I’m very pleased that the Supreme Court narrowly found a Constitutional right to marry. But I’m also with Jonathan Chait in thinking, “The Supreme Court’s decision affirming marriage equality hastens what was already a fait accompli.” It is a great day, but the only thing that makes it notable is that the Supreme Court isn’t decades behind public opinion. What I do think is kind of stupendous is that the decision came today, the day before San Francisco Pride. What a great coincidence that is! But not all people are celebrating.
Yesterday evening, the Associated Press reported, Gay Couples Wed on Historic Day as Conservatives Resist. Apparently, when the decision came down, a lot of LGBT couples across the country rushed to courthouses to get married. It’s sweet really. As a typically straight guy who never had to think of marriage as anything special, it’s nice to see people running towards it even as I have run screaming from it twice. And in many cases, these eager LGBT couples were treated with the openness and joy that the occasion deserves. For example, the article mentioned one couple in Louisville, Kentucky who were greeted by the mayor with a bottle of champagne. We have a word for that here in the Bay Area: class.
But in Pike County, Alabama, Probate Judge Wes Allen has decided that he’s just not going to issue any marriage licenses at all. Think about the irony of this. For decades, conservatives have been telling us that if LGBT couples get the right to marry, it will destroy the institution of marriage. I never imagined that same sex marriage opponents meant that destruction would come in this form: that there would be no more opposite sex marriages because the opponents would stop allowing them out of pure spite.
There does seem to be something wrong with conservatives. They just can’t let things go. When it came to Jim Crow, it was going to destroy “white culture.” But it didn’t. And this is going to destroy “straight marriage” and “the family.” It’s all so ridiculous! But I do understand where it comes from. I remember when I was younger, I would get mad about something. And I was right about it — it was a righteous anger. And so I wanted to hang onto it. But it took so much energy! Eventually, I just learned to let things go. I also learned that often when I thought I was righteous, I actually wasn’t.
Look at Judge Pike above. That picture was taken a few years ago. He’s 39 years old right now: too young to be that bigoted and too old to act so childishly. I really don’t get it. Even if you feel that same sex marriage is wrong, don’t you have a duty to, you know, do your job? There are parts of every job that aren’t pleasant. The loophole that Pike has found is certainly not one that his God is going to approve of. So what is he really doing but putting off the day when he will have to go along, and in the mean time looking like a real jerk. And he’s not alone.
I am egotistically enough to look up my birthday and I remembered that this was the most awesome birthday present I could get.
However it really was a done deal years ago, it just needed the right case to reach SCOTUS. When you have the most respected jurist nationally write this:
“Heterosexuals get drunk and pregnant, producing unwanted children; their reward is to be allowed to marry. Homosexual couples do not produce unwanted children; their reward is to be denied the right to marry. Go figure.”
It is just over. But it sure did give lots of wordy fellows a chance to pontificate on marriage and love. Almost sweet in its own way.
I had to read what I had written — you are getting into the archives there! I can’t believe I referred to him as “Judge Pike.” I’m going to leave that because it seems like a wonderful snark, but I’m sure I didn’t mean it.
Is that Richard Posner?
Yes! It was Posner. You get a gold star. Or since that is rather silly for a fifty something man, a beer.
The sane move years ago would have been for conservatives to insist that government get out of the marriage business altogether, only issuing civil union licenses. If you get married in a church, you don’t get a wedding license; you still have to go to a government office for that. One I was at had a funny little room with balloons and such for the purpose.
So it would have been easy, and fully in line with old-school conservatism, to keep “marriage” a private affair and civil unions a public one. But they were convinced this was such a great wedge issue that they had to push it, passing bans on gay marriage in states that already didn’t allow it. And go figure — it backfired and they lost the whole shebang.
Digging around the older posts is fun. I think there used to be a random post on the sidebar. Maybe there’s a way to put in a link that will let readers find one at random.
The government has to be in the business of instituting rules for marriage because they are the ones who are stuck dealing with the aftermath when the near inevitable (I may be a bit cynical about marriage despite never having been in the institution myself) crack up.
Oh sure — legal obligations, taxes, child custody and so forth. But conservatives could have gone all-civil-unions and it probably would have pleased both the LGBT community and many Christians both. They doubled down on bigotry, and it bit them right in the ass.
Even with civil unions people presume it is a marriage. Technically all of the 850 or so ceremonies I have performed have been civil unions since religion was not a part of it.
But it was never about civil unions-it was about icky butt sechs.
Lovely spelling, it cracked me up.
It’s strange how usually a Repub is caught in a sechs scandal for gay sechs, and usually has been adamant about how gay marriage destroys the nation. There’s a deeper issue here about the view that sexual liberation reduced us to a country of irresponsible orgasm-seekers, incapable of devoting ourselves to the endless drive to Get Richer. I mean, no Repub complains that we spend too much time watching sports. And a ballgame takes way longer than sechs.
There’s also a fundamentalist meme — this is an old, persistent one — about how America was blessed by God because we did Godly things. God, apparently, blessed us because we had little kids praying to the flag in school, and we opposed the godless commies and what-not. Gay rights, abortion, secular public schools, feminism, Muslims, Black pride, these all make God mad. So he’s been smoting us.
With decreased fourth-quarter housing starts. God’s getting a little long in the tooth for zapping people with lightning, apparently.
Growing up fundamentalist, I heard this stuff a lot. So you can have individuals who aren’t necessarily anti-gay on a personal level. They just know what their preacher tells them God wants, and they think their jobs are sh**y and their finances f***ed because we’ve Lost God’s Favor.
It’s enormously self-centered. But it’s a comforting answer. Our culture constantly tells us we’re failures/wimps if we aren’t rich. Rather than rejecting those messages, which are all-prevalent, it’s easier to buy the notion that one’s poverty is someone else’s fault. Different others stealing our jobs and our tax dollars. Or sinners making God angry.
Yet the places that keep getting slammed the hardest are the most “holy” like the South. You would think they would notice and go “hmmm, maybe we should be more like California.”