Posted on 12/08/2003 7:12:17 PM PST by Kay Soze
The fact that not all heterosexual marriages are perfect doesn't make gay marriage anymore acceptable.
Do you?
In a word, yes. There are some columnists I seem to agree with every time, and others I disagree with every time. Maybe my critical thinking is not where it should be.
Like I said, I didn't really mean anything by posting a second Ellen Goodman. But the one you posted I thought was pure poison.
Interesting choice of words, that article mostly concerned itself with historical facts, vis a vis the progress of Court decisions regarding traditional marriage.
I detest people who make statements like yours without bothering to actually debate the points made...it's so Clintonian.
I will be glad to expand on why I thought it was pure poison.
And you're waiting for what exactly?
"Expand" away!
Ellen, it is not the job of four people with robes to write the definition of marriage. What the heck qualifies these judges for that task? The definition was already unambiguously written into the law, to interpret which is their primary task.
EG's column uses the same sophistry as Marshall's majority opinion. She accepts and promotes the Marxist claptrap that it is the redistribution of wealth that gives individuals their choices. Since any moral disapproval by We the People is repudiated as mere prejudice, law must now be drained of our judgments, so that coercion of virtue becomes the province of judges.
Her column claims to trace two paths, gay rights, and the definition of marriage. She tries to paint them as converging. But she gives short shrift to gay rights, citing only the sodomy law decision. If the only problem for gays were those silly laws that were virtually never enforced, it sure doesn't look much like the struggle that African-Americans had to endure to get civil rights.
No, but the implication is that the inability to get marriage benefits is equated with Jim Crow.
But she uses the most intellectual dishonesty on the other path: describing an illusory "evolution" of civil marriage. In fact, civil marriage has not changed in definition, purpose, or in its main legal structures. She listed only decriminalizations of certain behaviors and changes in divorce law, as if these refinements were redefining what marriage is all about.
To peddle the lie that marriage is rightfully about the satisfaction of adults and not the begetting and raising of children in stable families embraces the rot which is slowly destroying Western Europe. I refer to the triumph of secular humanism and the concomitant marginalization of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Pure poison.
You seem to be stuck in place by your inability to separate the definition of marriage from the governmental restrictions on licensing.
Marriage means the same in Massachuttes today, than it did before the Court's ruling; the State was found to be in violation of their own Constitution when they refuse to issue some couples marriage licenses based on a State-sponsored dissapproval of their choice of partner via the gender make up of the couple in question, thus creating a second-class citizen.
"To peddle the lie that marriage is rightfully about the satisfaction of adults and not the begetting and raising of children in stable families embraces the rot which is slowly destroying Western Europe."
No one required me to sign a contract forcing my wife and I to have children prior to being issued a marriage license, and stability is exactly what the likely end-result of same-sex couples marrying will bring about.
"But she uses the most intellectual dishonesty on the other path: describing an illusory "evolution" of civil marriage. In fact, civil marriage has not changed in definition, purpose, or in its main legal structures."
You want claptrap?
There's pure, unadulterated claptrap.
We have seen marriage go from a time when a woman was not allowed to charge a husband with rape because marriage took away her rights as an individual to say "no", where couples could not buy birth control, where blacks and whites could not marry, and right into no-fault divorce.
If those things did not change the definition of marriage, neither did this.
One interesting think about the Mass situation, is whether the law will trigger social security survivor benefits for gay marrieds, and whether if it is called "civil unions," and the Mass Supremes allow that, it will not. There is quite a bit of state money potentially riding on, well, terminology.
And I absolutely did not suggest that.
In my last paragraph I did make some unsubstantiated and really unexplained claims. The intent of my post was to critique the Ellen Goodman column.
The fruits of secular humanism in Western Europe are: the low birth rate you mentioned; also declining militaries; also increased dependence on socialistic government; also a burgeoning hostile Islamic population. The deaths of those old folks in France were a signpost. It is no longer the family's job to take care of the elderly and infirm; that instead falls to the government.
All causes of marriage, divorce, and alimony, and all appeals from the judges of probate shall be heard and determined by the governor and council, until the legislature shall, by law, make other provision.
This is what the Massachusetts Constitution says Luis. But to judicial activists, the words contained in constitutions are meaningless as witnessed by the majority opinion in McConnell V FEC.
It won't end civilization but it will end the institution of marriage as we know it. Whether or not that will have an effect on civilization is for each of us to decide. I, of course, have decided it will have a profoundly negative effect and thus I will oppose any redefining of the word.
The upside I guess is that I will get to see the dire predictions of the downside of it all, refuted in my lifetime. And when we are both collecting social security, I can say, see I told you so John.
And we can chat about whether the two remaining justices on the otherwise vacant SCOTUS bench (Thomas and Breyer), will deadlock yet again.
And there you have it. :)
After catching up on this thread I can see that my previous post to you has no meaning.
I would point out to you Luis that judicial activism moved us from the right to privacy to murdering babies who are almost totally outside the womb and ready and able to breathe on their own.
The problem with judicial activism Luis is that the law is what 5 people say it is in direct contravention to what this nation should and did stand for.
Supporting judicial activism and supporting the rule of law are incompatible notions as witnessed by thirty years of sliding down the slope from "first trimester" abortion to killing them on the way out.
Rights are self evident, for example the right to life, the right to property and the right to travel as one sees fit in this nation.
Questions of liberty can get a little bit stickier. While one has the right to certain behaviors in the privacy of ones home, engaging in the same behavior in the public park is not a right, it's a question of liberty that is best decided by all those who pay for the park. At the same time the same persons have the right to life, property and travel whether or not they are in a public park.
My sisters used to tell me the same thing about abortion my friend. They have since acknowledged that I was right.
Your statement is flat false.
Did you read the exact words of Ellen Goodman's column? She said the SJC wrote the definition of marriage.. In the Massachusetts Constitution it is defined as a union of a man and a woman.
The State was found to be in violation of their own Constitution when they refuse to issue some couples marriage licenses based on a State-sponsored dissapproval of their choice of partner via the gender make up of the couple in question, thus creating a second-class citizen.
Your statement is correct.
However, the dissents seem to be much more convincing than the majority opinion.
No one required me to sign a contract forcing my wife and I to have children prior to being issued a marriage license.
Right, but here I am talking about what marriage is all about in the general sense. Can you honestly ponder life in Western Civilization over generations and not see the purpose of marriage as being about children and families and generations?,If not, I do not know what planet you are living on.
Stability is exactly what the likely end-result of same-sex couples marrying will bring about.
I am in favor of better stability for same-sex couples. That stability, if it does come about, will be good for the people among us who are gay. A little tweaking of existing civil contract law may do the trick.
Looked at that way, the issues of gay couples do not seem to have much impact on stability of the American family. It is only when these issues impact marriage law that I get concerned.
Neither do I.
But I can look at history and from what I have learned on my own and with yours and others help here at FR, it is plain to me that the natural progression of SCOTUS precedents is the liberalization of those precedents.
Roe took us to PBA in the last trimester. Engel v Vitale morphed into a ban on voluntary prayer before football games. I could go on but the point is quite simple. The history of 20th century jurisprudence is an activist court moving toward an ever more socially liberal USA and quite like you, I see nothing on the horizon to stop them.
The institution of marriage is on its way out unless the Massachusetts SJC is stopped and if I live long enough, I'll be able to point to all the new laws required to handle the new "marriage" paradigm as evidence of my thesis.
Bullsh%t.
The Court does not lead society, it follows it, simply acknowledging what direction society has already taken.
To use the example of Roe v. Wade, the Court's decision would be utterly meaningless, if societal acceptance of sex outside of marriage was not the norm, and if we as a society had no brought the challenge up to them. The belief that abortion was a woman's right was not created in the vacuum that is the SCOTUS, the argument was brought to them.
You, on the other hand, believe in a form of Judicial activism that would set up the Court as a social engineer, and use the unwillingness of the Congress or State Houses to address sensitive issues directly out of fear of the reaction of the majority voters, to prolong what in many clear cases is an inequity in our laws.
Individuals, who feel that their civil privileges and rights are being violated, and without a voice in our government, and a way to move toward challenging these laws because of the nature of being a minority within the society, need the Courts to hear their arguments, and examine how laws impact the individual.
In Texas, there was not a chance in Hell that the legislature was going to "fix" a bad law, and it was a bad law in spite of whatever you believe.
Now, we LOVE Judicial activism when it suits our purposes, or at least we certainly did in Bush v. Gore, when Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas, after spending years fighting the liberal expansion of the equal protection clause, used it to stop the recounts.
Was it activism?
Only if you are a lefty.
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