jasongpeirce
07-01-2015, 03:38 PM
The Gay and Not So Gay of the SCOTUS Marriage Rulinghttp://www.voicesofliberty.com/article/the-gay-and-not-so-gay-of-the-scotus-marriage-ruling/
July 1, 2015—Walking the Santa Barbara Harbor last Friday evening, the day of the Supreme Court’s landmark 5-4 ruling striking down state bans on gay marriage, I passed a middle-aged lesbian couple walking hand-in-hand, wide awake, quietly beaming, radiating joy. I was happy for them.
One of the women was wearing a t-shirt reading “Yay for Gay!” spelled-out in the LGBT’s very fashionable and conspicuously bold rainbow colors. Perhaps not coincidently, Friday was June 26, the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s speech concerning the Supreme Court’s controversial decision on Dred Scott v. Sanford.
“What else should I say? Everyone is gay,” sang Kurt Cobain in Nirvana’s 1993 hit “All Apologies.” What does that line mean to you? Interestingly, the song was released as a double A-side with the song “Rape Me” seven months before Cobain took his own life in April of 1994. Cobain is said to have dedicated “All Apologies” to his wife and daughter because of the song’s mood, described by Cobain as “peaceful, happy, comfort.”
But of course, songs, like all art, mean different things to different people, and those meanings can change over time. So can words, to the point where as Judge Antonin Scalia noted on SCOTUS’s recent Obamacare ruling the day before the gay marriage ruling: “words no longer have meaning.”
Perhaps it’s not that words no longer have meaning but more that words, like art, flags, and Supreme Court rulings, mean different things to different people. Which brings us back to the SCOTUS gay marriage ruling. There is a bit of good and plenty of bad about the ruling.
First, the good: the ruling has made millions of both gay and straight Americans very happy because gays can now marry in every state in the union. My daughter’s godfather, an American white man old enough to remember the wide and rampant social discrimination as well as the government’s institutional persecution of gays, is one of the millions who is very happy. Sadly his husband, an American black man who knew the same kind of persecution and discrimination (and-then-some because of the color of his skin) is not alive to share in the joy of the ruling.
I think of all those who are no longer with us today who would be so profoundly affected by the fact that if they were here, they could finally marry the soul-mates and loves-of-their-lives in every state across America – the long-alleged but hardly-realized “Land of the Free.”
Now, the not good. Anyone with a brain can imagine the (unintended?) consequences which will surely follow. Dissenting Judge Samuel Alito made a strong, logical case that the decision “will be used to vilify Americans unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy.” Alito continued:
“I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools… By imposing its own views on the entire country, the majority facilitates the marginalization of the many Americans who have traditional ideas.”
How do new, persecuted and discriminated classes of people come into being? The same two ways Ernest Hemingway said people become bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.”
If you’re still reading this, you probably care enough about the issue to understand all angles of the constitutional arguments at play, so I won’t spend much time on that. With that said, is marriage not a right? And what’s the role of the federal government, if any, when it comes to marriage? Should Justice Kennedy have heeded Kurt Cobain: “What else should I write? I don’t have the right”?
What it comes down to is that the SCOTUS decision is not a win for liberty. This decision increases the power of the court and the federal government. That is not good, at all.
The worst of this is the fact that so many Americans don’t have a problem with government involvement in marriage to begin with. Think about it: we have to ask our government permission to get married. We leave it to our government to define and dictate what a legitimate relationship is. This is absurd in a nation which prides itself as the “Land of the Free.” It’s especially absurd because state marriage licenses themselves are rooted in 19th century racist efforts to restrict inter-racial marriages. In a free country, consenting adult human beings should be allowed to form marriage contracts with whomever they want without government intervention. Private civil marriage contracts could provide what government intervention advocates argue is necessary for the members of a marriage to enjoy the full-fruits of the marriage. No one needs the government involved in their marriage.
Groucho Marx astutely noted: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” Politics itself – government itself – proves Marx correct time and again. It will prove to have done so again with the topic at hand. We must learn that the remedy for trouble is liberty, not politics or government.
Now, I agree with the conservative view that the family is the basic, essential unit of society, and that marriage matters. But it’s not the gender composition of the marriage binding the family that matters, it’s the degree of love in the marriage. On the other side, many liberals point to the bigotry and intolerance of many conservatives who claim to be Christian. These charges certainly have merit. Whatever the case, the battle over marriage will most certainly heat-up, despite the SCOTUS decision. At the root of the battle is that both conservatives and liberals say they love their country. And so, here’s my message to both conservatives and liberals: if you love something, set it free.
In closing, I want to share one more story. On Sunday my wife and I took our family to church – the church where my son was baptized. The church reverend is a woman who is married to another woman. They’re raising a beautiful, joy-filled child. At any rate, the preacher this past Sunday rendered a powerful sermon centering on a man she grew to know years ago at her former church in Los Angeles. He was a brilliant mathematician and astronomer, though socially he was shyly, awkwardly inept. But as they grew to know each other, she taught him how to better express himself, and he taught her about the gloriously dazzling brilliance of the universe. He also finally told her, well into their relationship, that if it wasn’t for the community and love he came to find in the church, he would have taken his own life years before, consumed by his own incommunicable pain and loneliness.
I know there may not be much here, or in liberty itself, for either conservatives or liberals to like. This can even be said for some who call themselves libertarian. But I want liberty — and love for that matter — for all Americans. If this offends you, all I can offer is the most appropriate All Apologies I can think of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWmkuH1k7uA
July 1, 2015—Walking the Santa Barbara Harbor last Friday evening, the day of the Supreme Court’s landmark 5-4 ruling striking down state bans on gay marriage, I passed a middle-aged lesbian couple walking hand-in-hand, wide awake, quietly beaming, radiating joy. I was happy for them.
One of the women was wearing a t-shirt reading “Yay for Gay!” spelled-out in the LGBT’s very fashionable and conspicuously bold rainbow colors. Perhaps not coincidently, Friday was June 26, the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s speech concerning the Supreme Court’s controversial decision on Dred Scott v. Sanford.
“What else should I say? Everyone is gay,” sang Kurt Cobain in Nirvana’s 1993 hit “All Apologies.” What does that line mean to you? Interestingly, the song was released as a double A-side with the song “Rape Me” seven months before Cobain took his own life in April of 1994. Cobain is said to have dedicated “All Apologies” to his wife and daughter because of the song’s mood, described by Cobain as “peaceful, happy, comfort.”
But of course, songs, like all art, mean different things to different people, and those meanings can change over time. So can words, to the point where as Judge Antonin Scalia noted on SCOTUS’s recent Obamacare ruling the day before the gay marriage ruling: “words no longer have meaning.”
Perhaps it’s not that words no longer have meaning but more that words, like art, flags, and Supreme Court rulings, mean different things to different people. Which brings us back to the SCOTUS gay marriage ruling. There is a bit of good and plenty of bad about the ruling.
First, the good: the ruling has made millions of both gay and straight Americans very happy because gays can now marry in every state in the union. My daughter’s godfather, an American white man old enough to remember the wide and rampant social discrimination as well as the government’s institutional persecution of gays, is one of the millions who is very happy. Sadly his husband, an American black man who knew the same kind of persecution and discrimination (and-then-some because of the color of his skin) is not alive to share in the joy of the ruling.
I think of all those who are no longer with us today who would be so profoundly affected by the fact that if they were here, they could finally marry the soul-mates and loves-of-their-lives in every state across America – the long-alleged but hardly-realized “Land of the Free.”
Now, the not good. Anyone with a brain can imagine the (unintended?) consequences which will surely follow. Dissenting Judge Samuel Alito made a strong, logical case that the decision “will be used to vilify Americans unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy.” Alito continued:
“I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools… By imposing its own views on the entire country, the majority facilitates the marginalization of the many Americans who have traditional ideas.”
How do new, persecuted and discriminated classes of people come into being? The same two ways Ernest Hemingway said people become bankrupt: “Gradually, then suddenly.”
If you’re still reading this, you probably care enough about the issue to understand all angles of the constitutional arguments at play, so I won’t spend much time on that. With that said, is marriage not a right? And what’s the role of the federal government, if any, when it comes to marriage? Should Justice Kennedy have heeded Kurt Cobain: “What else should I write? I don’t have the right”?
What it comes down to is that the SCOTUS decision is not a win for liberty. This decision increases the power of the court and the federal government. That is not good, at all.
The worst of this is the fact that so many Americans don’t have a problem with government involvement in marriage to begin with. Think about it: we have to ask our government permission to get married. We leave it to our government to define and dictate what a legitimate relationship is. This is absurd in a nation which prides itself as the “Land of the Free.” It’s especially absurd because state marriage licenses themselves are rooted in 19th century racist efforts to restrict inter-racial marriages. In a free country, consenting adult human beings should be allowed to form marriage contracts with whomever they want without government intervention. Private civil marriage contracts could provide what government intervention advocates argue is necessary for the members of a marriage to enjoy the full-fruits of the marriage. No one needs the government involved in their marriage.
Groucho Marx astutely noted: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” Politics itself – government itself – proves Marx correct time and again. It will prove to have done so again with the topic at hand. We must learn that the remedy for trouble is liberty, not politics or government.
Now, I agree with the conservative view that the family is the basic, essential unit of society, and that marriage matters. But it’s not the gender composition of the marriage binding the family that matters, it’s the degree of love in the marriage. On the other side, many liberals point to the bigotry and intolerance of many conservatives who claim to be Christian. These charges certainly have merit. Whatever the case, the battle over marriage will most certainly heat-up, despite the SCOTUS decision. At the root of the battle is that both conservatives and liberals say they love their country. And so, here’s my message to both conservatives and liberals: if you love something, set it free.
In closing, I want to share one more story. On Sunday my wife and I took our family to church – the church where my son was baptized. The church reverend is a woman who is married to another woman. They’re raising a beautiful, joy-filled child. At any rate, the preacher this past Sunday rendered a powerful sermon centering on a man she grew to know years ago at her former church in Los Angeles. He was a brilliant mathematician and astronomer, though socially he was shyly, awkwardly inept. But as they grew to know each other, she taught him how to better express himself, and he taught her about the gloriously dazzling brilliance of the universe. He also finally told her, well into their relationship, that if it wasn’t for the community and love he came to find in the church, he would have taken his own life years before, consumed by his own incommunicable pain and loneliness.
I know there may not be much here, or in liberty itself, for either conservatives or liberals to like. This can even be said for some who call themselves libertarian. But I want liberty — and love for that matter — for all Americans. If this offends you, all I can offer is the most appropriate All Apologies I can think of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWmkuH1k7uA