The Morning After the Same-Sex Marriage Decision

The New York Times ^ | May 14, 2015 | Linda Greenhouse

[2ndDivisionVet]

Let’s assume, as I do, that the Supreme Court finds a constitutional right to same-sex marriage when it decides Obergefell v. Hodges sometime next month. What happens next?

It may be a morning-after landscape of more confusion than clarity, with some rain falling on the victory parades.

Conservative Christians, claiming victimization by the onrushing tide of marriage equality, aren’t like to be deterred in their quest for the right to withhold goods and services from same-sex couples. Indiana’s retreat last month, under pressure from some leading corporations, from a law that would have given businesses a religious excuse for discriminating was a setback for the Christian right, but a relatively minor one.

The disavowed law was basically symbolic, as was its defeat. Because Indiana, like most states and the federal government, provides no statutory protection for gay people against discrimination, discriminators don’t need a religious justification in the first place. I wish I could report that this awkward legislative episode has prompted the state to enact an anti-discrimination law, but that’s not the world we live in.

The banner of religious victimhood is being raised high by Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas now running for the Republican presidential nomination. He warned a group of ministers last month that the country was hurtling down the road toward “the criminalization of Christianity.” Declaring that it was his “biblical duty” to pray for members of the Supreme Court as they consider the same-sex marriage case, Mr. Huckabee told the ministers: “I think it’s fair to say that Christian convictions are under attack as never before.”(continued)

[2ndDivisionVet]

Comments?

[Jack Hammer]

“What happens next?”

The same thing that happened to the Cities on the Plain.

[dp0622]

Conservative Christians, claiming victimization by the onrushing tide of marriage equality///

My grandpa said when the men become women and the women become men, the country is done. How did he know 75 years ago what would happen?

Huckabee has nothing to offer but wearing his righteousness on his sleeve.

Cruz knows well how to handle the media and reach Christians of many political beliefs without sounding like an us against the world zealot. He must be the nominee for the republicans.

[SoFloFreeper]

eventually, Genesis 19 happens.

We must repent.

And I am not just talking about the non-Christians.

We “Christians” who act UN-Christian, too. We are called to hate sin and love the sinner. We aren’t doing that very well, are we? Myself included.

Jesus help us.

[Mark17]

The same thing that happened to the Cities on the Plain.

Eventually that will have to happen, maybe San Francisco. Meanwhile, what will be the next perversion to seek supreme court approval.

[apillar]

Nothing.

In my state, we already had gay marriage shoved down our throats last fall by a federal court ruling. My state is bible belt, and socially conservative. Yet the response wasn't a bang, heck it wasn't even a wimper. The response by the vast majority of Christians was just a resigned shrug. I hate to be a downer. But the vast majority of Christians surrendered the culture war long ago, quite a few even went over to the other side. I attend a small rural Baptist church, and even in our very socially conservative church, the Preacher has started getting heat from certain members of the congregation when he preaches against gay marriage and says homosexuality is a sin. Usually the criticism comes in two forms, the "I personally agree with you preacher, but such language is turning off the youth and making us look like bigots" and the "When you say gays are going to hell it makes Sister So-and-So sad because her son is gay, and besides I think Jesus loves everybody." If you have this much dissent and division in one conservative church, how do you expect Christians to present any type of united front in the culture war.

[spirited irish]

Already polygamy is making a comeback. But the next perversions to seek supreme court approval may well be multiple males marrying each other and males or females marrying the animals they “love.”

[MacMattico]

If gay marriage becomes federal law, the next step will be to force churches to perform said marriages or lose their tax exempt status. Just another way to break down traditional western culture. We have gay marriage in my state and I know a man who is 70 and his “husband” is 55 and they just had twins through a surrogate. Why? Because one is high profile attorney that paid the mother well. There is a good chance they will both be dead before the babies graduate high school and they won’t allow them to know their surrogate mother. Although she sounds like a real winner. These men now have two little girls to raise, never wanted to be married or have kids before because they didn’t believe in monogamy, and only married a year ago. This will not turn out well for the poor twins.

[dbehsman]

What will happen next?

Incest will have to be legally recognized.

There's only one secular reason to legally forbid incest. And the reason is that offspring produced from such a union have a greater likelihood of being deformed. (The actual numbers of deformities from babies produced from an incestuous relationship as opposed to non-incestuous relationship are only slightly elevated.)

With same sex marriage, procreation is taken off the table. That's not my opinion, that's biology 101.

So, what would be a secular reason to prevent two adult sisters from getting married? Or how about two adult brothers? Or how about if we dig further into the sewer of leftist Utopianism and ponder why a father/adult son couple would be denied.

Think about how weird this would be. You would have a situation where a father/son couple could get married, but not two first cousins of the opposite sex. A brother and sister could not get married, but two brothers or two sisters could.

And of course, the satanic left will act completely surprised, but it's all part of their plan to drag down the human race to the level of animals.

[The_Republic_Of_Maine]

What happens next?

Well let’s look at the case of Tom, Nancy and Sue. Tom, Nancy and Sue live together, all three are in a ‘loving relationship’ together and both Sue and Nancy have children that Tom has fathered.

Tom say’s, how is it that Sue, Nancy and I can live together, have children together yet cannot be married?

[Mark17]

Already polygamy is making a comeback. But the next perversions to seek supreme court approval may well be multiple males marrying each other and males or females marrying the animals they “love.”

I know these are some of the possibilities, I just wonder which one(s) will be tried, if not all of them?

[nathanbedford]

So far this morning threads have appeared on the issues of abortion and amnesty and I have held that each of these issues are litmus tests for conservatives. A candidate or even an individual who is not opposed to abortion and to immigration amnesty is not only out of the mainstream of conservatism, he has virtually no claim to the title.

However, I do not hold that same-sex marriage is an equivalent litmus test issue for conservatism and it should not be. The power of a state or federal government to compel Christians to perform services in furtherance of homosexual marriage is quite another matter.

Here is a post from some time ago which it stands the test time:

I am ambivalent about gay marriage.

First, I am acutely sensitive to the maintenance of the family because I have a hobby horse which I ride ceaselessly on these threads: the left is attacking every institution which holds our society together and which holds back the advance of socialism/communism/statism. The attacks on the family were fashioned originally by The Frankfurt School which delivered a 1-2 punch, attacking the family and destroying the father's role as an authority figure within the family. That means That The Frankfurt School and its misbegotten spawn have long aimed to destroy the institution of marriage.

Therefore, I am reflexively hostile to any threat to the institution of marriage because I see it as part of the crimes of cultural marxism arising out of The Frankfurt School. If I am to err, let it always be on the side defending the world against The Frankfurt School.

Let me clear away some of the underbrush. There has been much equating of abortion and homosexual marriage. The objection to abortion is profound and it need not be grounded in religion. Abortion is the killing of a human being not yet born and as such it is indefensible. Moreover, the practice involves the infliction of harm on an innocent victim who in this case cannot defend himself. That certainly is not true of adult homosexuals desirous of entering into a marriage. There cannot be said to be a victim. To the degree that opponents of homosexual marriage are seen to be invoking the law to impose their objections to private conduct, without a victim, the political party which supports them will not be supported by an increasing number of Americans. To the degree that the opponents of homosexual marriage are seen to be invoking the law to punish activity done in private which subjectively makes them squirm, the political party which supports them will not be supported by an increasing number of Americans.

The Question for me becomes, does the very fact of the law sanctioning marriage between couples of the same sex inevitably undermine the institution of marriage between heterosexual couples? I know that the social conservatives are emphatic in holding that the institution of heterosexual marriage will be mortally compromised. But I have never understood exactly why this should be so. I think the belief is that sodomy is such a grotesquerie that to equate it with the God ordained sacrament is to defile marriage. To sanctify sodomy with a solemn and legal marriage certificate is an outrage which defiles marriage.

It seems to me that this reaction is a subjective one and that means that one man's subjective reaction is as valid as another man's. Some people are troubled by this and some people are not. I have trouble declaring that one reaction ought to be elevated in the law over the other.

There is also the problem that sodomy between consenting adults done in private has been awarded by the Supreme Court the status of constitutional protection. Therefore, no state may prohibit homosexual sex done by adults in private. Evidently, they have a constitutional right of privacy to bugger each other as much as they want.

Parenthetically, it is important to note that almost nobody objects to civil unions or civil contracts which give gays the right of inheritance, custody and visitation, hospital access, and burial rites etc. I am inclined to think that society ought to grant these rights to gays as a matter of course. On the other hand, conservatives rightly reject the notion that someone can declare himself married and thereby obtain benefits from the government to which he would not otherwise be entitled. I am very much in sympathy with this position. Hence one source of my ambivalence.

So opponents of homosexual marriage are being forced onto an ever narrowing land bridge. On one hand the activity sanctified by marriage, homosexual sex, has already been sanctified by the Supreme Court and is therefore perfectly legal. On the other hand the majority of Americans agree that virtually all the benefits of marriage should be accorded homosexuals by virtue of their choosing to enter into a civil contract. So the narrow land bridge says that homosexuals can do everything else married couples can do except go through a ceremony which is acknowledged by the state. The problem with this remaining remnant of dry land from which to object to homosexual marriage is that homosexuals can easily find some church which will conduct the ceremony. So opponents of homosexual marriage are reduced to maintaining the hollow position that the church ceremony, which practically can be done at will, may not be acknowledged by the state.

As the ground under the feet of those who object to homosexual marriage continues to erode, it is becoming clearer that they are on the wrong side of history. That is not necessarily a good thing. Not a good thing for our society and, unfortunately, not a good thing for the conservative movement.

There is an argument which weighs on behalf of the opponents of gay marriage. The historical fact is that marriage is and always has been inextricably bound up in religion and it is a deep tradition in our culture that marriage is done according to the precepts of our Judeo Christian heritage. Clearly, homosexual marriage is explicitly and provocatively contrary to those faiths. Religion has given birth to the concept of marriage and as such it has a claim on the concept. It is a claim that says if you want a make a marriage you must do it according to our precepts, if you want to behave contrary to our precepts you must call it something else: a "civil union" would be a good name.

This argument says that it is important to protect the sanctity of marriage from degrading it by associating it with sodomy. I am sympathetic to this view because as I stated at the beginning, if you destroy the family you have gone a long way toward destroying any resistance to the kind of society people like Barack Obama would like to impose on us.

But I am not so sympathetic as to go to the wall to protect the institution of marriage from a threat which I see to be attenuated and probably inevitable when to do might compromise other important precepts of conservatism resulting in the very real sacrifice of real victims- like unborn babies.

I read the reasons in this article which the author invokes to argue that homosexual marriage is "harmful." I remain unconvinced that there is a connection between the "reasons" he adduces and harm to the institution of marriage. That, of course, is a different issue than whether homosexual marriage is somehow harmful to society.

Where is society today? It is in a state of flux as a result of cultural and technological forces which have not yet fully played out but which clearly are resulting in degrading the institution of marriage. Culturally, we are in the post Murphy Brown age in which Vice President Dan Quayle was rounded upon by the keepers of our culture when he rebuked the network for holding up unwed motherhood as a desirable state. Today, nearly 70% of African-American births produced bastards as do an increasing number of whites, nearing or exceeding the 40% mark. Clearly, the culture has passed the institution of marriage by. That is not to endorse this trend in the culture but merely to remark it.

Technology has also had a profound role to play. Long before Murphy Brown, around 1960, a seismic event occurred which has profoundly altered not just marriage but our entire culture. It was then that the pill was introduced and with it the virtual assurance of an ability to control pregnancy and procreation. Marriage as an institution was designed to manage those theretofore uncontrollable realities. As those realities became controllable, the need for marriage declined. The culture was further modified even before the pill by the introduction of penicillin which brought venereal disease largely under control, thus eliminating another practical need for the monogamy theoretically associated with marriage.

The women's movement perversely brought us no-fault divorce which has destroyed more marriages that homosexual marriage possibly could. The change in our divorce laws cannot occur in a vacuum and it is impossible to insist that our marriage laws will not change as the culture, technology and divorce laws all sweep past the institution.

Of all the places for conservatism to place its energy, opposition to homosexual marriage will produce fewer fruits, the greater blowback, and risk portraying the conservative movement as having been overrun by history.

One final thought, we ought as conservatives to distinguish between opposition to court sanctioning of homosexual marriage, especially rulings by federal courts, and referenda or actions of state legislatures who are representatives of the people. We have sound constitutional grounds to object to the courts sanctioning homosexual marriage against the will of the people, especially as it was expressed by referendum in California, for example. As a matter of philosophy we should object to the tyranny of judges, they have no special expertise or authority to decide these issues. There is no federal constitutional right to sodomize, even in private, despite what the courts say and, by implication, there is no federal constitutional right to legitimize buggery with matrimony.

If the states acting through their elected representatives or through referenda decide to legitimize homosexual marriage, that is quite another thing.

[madprof98]

. . . their quest for the right to withhold goods and services from same-sex couples

Redefining reality again. And getting away with it.

[Susquehanna Patriot]

Basically the erosion and departure from Judeo-Christian heterosexual morality that started decades in this country to bring us to the point there is no turning back in the culture where marriage is being redefined.

I have stated before that I agree with the Constitutional proposition that it is the province of the states define what relationships between adults, marriage or some “social contract” between homosexuals. As illustrated in the movie The Passion of The Christ, Pontius Pilot knew what was the right thing to do. He knew that it was unjust to release a murderer for an innocent man, one who had to be beaten first to see if that could satisfy the mob’s blood thirst. But in fear of the crowds, he did made a politically expedient decision.

Like the erosion in the Judeo-Christian culture, the Constitution has been degraded also (to the point that our Founders would not recognize much of their own country, must less be challenged to live in it). The argument that marriage belongs to the States will ring hollow - the current group of Pontius Pilates need to give the modern mob what they want. Legally protected buggery does not a marriage make, anymore than a heterosexual male can claim to be a lesbian. The mob cannot wait to have this issue be addressed in 50 states over two or three generations - for good reason. A majority of the Supreme Court now just needs to find the right words to make it look legal. You can begin to predict what will happen next. Ambivalence won’t be an option.

[Morpheus2009]

If San Francisco and California don’t run out of water first.

[Mark17]

If San Francisco and California don’t run out of water first.

I was just in the Bay Area last month, for a visit, but I abandoned the place in 2013. Whenever traveling through San Francisco, I always tried to move as quickly as possible, in case fire and brimstone stated to rain down on the place. 😎

[Sgt_Schultze]

There’s no test in law that require sexual activity between partners, so there shouldn’t be any prohibition against related same-sex siblings to marry. Then later, parents could “marry” their children and grandchildren and avoid the nastiness of wills and probate altogether.

[bert]

Yesterday, on I 81 north, a Mini Cooper was maneuvering in the heavy traffic. On the back window was written in white shoe polish “Brother Sister Road Trip”

The car had a Texas tag.

Given the ability to be 99% certain of birth control, I wondered about an incestuous road trip and then about the incest taboo. Since the primary reason for the taboo is defective children, if there is no danger of having children, will the elimination of incest laws be the next crusade?

[Morpheus2009]

I just mentioned the running out of water part because that’s just reality, and it’s a main reason why I wouldn’t hang around because if a water shortage crisis happens, I am pretty sure the fact wouldn’t be acknowledged until the water costs and pressure were pretty high and beyond deniability. A lot of people of all kinds will be trying to leave the state when it’s clear that they are really short on water, and the pressure is not clearly coming back on any time soon.

[Morpheus2009]

On the other hand, plenty of people are well aware of the increased risk of having genetically defective children as a result of incest and therefore avoid incest, or at least get heavy on birth control to be sure that their behavior doesn’t produce a child.