The Supreme Court punts on gay marriage
Which is also a decision, because the trend in the lower courts is to declare its ban unconstitutional:
Jonathan Adler writes that the Supreme Court might still take a case in the future, but I don’t see how that is realistic considering how expansive the pending cases were in terms of geography. In the states for which review was sought there will be marriages undertaken, a complicating factor if the court were to rule in the future that same-sex marriage bans were not unconstitutional.
The Court’s refusal to hear the issue was a surprise to most SCOTUS-watchers. You might call it cowardice, or you might call it lack of activism. But refusing to hear cases on which lower courts have been activist is not a lack of activism, either, it’s a lack of action.
I haven’t studied each case in depth, but it appears that they involve state appeals courts overruling anti-gay-marriage referenda passed by the people in each state, and declaring those bans invalid for constitutional reasons. That’s a troubling way for the gay marriage issue to be decided. The trend of public opinion has most definitely been for gay marriage to become more and more accepted, and one might think that as time went on more and more states would drop their bans because their populations would vote to allow gay marriage. The state courts are forcing this process, despite the fact that the arguments for the unconstitutionality of gay marriage bans is not strong.
It is somewhat akin to the history of abortion. Roe v. Wade was a stretch in the legal sense, positing a right to privacy that did not exist in the Constitution as written. And this despite the fact that the trend in the states was to allow abortion in more and more states; it had already become legal under certain circumstance in twenty states prior to the SCOTUS decision.
[NOTE: My own opinion on gay marriage can be found in this post from about a year and a half ago, particularly in the “Note” at the end of it.]
Such a small percentage of the population is exclusively gay that few people will actually take advantage of the right to gay marriage. It was just an attempt to pretend to be like everybody else.
Does “gay” marriage include lesbian marriage? It’s all homosexual, but the groups are distinct. I’m surprised that this patriarchal classification has not created internal conflicts. Also, the issue is really selective exclusion, which normalization of homosexual behavior does not address, and in fact exacerbates.
There are also the moral ambiguities related to womb banks and sperm deposits, but those first arose from heterosexual demand. Still, they are uniquely relevant, as homosexual men and women seek a Posterity, and force a perception of normality.
Roe v. Wade was argued under the First Amendment, specifically the religious clause. The privacy aspect is related to the practice of a sincerely held faith. In Roe v. Wade, the article of faith is that human life is the product of spontaneous conception. That people of diverse faiths are eligible to determine the beginning of life according to their sincerely held belief.
Actually, it’s not even an article of faith. The evolution (i.e. chaotic process) of human life is uncontroversial. It begins with conception (i.e. source) and ends with a natural, accidental, or premeditated death (i.e. sink). The source and sink in an evolutionary process have a diametrically opposed character. Roe v. Wade was argued on the basis of a deeply held but self-evidently false myth.
This is a giant step towards the Islamization of the USA. The courts have already overruled referendums which deny Sharia law legal standing in the USA. One major step in instituting Sharia law is the establishment of polygamy.
Since the courts have jettisoned the traditional definition of marriage there is no justification for them to oppose Polygamy especially when Muslims claim that it is mandated in the Koran and hadiths and that it is bigoted to deny Muslims the free exercise of their religion. On the other hand, since the left longs to Islamize the country, they will ensure that Christians will lose their freedoms even when they point out that they have a Biblically reason to refuse to participate in gay marriage.
If limiting marriage to a man and woman is unconstitutional discrimination, then upon what legal basis is the banning of any form of plural marriage not also unconstitutional discrimination?
My concern is with the psychological welfare of children in ‘marriages’ outside of the traditional norm. Gay and lesbian ‘parents’ cannot, by definition, provide an opposite gender role model for their children. That has to have a decidedly negative impact.
Plural marriage would unearth a Pandora’s box of concerns regarding children.
“A model of parenthood dominated by the mandate to satisfy the parents’ needs rather than those of the children will be forever defective.” Kevin D. Williamson
“The grandchild, far from being incidental, is decisive. Civilization persists when there is a widespread sense of an ethical obligation on the part of the present generation for the well-being of the third generation –their own grandchildren. A society where this feeling is not widespread may last as a civilization for some time–indeed, for one or two generations it might thrive spectacularly. But inevitably, a society acknowledging no trans-generational commitment to the future will decay and decline from within.” Lee Harris, “The Future of Tradition”
Agreed that it opens the door to plural marriage.
Regarding the Note in the link you posted, my experience in the gay community is that you’re right. I don’t really know a whole lot of lesbians, so I can’t speak from experience there, but gay men of my generation (20s/early 30s) are totally on board with the “heteronormative” ideal: get married, have kids (either through adoption or surrogacy), and raise your kids in a monogamous two-parent household (and, for many, rear your kids in the Church/Synagogue).
The caveat to this is that my experience comes from a gay community that is overwhelmingly middle- or upper-middle-class and white. And this is simply being consistent with the rest of the middle- and upper-middle-class white community, where everyone else’s romantic life is also primarily concerned with finding a spouse and having kids.
As for the rest of the gay community–black men, Latinos, poor white gays–I have no idea. I suspect that they are subject to the same forces that have drastically lowered church attendance and marriage rates in those communities, but I don’t have any figures to back that up.
But, I thought it was worth sharing that legalizing gay marriage most certainly has made a difference in normalizing the “get married, have 2.5 kids and go to church” structure among gay men. And in doing so, it’s de-normalized promiscuity in the same community. Not completely, obviously, but it’s certainly a far cry from the days when promiscuous, anonymous sex was the norm among the same middle- or upper-middle-class white gay men.
Definite cowards. Only need 4 votes for cert.
John Roberts is my suspect as Alito, Thomas and Scalia would have voted to hear a case.
A split in the circuits is not required. Issue is very important and had very high public interest.
Question: Where will HuffPo and Yahoo news get content now?
And Kennedy and the four Dems let the Circuits do their dirty work.
Happy to be in NE.
Geoffrey Britain:
The leftist conception of diversity demands an unambiguous male and female representative to head each family. Suddenly, they recognize diversity of individuals. How convenient.
They also demonstrate a distinct disrespect for the product of evolution. Nature has seen fit to make the human species “bicameral”.
The progressive dysfunction engendered by selective exclusion was predictable.
The progressive dysfunction engendered by shifting science to a universal frame and elevating the human ego was predictable.
This is how competing faiths interact. They seek to marginalize or eviscerate the other order.
Plural marriage is a lock. It starts in the Northeast where nearly all the judges are Dems and Ivies.
No way around it for Muslims who assert a “religious” reason.
This is not about marriage. This is about [forced] normalization of dysfunctional, deviant, and fetish behaviors. The slippery slope is not normalization of behaviors per se, but the selective exclusion of behaviors. They adopted a progressive/incremental model in order to avoid a revolution, and they still need to force normalization. And that does not preclude or mitigate the moral hazards created through selective exclusion.
This issue is far from settled. The incongruencies will be progressive and cumulative, and eventually there will be a convergence, which will need to be reconciled by future generations. Sounds familiar? Progressivism/incrementalism is an immoral policy/ideology.
“This is about [forced] normalization of dysfunctional, deviant, and fetish behaviors.”
Yes it is but… while the tactic is the same, the strategic goal varies according to the particular interest group on the left.
Sympathetic heterosexual liberals simply see it as a matter of equality and naively imagine that it can be stopped at two individuals marrying or willfully proclaim that there should be few to no limitations on whom may marry. They deny even the possibility of any negative impacts upon children.
The LGBT community is using same-sex marriage as a tactical means to enforce societal acceptance of LGBT individuals and their behavioral ‘lifestyle’. Full acceptance and nothing less will do, means full societal approval.
The hard core left is using same-sex marriage as a means to attack the cultural infrastructure of America.
“Destroy the family, you destroy the country.” Vladimir Lenin
they found a penumbra in roe v wade, to apply write to privacy… they LOST the penumbra and right to privacy in the ACA…
Plural marriage would unearth a Pandora’s box of concerns regarding children.
it was more the norm prior to the modern era…
harems, and all manner of plural groups were the more common arrangements as men of power and strength and means kept many wives and barely appeared as role models for their kids.
however, to add to GOBs thing as to the children, the public pc talk as to health of children in homosexual relationships does NOT match what the research has found, any more than what research shows about IQ among groups, and so on and so forth
Agreed that it opens the door to plural marriage.
which is interesting since the feminists fought to destroy plural marraige, and by their fight with LGBT they have erased all arguments against it. not to mention bestial marraiges, and marraiges to inanimates like robots.
aint logic a biatch…
Grand Seraglio of Ottoman Sultan:
The Imperial Harem of the Ottoman Empire occupied one of the large sections of the private apartments of the sultan at the Topkapi Palace which encompassed more than 400 rooms. While no official numbers exist on the number of its inmates, it massive size can be gauged on the basis of the fact at the height of its power, there were around six to eight hundred eunuchs serving in the harem
Ismail ibn Sharif:
had more than five hundred concubines
King Tamba of Benaras:
It is believed that his harem included some sixteen thousand inmates and was presided over by the chief queen Sussondi.
Sultan Ghiyas-ud-Din Kilji:
harem numbered fifteen thousand4 and required him to build a separate walled city to house them. In fact, Jahaz Mahal, today one of the prime attractions of Mandu
King Mongkut of Siam
housed his nine thousand women5 in a totally contained city with its own government, recreational facilities, and a theater.
Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan had six Mongolian wives, the first being Borte of the Onggirat tribe to whom he was affianced when only nine years old. Later, he went on to establish a large harem and he married many daughters of foreign kings, even though Bé¶rte would be his only empress. Apparently the inmates of his harem numbered anything between two to three thousand
Emperor Jehangir:
maintained a harem of over one thousand women At the same time, Jahangir also kept close to another thousand young man-in-waiting for those times when his appetite tended toward the other gender.
Ashoka
kept a harem of around five hundred women
Montezuma II
kept four thousand concubines. every member of the Aztec nobility was supposed to have had as many consorts as he could afford
Amenophis III
started a harem with Tiy, his one Great Wife. Eventually he went on to add two Syrian princesses, two Babylonian princesses, one Arzawa princess, “droves” of Egyptian women, and two princesses from Mitanni, one of whom alone brought along 317 ladies-in-waiting.
the above is the largest. but if you know history, you can find thousands of such examples. even the james clavel novel Tai Pan shows that prior to westerners, asian merchants had “as many wives as they could afford” which is the usual measure…
note that today, given feminism, the wealthy have a harem of thousands and thousands, because the harem earns its own money and believes they can be wife number one.
for the more common man, having a few wives after the number one was common.
if you look to the mormon practice, it again is about what you can afford. in general each wife gets her own living space.
in general though, only the top few got any special anything, the rest were just genetic seeding of the population
do not think that this does not make much difference, about 1 in 200 men are related to Genghis kahn.
usually are opinions are not well informed when they have to take in external cultures and history as the majority of western people have no freaking idea of such, and only come across such as part of curiosity books and fun facts…
Roosevelt had 5 children (one died)
Nanci Pelosi has 5 children
Sarah Palin has 5 children
2nd generation Kennedy had 9 children, JFK had 3
Robert and Ethel Kennedy had 11
John Mccain – 7 children
Mitt Romney – 5 children
the point of feminism is to limit families who when large can aquire power by being able to trust together, and so would be a threat to people like the above or other such families.
if you look up large families in politics, you get dems complaining about republicans having large families, but completely ignoring dems who have them
The Political Graveyard
The Political Graveyard is a website and database that catalogues information on more than 224,000 American political figures and political families, along with other information
A large number of politicians belong to two families, which are connected into a group of 1347 politicians known as the “Thousand Related Politicians”. Most large families are a subset of it,the largest family that is not a subset are the Polk-Ashes, with 47 members. The largest subset family are the Seymour-Roosevelts, with 154 members.
the things the little people dont know…
gay marraige is just one more way to limit the ability of another family cropping up like polk ashes and fighting for a place in the power structure
Artfldgr at 3:47 pm,
“Plural marriage would unearth a Pandora’s box of concerns regarding children.”
“it was more the norm prior to the modern era…
harems, and all manner of plural groups were the more common arrangements as men of power and strength and means kept many wives”
It’s true that men of status in many societies had many offspring by many women. Arguably however, that has never been the ‘norm’ because men of ‘influence and wealth’ are always in a distinct minority. Even in Muslim societies, relatively few men had the wealth to support multiple wives.
There’s a fair consensus among developmental psychologists of the importance of parental role models of each sex for optimum child development. Same-sex marriage cannot provide that, lesbians cannot role model being a father nor gay men, being a mother. What do gay men know about the concerns of a young teenage girl? Conversely, what do two lesbians know about becoming a man?
The whole purpose of a parental role model is to provide a profound example to the children of the kind of man or woman that the child should seek to aspire to be and, of those qualities that should be sought in a future partner. Since 95-98% of the children of same-sex couples will be heterosexual, same-sex couple’s parental role modeling, by definition is half incomplete.
Plural marriage just makes a ‘scrambled egg’ of the whole developmental process. That no one who advocates marriage outside a one man, one woman relationship ever starts with the children’s welfare reveals these ‘alternative lifestyles’ to be parental need-based rather than child need-based.
On another note, I assume ‘GOB’ refers to Geoffrey ‘of’ Britain. FWIW, My ancestry is primarily Portuguese/French with a number of other nationalities thrown into the genetic mix but born and raised American. Two tours of the western pacific courtesy of the USN but have never been across “the pond”. My ‘handle’ is a nom de plume based on my actual first name and the onomatology of my actual surname.
A Pew poll done in September showed that 49% of Americans support same-sex marriage, down from 54% from a Pew poll done in February.
An outlier? Or are the lawsuits against bakers and florists having an impact on public opinion?
Artfldgr said:
“Plural marriage would unearth a Pandora’s box of concerns regarding children.”
You didn’t notice? I suppose with all that was going with our mad lemming-like rush toward the cliffs of cultural and societal suicide it’s understandable. Opening up Pandora’s box and dumping out the contents didn’t even register as a speed bump with most people.
http://blogs.lawyers.com/2013/10/in-california-more-than-2-parents/
“After a convoluted case in which a lesbian couple and a biological father all claimed parental rights to a child made its way through the state’s courts, California has passed a law allowing children to have more than two legal parents…”
The problem of plural marriage and any concerns about child welfare have been solved, now that Heather can have three mommies and four daddies, or whatever.
Ann said:
“A Pew poll done in September showed that 49% of Americans support same-sex marriage, down from 54% from a Pew poll done in February.
An outlier? Or are the lawsuits against bakers and florists having an impact on public opinion?”
Given that the much publicized “widespread support” for SSM never actually shows up on election day when people are given the chance to vote on the issue, I’m convinced that actually measuring public opinion was never the point of the polls.
Rather, it was to convince the courts that by imposing SSM on the electorate they were giving the people what they wanted.
The vital thing was to make sure SSM never again got on the ballot so the people couldn’t prove pollsters like Pew wrong.
Yeah, evolutionary fitness, contrary to popular misconceptions, is not necessarily a species-wide principle. The people advocating for “planned parenthood” are well informed indeed, and they are ruthless with, of course, “good intentions”.
Steve57:
They’re approaching the logical conclusion: all relationships are corporate. Children are an asset and/or employees of the corporation headed by the parents or guardians. Abortion is a fiduciary act of liquidating unwanted or burdensome assets. They may also be terminated or expunged through reduction in force.
And the future of banking… womb banks (aka “surrogates”) and sperm depositors (aka “men”). The metaphor perfectly captures the degradation of human life to a commodity.
Constitutional right implies an immutability and permanence that popular legislation does not.
It used to imply that, Eric. But that was before we were saddled with a living, breathing Constitution that changed with the times as interpreted by our black-robed, appointed-for-life priests. Who might as well be interpreting the entrails of sacrificial goats.
“Constitutional right implies an immutability and permanence that popular legislation does not.”
Once you reject the existence of a creator there can be no basis for unalienable, immutable, permanent rights. What the mob grants, the whim of the mob may later take away.
Zamzam,
Your experience with the gay community seems to be anomalous, see, for example, here (and the linked study): http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/open_monogamy/
Also see the Mark Regnerus study of children raised in homosexual households: “How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study”
(BTW, the Regnerus study pretty much is consistent with a large body of research indicating that compared to heterosexuals, homosexuals and homosexual couples have significantly higher rates of all sorts of relational and physical problems. And no, it’s not due to discrimination)
Any group should be able declare itself married when any members of the group or member’s guardians can consent to marriage, which should allow homosexual marriage, various poly- marriages, pedo-(also called Islamic or Mohammedan-marriage), xeno-, sado-, etc. as long as no one in word, thought, or deed, including policy or commerce, is intimidated, coerced, or compelled to pretend they believe in forms of marriage deplorable to them.
I’ve found that many libertarians are happy to have the state enforce morality, as long is it’s their morality. That is, they hate their chosen enemies more than they love their freedom.
In this Internet age, it should be possible to create “rape” marriage. According to Nancy Friday, many women have rape fantasies. So there is a dating service waiting to be born: women (and probably a few men) who want to be raped, and men (and if the activities of school teachers are to be believed,a few women) who want to rape. To be rape-married would place matched partners’ behaviors beyond the interest of Law.
The lawsuits have already been filed (in Utah!) against the prohibition of polygamy. The prohibition on incest will soon follow. If a state may not prohibit same-sex marriage, how can it prevent anything?
There is a greater loss here, than just traditional marriage. It is that the democratic process no longer means anything. Is there anyone who can doubt that the authors of and voters for the 14th Amendment in 1868 had no idea that it meant that same-sex marriage was now enshrined in the Constitution. (Had they known that, there would be no 14th Amendment.)
How did that become so? Judges declared it to be so, overruling, in many cases, the expressed result of the voters on a subject which had never been thought to be a matter of federal law.
In other words, there is no longer any limit on the power of the federal judiciary, the 9th and 10th Amendments have been superceded, and the next time an idea becomes popular among the lefty elite (guaranteed income? carbon tax? nationalize industry? sharia law?) the judges will say it’s in the Constitution, or at least in the “penumbras and enurbations.”
I’d like to wake up and say this was all a bad dream caused by re-reading a Tom Kratman novel, but alas, it’s all too real.