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.