No Room for Sanity at the Inn: Stifling Democratic Debate over Same-Sex Marriage

Public Discourse ^ | 12/4/15 | Anthony Esolen

[rhema]

Democracy and common sense teach us to seek the truth by listening to one another. If we will not even provide a room for people who want to talk with one another because we do not like what they say, then democracy is impossible.

When I was a junior in college and looking for a summer job to defray the next year's tuition, I answered an ambiguous ad in a newspaper and found myself selling high-quality pots and pans, china, and cutlery to unmarried working girls. It actually was a good job for a good company. I ended up selling $20,000 of merchandise in eleven weeks. My sales put me at number six among the college kids selling kitchenware up and down the eastern seaboard. My bonus was an all-expense-paid trip to Bermuda, with the company executives and about ninety of the other young peddlers.

We stayed at The Princess, a hotel in the country's chief town of Hamilton. A posh hotel, that. We had a couple of business meetings, I suppose so as to count the trip as deductible from company expenses. Mainly we had free time. Some of the other students used it to go to one of the beaches at night for co-ed skinny dipping. Clearly, the sexual revolution was well underway. I don't suppose we got any healthy marriages out of those four days.

When the Supreme Court struck down segregationist ordinances in the South, no one knew, or at least no one admitted, that freedom of association would ultimately be ruled unconstitutional. The Court said that certain businesses were in fact public "accommodations," and therefore, though they were privately owned and operated, they warranted a special degree of public supervision. An "accommodation," if it is to be distinguished from any business of any sort at all,

[fwdude]

Articles at Public Discourse are almost always excellent reads and well worth your time. This one is no exception.

[rhema]

I agree; I check it about every other day. Today was an unexpected treat: the estimable Anthony Esolen, who's a regular contributor to a magazine I subscribe to, Touchstone. (Not all of Esolen's Touchstone articles are linked, unfortunately.)

[Nea Wood]

Excellent article, thanks for posting.

[fwdude]

I'll go even further than the article. I believe the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution are absolute when it comes to freedom of association. Therefore, we have the absolute, unquestionable right to say, "we don't server your kind here." To make arbitrary exceptions for "food" or "lodging" is just a leak in the dike.

Were this freedom to be allowed to hold absolute sway once again, do you know what would happen in this country? Nothing. Only a much more civil country where people were properly considerate of the beliefs of others when it came to there own property.

[AdaGray]

As luck would have it, living in the Northeast and very close to a big city, my new neighbors are two married men with an adopted infant. They are not bad people, but they are delusional. And let me tell you, I don’t think the whole marriage thing is working out. They have only had the baby for 6 months and now there are arguments about who gets to still go out to bars (seriously).

[fwdude]

I think I would vomit knowing what situation that child living so near to you is subjected to.

[GenXteacher]

That is a good article. One the chief casualties of the so-called civil rights movement has been the freedom of association that is an important part of natural law. In embracing the ‘equality’ that the French Revolution dismally reached for, our society has displaced the liberty that our own American Revolution reached for. The bureaucratic machinery for attempting to abolish discrimination against former slaves will eventually be used to make slaves of all of us.