Victory - Same-Sex Power to Marry


Guyau

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Equality under the law may or may not match up with equality as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, meaning this decision isn't fundamentally about a human right but at best only coincidental.

Frankly, marriage is a contract but neither heterosexuals nor homosexuals should have their contracts off any government model. Strictly speaking, it's not that both groups are properly now in the same pot but that there should be no pot. But since that's not the issue, the Court's decision is the proper one.

There can be countless variations of what is in a "marriage" contract, all subject to private arbitration enforcement none having anything to do with anything the government is properly about. I am not any kind of libertarian anarchist, but see no reason its logical anarchist principles cannot be applied to civil matters exclusively leaving government only concerned with criminal law which is contra the violation of human rights law only.

--Brant

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Frankly, marriage is a contract but neither heterosexuals nor homosexuals should have their contracts off any government model.

Marriage is a contract made with God who grants His blessing.

Homosexual union is a contract made with government which grants its blessing.

Greg

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Here is how many conservative young Americans think, and I believe S. E. Cupp represents a wide swath:
 

 

I hope, seeing some of the faces of these people who have fought for so long for very little, really, just for recognition of their unions, their monogamous unions, I really hope this can change some hearts and minds in my party. You're not going to do it at the barrel of a gun. You're gonna do it through human stories like these...

 
I like her thinking. I resonate with her.
 
Michael

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This is one of those minor issues that is not minor for some, but to me it is an irritation. But thanks anyway SCOTUS. Religion should be personal and not be a legal factor, Greg. Like Brant I think the state should not be involved in marriage other than in a contractual sense so it should be defined as a union between two humans. Why? For years, unions between multiple spouses (the Mormons for example) have been legally binding as just one spouse and THEN other dependents or recipients offered legal protection under the law and that is reasonable. The HBO show, Big Love, is the best exposition of that concept that I can think of. I think the slope has stopped and it is no longer slippery. Two humans united by their wishes and recognized by the government is the end of the controversy. Now I just had a weird thought. What about the different sentient species on Deep Space Nine and The Enterprise?

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Stephen,

On a personal note, let me say how pleased I am for you (and the other gays on OL).

You have never been very vocal about these things, but I have felt your silent suffering from a distance. It's always been on my mind whenever I thought about you.

Hopefully, this is now going to go away. (I mean the problem, not my empathy. :) )

Michael

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Religion should be personal and not be a legal factor, Greg.

I agree, Peter.

But to leftists for whom liberal government is their god, their secular political religion can only be legalities. This is why they legally petitioned their god for its legal blessing and their god has granted its legal blessing.

This process actually has nothing to do with God and morality, only with government and legality. It's purely a matter between secular leftists and their god.

Greg

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Greg wrote:

But to leftists for whom liberal government is their god, their secular political religion can only be legalities. This is why they legally petitioned their god for its legal blessing and their god has granted its legal blessing. end quote

Can you stop saying god or God? And add the letter oh ... But to leftists for whom liberal government is their good, their secular political religion can only be legalities. This is why they legally petitioned their good for its legal blessing and their good has granted its legal blessing.

Now change the d to a p. But to leftists for whom liberal government is their goop, their secular political religion can only be legalities. This is why they legally petitioned their goop for its legal blessing and their goop has granted its legal blessing. Damn. I feel like Im back in the ninth grade!

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Damn. I feel like Im back in the ninth grade!

If I were your 10th grade teacher, you would be.

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Can you stop saying god or God?

(shrug) Why?

They're both perfectly accurate and equivalent descriptors. Liberal government is little g god to secular leftists in exactly the same way that big G God is to religious folk. In fact, you can track the growth of government with the growth of secular leftism as a political religion... as one is a product of the other.

Greg

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ARGH, autoplay! Here is the link to comments by Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore -- a video and story at the Montgomery Advertiser. Take-home: Moore is not gonna stand for it.

Edited by william.scherk
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Thanks, Michael!

SampW_zpscsfnxzhv.jpeg

Each looks like he got the best of the deal.

Especially the guy with the flower. I mean, he's got the flower, right?

--Brant

I may have hurt someone's feelings, but that goes with my inherent clodship

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Well what this does do is protect the surviving member of a union from the deceased side of the family when it comes to asset division. How many times have cohabiting people been victim because the courts refused to admit common law and simply left the spouse with nothing.

I call it a victory in so many ways. It always struck me as horrible in the land of the free "liberty for all unless you are gay".

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It always struck me as horrible in the land of the free "liberty for all unless you are gay".

Who said that? Was it Lincoln or Kennedy?

Thanks for the posting of the wedding picture. The posed appear benevolent but amazingly intelligent.

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The ruling certainly is the correct outcome, and even though the majority opinion was full of emotionalistic gobbledygook, it was principally founded on the proposition that marriage is an individual right and therefore cannot be denied to any class of citizens. This ruling draws on Loving v. Virginia (which elevated marriage to the status of a fundamental right in SCOTUS jurisprudence) and also Kennedy's majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas. I'm not a fan of the idea of "substantiative due process" but the simple fact is that after the Progressives shredded the Privileges and Immunities clause, its the only way to incorporate individual rights against States.

Kennedy's reasoning was, like his reasoning in Lawrence v. Texas, profoundly libertarian.

And I wasn't the only person to pick up on this; Justice Roberts did so too in his dissent. He argued (correctly) that Kennedy's decision was based on an ideal of unbounded individual autonomy and treated marriage like an individual contract. He also relied on Progressive jurisprudence in his rebuke to Kennedy, even perpetuating Richard Hofstadter's infamous "social Darwinism" smear against Herbert Spencer. He likens this decision to Lochner v. New York (a decision which struck down a New Deal economic regulation as a violation of the right to contract, IIRC) in its endorsement of radical individualism; Roberts thus shows how he isn't that different from Progressives after all (he also showed this when rewriting Obamacare).

Alito's dissent correctly pointed out that "liberty" as an ideal means different things to different ideologies, but the Declaration of Independence makes it pretty clear which ideology was intended to be the basis of the American system.

Scalia threw a premenstrual temper-tantrum over the ruling and screeched that the ruling denied the right of "self-rule" to the American people; his collectivist reasoning is obvious. "The people" are not an entity, only individuals are entities. Allowing a fundamental right to be subject to democratic restriction is to allow two wolves and a lamb to democratically decide on what's for dinner, and Scalia's "self-rule" is really just "the right of a majority of individuals to violate the rights of a minority of individuals." This proposition is fundamentally at odds with the entire Anglo-American Enlightenment-Individualist tradition, and an obvious contradiction since there can be no right to violate rights. Scalia argues that the decision is really about "who decides the meaning of marriage," but in doing this he package-deals civil marriage (which is what the ruling is about) with religious marriage; religions can still decide whom they will offer religious marriages to, and individual citizens are free to treat marriages which they don't "believe in" as being illegitimate. Is the faith of the religious so fragile that their convictions require government reinforcement?

Thomas' dissent was interesting, however; he argued that gay marriage turned "liberty" into a positive liberty (i.e. State entitlements) rather than a negative liberty (i.e. self-sovereignty). Thomas is right that "liberty" as understood by the Founders meant negative liberty, but Thomas therefore implies that marriage in its current form counts as a positive liberty. If Thomas wanted to be consistent, he should therefore come to the conclusion that civil marriage is itself unconstitutional (because it violates the understanding of liberty held by the Founders), but he doesn't. His dignity argument is also mistaken; he argues that Kennedy implicitly treats dignity as something bestowed by the State (rather than innate within individuals) but this is a misreading of Kennedy's ruling. Kennedy argues that because individual dignity is innate, denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples counts as an "injury" against the dignity of the individuals who constitute these couples.

Yes, in the ideal world there would be no legislatively-defined marriage or any laws which differentiate between people on the basis of family status/arrangements (i.e. no tax breaks for the married). Relationships and their attendant institutions/labels/styles would be exclusively a matter for civil society and contract law. But to the extent that the government does define and regulate marriage, it must do so in a matter consistent with the fact that marriage is an individual right which subsists within every individual (and therefore subsists equally within every individual), and that individuals also have the rights to pursue their own happiness. Ultimately the government would acknowledge that every individual human being has the right to do whatever they want to so long as it does not involve the initiation of violence, fraud or coercion against any other person; to quote Herbert Spencer, "the absolute liberty of all, constrained only by the like liberty of each" (a sentiment echoed by J. S. Mill). Privatizing marriage entirely is the ultimate goal, but equality under the law is an incremental step towards doing that.

Another wonderful thing about this outcome? The Christian establishment (all the Catholic Ecclesiarchy and Fundies and Evangelicals) have expended a massive amount of political and social capital on this debate; in their rabid bible-thumping and moral condemnation, they have effectively become the face of Christianity as a whole. I believe I read an article a few years ago which stated that the adjective most young Americans associated with Christianity was "anti-gay." This ruling will demoralize and discredit a huge proportion of the Christian power-base and further bring ridicule to the entire religion, particularly amongst the young (who are far more secular than their parents). The simple fact is that the gay marriage issue was effectively their last stand in the Culture Wars, and now the Court has thwarted them. This battle is the hill upon which Christ will finally die... sort of like Golgotha but a lot longer lasting! (Note to those quote-mining: the previous statement was meant to be humor).

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it was principally founded on the proposition that marriage is an individual right and therefore cannot be denied to any class of citizens.

That leaves "marriage" wide open for the polygamist, incest, man/boy, and bestial citizen classes.

It's anything goes now! :laugh:

Greg

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it was principally founded on the proposition that marriage is an individual right and therefore cannot be denied to any class of citizens.

That leaves "marriage" wide open for the polygamist, incest, man/boy, and bestial citizen classes.

It's anything goes now! :laugh:

Greg

Actually it doesn't, because marriage is a consensual/contractual arrangement, which means that it can only be entered into by consenting adults. This automatically rules out zoophilia and pedophilia. It would permit polygamy (and polyandry, and polyamory of all kinds). I don't see anything wrong with polyamory.

So "anything goes" is frankly a ridiculous statement. There's a built-in limit; if marriage is like a contract then it is automatically restricted to people able to enter into legally binding contracts.

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Greg is giving me flashbacks to my own parents' rhetoric.

Not a pretty sight on such a rational place as this.

Incest and polyamory are disgusting to most people personally, but to outlaw them, Greg, would be to worship government as the safeguard over our culture -- which does not sound like you.

It's up to individuals to refrain from these things, not the government to outlaw them.

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I think the decision is wrong. The Constitution leaves issues of marriage to the individual states. If the 14th amendment mandated same sex marriage it would never have passed.

What bothers me most is this decision in light of the increasingly aggressive homosexual movement. Obviously there is a fair segment of the homosexual movement that won't be happy until everyone has to bake a cake for homosexual weddings, etc.

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Thanks, Michael!

SampW_zpscsfnxzhv.jpeg

Each looks like he got the best of the deal.

Especially the guy with the flower. I mean, he's got the flower, right?

--Brant

. . .

Thanks, Brant. How wonderful is this victory, and Kennedy* has done such a fine job. To my mind on the arc in our lifetime, this is the final victory that was needed for full legal equality of gays and lesbians with straight persons in our country. Abolition of the laws against gay sex acts, full equality of gays in the military, and now this decision for equality in the power to marry, these are to me the milestones in this arc of freedom, of much personal significance.

Our straight friends and neighbors and family are overjoyed by this decision, and they have let us know. We will marry shortly. Walter and I met through a personal ads section of a newspaper, in a section dedicated to HIV persons looking for other HIV persons. I had written a one-word response (surface mail) to his ad, the word exciting, and included my phone number. It turned out he lived just a couple blocks over from me, and we agreed to meet at the restaurant at the end of my block. The night was January 19, 1996. Bitterly cold—Chicago, you know. We each learned something quite unexpected about each other at that conversation. He learned that I edited and published a philosophy journal. I learned that he had been married about ten years in the '70's and was father of two sons, the younger of which was now in college. Walter and Lynn their mother had remained in close partnership in raising these children. All in Chicago, to fine results.

Walter and I went swiftly from “Where have you been?” to “In sickness and in health, for all of my days.” I became part of Walter’s family. This photo was taken in ’97 at the wedding of his elder son. I imagine this photo can do as our own marriage picture too. I’ve noticed through the years in our generation many straight people will tell the number of years they have been married, but if they know you a bit, they go on to tell you also how many years they have been together. By the time of this photo, Walter and I had gotten matching rings, which we wear on that finger to this day. Well, there’s a story about that I hope not too intimate to tell. In the first months of our relationship, Walter would come over to my apartment after my work hours. When the time came, he would often tell me to go and get whatever was in such and such pocket of his jacket. I would bring it and then try to figure out what on earth such an item was for. One evening he told me to go to such and such pocket and bring the two items from it, and be sure there were two. Well, I found only one item, but there sounded the clearest ringing tone from a small thing that had fallen to the floor. It was a gold ring. I brought it with me, and told him he had left his ring in his pocket. He said “It’s yours if you want it.” I was struck stone still for a long time. I tried it on. It fit, and I said “If the ring fits, wear it.” He explained that we would get matching rings, and this one from his marriage to Lynn, I would give back to him.

Much happiness.

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