at the sort of temperament and talented outlook which should be making decisions in our state legislatures.
PS: I support the rights of parents to corrupt their children (most parents placing their child in a madrassa do); it’s the price paid to home school my children for freedom.
A geas, eh? Thank you for the kind words, Zafar. I’ll think about it but I’ve never been very good at spelling.
Your spelling is excellent.
I think buried in all that evasion is an acknowledgement that the claim that we could have freely commingled assets was false. Yes, the tax was avoidable. I could have declined to support my spouse. Or I could have broken the law. If you know of a third way, Mr. Accountant, to avoid the tax, I’d be all ears.
(And of course we agree that eliminating the byzantine gift and estate tax system would have been nice, but I was talking about the world as it is, not as I’d like it to be. If we get to live in a world as I’d like it to be, I’ve got a long list of suggestions.)
I am pointing out that what you call a Constitutional grab bag already exists. I don’t know if you noticed it, but “once a right to privacy is established, it does seem very strange to punish sexual behavior that’s neither publicly indecent nor involves minors” is a conditional statement.
The Slaughterhouse dissent was in the right, the Lochner era was in the right. The Progressives who repudiated Lochner, pleading deference to legislatures on our less “sexy” rights were wrong. That’s pretty conservative. Indeed, pretty conservatarian.
What Peckham said was, “Under that provision no state shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The right to purchase or to sell labor is part of the liberty protected by this amendment.” Of course the New Deal Justices thought Peckham was nuts, or evil. Oliver Wendell Holmes (progenitor of the hugely-inflated rational basis test)
What we learn from our judicial history – especially regarding slavery and antiblack laws, but not limited to them – is that the Privileges and Immunities Clause, the Impairment of Contract Clause, the Takings Clause, etc, aren’t worth two bits if the due process in the 14th Amendment, which is meant to reassert these rights for all Americans (the Privileges and Immunities Clause evidently having proved most unfortunately toothless by itself), is merely procedural. What’s procedural due process? You get fair notice, a hearing before an impartial judge – but, as our own history has quite painfully taught us, not a hearing before a judge who’s obligated to respect
The rightful use of substantive due process, IMO, is to obligate justices to be not just “impartial” (which in practice includes being willing to pretend that legislation which violates these rights could be just as good as the rights themselves), but to actually enforce these these rights, not pretend that laws violating these rights are just as good as the rights themselves.
Yes, the Privileges and Immunities Clause provides a way the Constitution could be interpreted to make the 14th Amendment and incorporation unnecessary. Unfortunately, the Constitution failed to be interpreted that way often enough for the privileges and immunities the citizens of all states should enjoy (no matter what kind of crazy stunts their state tries to pull) to no longer be protected by the Privileges and Immunities Clause itself. Perhaps the 14th Amendment should have read, “You know the Privileges and Immunities Clause? Well, we meant it. For everyone!“? ;-P
Substantive due process did not have to be about granting the courts license to invent new rights. Obviously Progressive justices have abused it to create fictitious rights (which revolts me as much as you). Substantive due process should be about acknowledging, though, that the courts should be bound to enforce our real fundamental rights – because as history has painfully proved, time and time again, neither citizen nor judge can rely on legislators for that enforcement.
What you’re not seeing is that you won! Your side won! You got gay marriage. Yay you. It was not necessary to destroy Christian businesses in order to get gay marriage. Those weren’t the opposing choices. The reason it’s happening is simple vindictiveness. Had your side been happy with victory, things likely would have settled down just fine. But too many on your side were not simply happy in victory.
What you don’t see is that you’re presuming to tell me who “my side” is. I was on their side w/r/t marriage equality. I’m theoretically on yours when it comes to destroying these businesses. It’s just that some of the people on your (our) side on that issue are so nasty that they make it hard to care very much and uncomfortable to be associated with them.
The latter. SSM merely exposed how those laws could be so easily abused.
In fairness, though, @mjbubba and others are correct that one of the (predicted) effects of passing SSM was that it would make it easier for these old laws to be abused in this way.
The problem, however, is those damn old laws.
Good luck getting them repealed. They’re the flagships of the civil rights movement.
For crying out loud Cato. No, no evasion and no admission that the broad claim was false. Apparently you had specific instances of commingling in mind which I did not and vice versa.
Good luck un-marrying Cato and his husband.[Self-redacted.]
Wha???
Why did you quote Randy to make it sound like he was wishing to have ssm repealed, when he was responding to your point that anti-discrimination laws are the problem?
Am I missing something?
^I regret the above already and [offer my apologies].
I’m really perplexed with where this leaves us.
These laws (in their current forms and under current circumstances) are a direct threat to liberty, both in general and in particular against the religious liberty of observant Christians. But, when presented with ready and willing allies on it, you shrug, say it’s hopeless, and go back to lamenting the injustice of the situation.
From whom?
Well, specifically, to Randy.
Perhaps your wording is confusing.
If I ask for an apology, then I am the Wronged Party, rather than the Offender, who should offer apology. So your wording sounds as though you are asking for an apology from Randy rather than offering an apology to Randy.
Idiomatic preposition stuff; small but meaningful.
Perhaps “make apology” would be clearer?
My screw-up. I apologize to Randy.
Better and shorter. E.B. White smiles.
So far there are only a few “extremists” on our side who have spoken about amending our anti-discrimination laws. I think every public statement to this effect has been made by someone who is on the SPLC list of hate groups.
None of the GOP Squishes want to be on record as even listening to these people.
Ready and willing allies are welcome, and so rare that we didn’t recognize the offer.
That doesn’t narrow it down at all. ; )
I support repealing those laws. I understand your religious liberty concerns and I sympathize with them, but they are just one special case of the broader problem – that anti-discrimination laws have turned into an all purpose cudgel that permits federal, state and local civil rights bureaucracies to micro-manage everyone’s commercial activities.
Thank you very much, Cato R.
Yes; if we fight for Christian bakers and florists on the basis of their First Amendment right to the Free Exercise of their Religion, then we leave on the table their First Amendment right to freely Associate with others as they choose.
We are facing a First Amendment crisis. Individual liberties are in peril.
We need all the ready and willing allies we can find.