Tag: Gay Marriage

You might have missed the news blip this week that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a challenge to its 2015 gay marriage decision, Obergefell v. Hodges. The decision of an overwhelmingly conservative court next year could very well be one of the year’s biggest stories, dividing Americans like nothing since the Trump court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

I’ve been a backer of gay marriage since the 1990s, when Andrew Sullivan made the case that marriage would push gay life more into the traditionalist mold of heterosexual life shaped by the responsibilities of the modern marriage covenant. The committed love of an older lesbian colleague and a gay teacher had something to do with my thinking, as well.

The best thing about Obergefell is that in the decade since it legalized gay marriage in all 50 states, all the religious right’s scary arguments about the moral and social breakdown married gays would unleash upon society have been shown to be bunk. The worst thing I’ve seen is that the LGBTQ community is just as bad at marriage as the rest of us. I’m no paragon. Just ask my wives.

But even then, I am all for the Supreme Court overturning the decision that was Anthony Kennedy’s last big foray into philosophizing. His ruling, joined by the court’s liberals, is farrago of falsehoods and flapdoodle with a complete disregard for the Constitution, which much to the annoyance of the left simply doesn’t have anything to say about the debate at hand other than to require that we resolve things as a democratic republic should — by voting.

One way you can tell whether your spouse in a marital argument or your swing-vote Supreme Court justice has gone off the rails is when they start using words like “all” and “always.” Kennedy takes all the way to the second sentence of the decision to get sideways with reality: “The lifelong union of a man and a woman always has promised nobility and dignity to all persons, without regard to their station in life.”

“Always has promised nobility and dignity to all persons,” huh? Guess he’s never heard of marriages that can be undone with a brief incantation and the wife cast aside. Guess he’s never heard of the places where wife beating and marital rape were standard. That’s a lot of nobility, right there.

The next paragraph gets even better. “Since the dawn of history, marriage has transformed strangers into relatives, binding families and societies together. Confucius taught that marriage lies at the foundation of government. This wisdom …”

Confucius had a lot of wisdom about how marriage should be conducted. Wife chattel? Check. Wife can’t own property? Check. Wife to obey husband in all things? Check. Corporal punishment for bad wives? Check.

That’s some wisdom from Confucius about the “dignity” of wives. Let me go out on a limb to say if your opinion on gay marriage starts off by citing Confucian wisdom, you might be a little confused about history.

Scalia: Let public debate continue

Kennedy is no less confused about his job interpreting the Constitution. He opines that his “method respects our history and learns from it without allowing the past alone to rule the present.”

But the thing about Constitution is that the whole point is for the past to rule the present, unless legislators take up the arduous task of amending it. The First Amendment from the distant past gives us the right to free speech. The past absolutely rules that you cannot throw irritating columnists in jail for what they write, no matter how much you want to, without changing the Constitution.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who knew what his job was, had it exactly right when he wrote in dissent, “When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, every State limited marriage to one man and one woman, and no one doubted the constitutionality of doing so. That resolves these cases. When it comes to determining the meaning of a vague constitutional provision — such as ‘due process of law’ or ‘equal protection of the laws’ — it is unquestionable that the People who ratified that provision did not understand it to prohibit a practice that remained both universal and uncontroversial in the years after ratification. We have no basis for striking down a practice. … Since there is no doubt whatever that the People never decided to prohibit the limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples, the public debate over same-sex marriage must be allowed to continue.”

In short, the men who reshaped our country’s Constitution in the wake of the Civil War did not accidentally legalize gay marriage, no matter how much Justice Kennedy might twist logic and history to make it seem so.

I want gay marriage to be legal. I will vote 100 times to make it so if that is what it takes. But just because I like the outcome of a Supreme Court case does not make it good law. The Supreme Court should strike this monstrosity down, and Congress should go about making it law the right way.

David Mastio is a national columnist for McClatchy and The Kansas City Star.