SCOTUS will probably be facing the music…
…on gay marriage, now that circuit courts are split on the issue:
In one sweeping decision, the Sixth Circuit has given all of the states in its geographic region a victory for their bans on both initial marriages of same-sex couples and official recognition of such marriages performed outside of the couples’ home states. By contrast, other federal courts have nullified identical bans in thirteen states just over the past few months, with the prospect that the number would soon rise to sixteen ”” for a total of thirty-five states, plus Washington, D.C., allowing such marriages.
Here’s a summary of the grounds on which the new decision was based:
Under the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, state marriage laws are clearly constitutional.
…State marriage laws easily survive rational-basis review. It is rational to define marriage as a male-female union because (a) governmental recognition of marriage operates to regulate the intended and unintended effects of male-female intercourse, and (b) it’s reasonable for the people of a state to assess how the benefits and burdens of redefining marriage are playing out in other states before they decide whether to take that step. “Any other approach”> would create line-drawing problems of its own.”
State marriage laws do not reflect animus.
There is no “fundamental right” to SSM.
The judge who wrote the opinion and the one who joined it are Republican appointees; the dissent was written by a Democrat. I would be very surprised if the Supreme Court declines to hear the issue after this, but I have no idea how a SCOTUS decision would go.
I read of this yesterday and found it of interest given that it was the first time that I have read where a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge has pointed out in his written opinion that, “Sutton suggested that the same argument that says there is a constitutional right to gay marriage could be used in support of polygamy or some other combination.
“If it is constitutionally irrational to stand by the man-woman definition of marriage, it must be constitutionally irrational to stand by the monogamous definition of marriage,” he wrote.”
I bookmarked the AP article for future reference.
So I find it of further interest that yesterday, the AP included those words but today, they are no longer in the same article… the AP reviewed the article and removed the Judge’s pointing out the most basic argument against ‘judicial revising’ of the traditional definition of marriage.
One more example of leftist ‘agenda’ propaganda disguised as “journalism”.
Gay agenda won t end at marriage, taxpayer will be funding female surrogates & physicians to facillitate this so 2 males can have a family, we ll be paying for gender reassignments too
iirc, a Utah judge pointed out that allowing SSM would also allow polygamy. I don’t remember which level of the Federal court system he sits on, though.
The big mystery to a lot of people in all of this has been why the US Supreme Court has been actively avoiding the SSM cases. You’d think that whichever side thought it had the majority of Supremes on its side would bring one of the cases up for review to settle the issue once and for all.
Neo reports from the decision:
Yes, that is precisely, has been, and remains, the logically powerful reason-based argument that has more often than not been overlooked in the discussion of same-sex “marriage”
The question is 1, why a “social” interest in the importance of the contract in the first place; and 2, why the importance is great enough to drag the issue into the public sphere where we as citizens and jurors must recognize that there is a socially worthwhile matter to be considered.
Who would naturally care which bugger gets the poodle or what they wish others call their association?
However, here is the catch, and what many of us forget when trying to reason in this way. The very notion of both reason and purposive-ness as being determinate in establishing interpersonal and socially distributive claims to our recognition, regard, affirmation, and support, are not conceded by the left.
Their reasoning is: there is no such thing as natural purposes or kinds; to therefore claim to base decisions on inferences from them is forbidden. Therefore, that which it is impossible to reason about on the basis of natural kind premisses, can only be reasoned about within a content of arbitrarily stipulative propositions. It follows then, all “rational reasons” for affirming or prohibiting, find their grounding only in the “expert” interpretation of what it is that has been arbitrarily socially stipulated, and which social stipulation holds primacy of place or sits at the conditioning apex.
And, since inclusion and cost sharing is the highest arbitrary value of the social shaping project of the left, there can be, in their view, no compelling or rational public interest reason for opposing an obligation imposed upon the subject-matter populace to recognize, affirm, enable, share risk and trouble and cost underwrite.
Thus, the mentality of the postmodern leftist and his client class has migrated completely away from teleological explanations including the realm of biology, from ideas of right reason, from objective morals, and even from the notion of rationally defensible interpersonal boundaries; and contrariwise toward subjective emotional satisfaction; and power and population shaping as self-justifying, remain as the only standards of value.
There can be, therefore, literally, no traditional reasoning with them on the subject of interpersonal and social boundaries.
You can acquiesce or resist. Those are your only choices.
What this or that is “for”, is to their minds, what they declare it is “for”: end of story.
There is a rather comic opera process playing out on Ed Feser’s blog right now; wherein over 700 comments have been generated by, and in response to some small time academic who has been blathering on, and on and on, about “inclusion”, “welcoming”, “repurposing”, self-creation, social sacrifice, embracing a self-sacrificial life guided by chance, hippie bonobos as our evolutionary ideal, and “LOVE”.
You can guess which orifices he wishes to see established as infinitely re-purpose-able.
One sincere and apparently persistently earnest “Thomist” after another rises to the challenge and attempts to engage this commenter, only to find that any attempt to tease a consistent meaning out of the words he deploys, or to get him to recognize the predicate inconsistencies underlying in his own claim structure, is completely futile.
In fact, this clown is gleefully trotting out, literally, or almost literally, every contemptibly ridiculous, emotion swollen trope, which people like myself have for years now hung on the ridicule rack in order to mock in the mush-minded idiocy of the secular kumbayaists.
Yet apparently, and contrary to my voiced suspicions, he is serious: since it seems too elaborate a joke to set up a personal web site spouting the same crap you are polluting another’s blog with, unless you actually believe it yourself.
I mean for Gaia’s sake … ‘repurposing this or that biological feature, joyously evolving ourselves into facsimiles of hippie Bonobos, let’s all follow Ram Dass over the edge … ‘ https://santitafarella.wordpress.com/
You think it’s got to be a joke. But this guy apparently teaches at a college.
Now if he is this crazy and yet can teach literature and get paid for it, what are the thought-averse, emotion swollen, tattooed and pierced, lumpenprole nihilists of the Democrat client class, aiming for?
Hell in a hand-basket. But all together, of course.
We know how the left side of the Court will vote, and on the right we know how Scalia is going to go. Probably Thomas and Alito too. But Roberts is dicey at best and Kennedy is almost certainly a lost cause. Its not over yet for traditional marriage, but it soon will be.
Better watch your abbreviations, Neo! Using SSM you are only a keystroke away from making possibly unfounded assumptions about a couple’s (itself assuming a fact not in evidence) sexual ya-ya’s.
Unless, of course, SSM is the approved shorthand for same sex marriage — that IS what we are talking about here, right? One never knows what LGBTQQII, P.C. has been up to.
Unless, of course, SSM is the approved shorthand for same sex marriage
———————-
It is.
Presumably because the term “homosexual” seems to be not very well-liked in mixed company, and “gay” is often (though not always) used to refer to male-male sexual relationships (as opposed to lesbian relationships), Same Sex Marriage is usually the go-to term for it. And the obvious abbreviation is the one that you’ve already noted.
“Same-sex marriage” is dumb, stupid, idiotic, and nonsensical, and no amount of Supreme Court and other judicial blathering can make it reasonable. Under “same-sex marriage” rules, I could marry my dead grandmother and three neighbors, including a little boy, down the street. Why not? All is permitted according to the vicious nihilists who are pushing this ridiculous concept.
Male homosexuals are seriously over represented in the stock market — no divorces.
So, in my stock broking daze I knew quite a few. (Word of mouth?)
Suffice it to say: to a man they diss’d marriage… any marriage. I would be regaled with tales of woe — of their straight acquaintances — all of whom seemed to have lost their shirts in family court.
If you don’t want to see homosexuals ruined by divorce court — then don’t let them get hitched. For such unions won’t (normally) even have the bonds of progeny to hold them together when the storms come.
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I regard the entire matter as fake — as a political straw horse.
Homosexuality has been around for millennia. At no prior time, in no prior society, have homosexuals clamored for married status. On the record, quite the reverse has been celebrated.
“Gay” as a term for homosexuals has been in use for a long time. It has both the ironical import of describing those who are often morose — over broken loves; and the attributes of THE heaviest partiers ever to have been born.
&&&
To me SSM carries the meta-message that homosexuals insist on being in our faces — even after having run out of all of their primary beefs.
Might we expect a surge in NAMBLA themes?
And the obvious wedge towards polygamy is already obvious.
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With all of these adult indulgences — what of the children?
Social fluidity or it’s discrimination. Similarly, gender fluidity or it’s discrimination.
On a related theme, the Europeans have rejected interspecies marriage with a rejection of implied consent. Apparently, animals — at least in Europe — are not obligated to register for Obamacare under penalty for breathing.
The Court cannot rule on just marriage of couplets without considering moral hazards created through selective exclusion that will be left for future generations to reconcile.
MollyNH:
Not surrogates, womb banks. Unfortunately, renting a woman… I mean, womb, is not a novel concept that was introduced with the normalization of male homosexual unions. So many unwanted children and womb banks, too. The concept of “sperm depositors” is a lesser moral concern.