I was just reading a Reuters article about the gay marriage cases that the Supremes will be hearing next week.
There is nothing at all original in the article, and I mention it for only one reason. Naturally, the author recognizes the opposition's argument that the definition of marriage is something that should be left to the individual states. What the article fails to mention, and what proponents of that position never mention, is the full faith and credit clause of the constitution.
If the Supremes decide to leave the definition of marriage up to the states, they are just postponing for a year or two the next inevitable case in which one state refuses to acknowledge a marriage that was made in another.
Of course the Supremes at their best do try to craft extremely narrow decisions, but there are cases where there is an overriding national interest. Imagine if Brown v. Board of Education only applied to Kansas and the four or five other states whose similar cases were all covered by that one decision. The court would have had to do it all over again in the following term.
Why postpone the inevitable? The Supremes need to make a big decision here, and I mean big in the sense of sweeping, as well as important.
3 comments:
To the extent that the "Supremes" (and I love your terminology) are swayed by public sentiment, there seems to be a very recent change in the way the public is seeing this matter.
As you know, I am not a fan of the Supreme Court chasing every popular issue, but this is one that has so much correctness to it that it isn't just a passing fancy.
Maybe we can credit the election last November for weakening the hold that the evangelical Christians had around the neck of the Republican party so that the party (not saying I am very optimistic here, just sayin') could begin to represent some of us who are more socially liberal but have a conservative fiscal view.
I thought about including some other stuff, but let's mark this as one of those unique times where we agree.
I think I will print your comment and frame it...unless the earth explodes in a fireball before I have the chance.
By the way, I am such a well-read guy that I don't even remember who I stole the "Supremes" from. Quite possibly I took it from Molly Ivins, whose cleverness I miss.
As regards your comment about evangelical christians and the GOP, this is from Ross Douthat's column today. Very clearly, this is just one man's opinion, but it's kinda interesting.
___________________________________
"As The American Conservative’s Dan McCarthy noted in a shrewd essay, the Vietnam War helped entrench a narrative in which liberal social movements were associated with defeat in Indochina — and this association didn’t have to be perfectly fair to be politically and culturally potent.
In a similar way, even though Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney weren’t culture warriors or evangelical Christians, in the popular imagination their legacy of incompetence has become a reason to reject social conservatism as well. Just as the post-Vietnam Democrats came to be regarded as incompetent, wimpy and dangerously radical all at once, since 2004 the Bush administration’s blunders — the missing W.M.D., the botched occupation — have been woven into a larger story about Youth and Science and Reason and Diversity triumphing over Old White Male Faith-Based Cluelessness.
Of all the Iraq war’s consequences for our politics, it’s this narrative that may be the war’s most lasting legacy, and the most difficult for conservatives to overcome."
___________________________________
I don't like to go too far with these kind of shooting-from-the-hip analyses. It is more likely that the proper analogy for gay marriage equality is the "tipping point" or "critical mass."
But I like it when conservatives start saying Bush and Cheney didn't just fuck up the country, but they went so far as to fuck up the Republican party too.
There are two separate issues here really. One is how the Republican Party tries to define itself in terms of social issues, and the other is how the public perceives it.
Post a Comment