Patterico's Pontifications

7/1/2015

Same-Sex Marriage: One Week Later

Filed under: General — Dana @ 6:58 pm



[guest post by Dana]

So, this:

Untitled-2

Photographer Ed Freeman shot this photo 10 years ago and posted it on his Facebook page after the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage was announced. It was accompanied with a victorious statement by the photographer:

“When I took this picture almost ten years ago, it never, never occurred to me that it would someday come to symbolize the victory we are celebrating today. Congratulations to all of us! Love to you all.”

As you can imagine, he has taken a lot of heat for the photograph. Everything from scorn, outrage, and of course, a death threat.

With a straight face, Freeman defended himself, claiming he never intended to be disrespectful:

“The principle complaint that people have is that I am equating the gay struggle with the contribution and sacrifice of American servicemen,” Freeman said. “But there is no equal sign here. This is not meant as a sign of disrespect. For God sake, no. I totally support people in uniform. There is no comparison going on here. The comparison is going on in people’s heads, and they’re spoiling for a fight. They’re already on edge because of the gay marriage decision.”

Sigh.

With that, now that a week has passed since gay marriage has been the law of the land, the gay community isn’t sure how to handle their new found rights and independence. After all, when a group successfully overcomes a self-perceived victimhood, where do they go from there?

The more victories that accumulate for gay rights, the faster some gay institutions, rituals and markers are fading out. And so just as the gay marriage movement peaks, so does a debate about whether gay identity is dimming, overtaken by its own success.

“What do gay men have in common when they don’t have oppression?” asked Andrew Sullivan, one of the intellectual architects of the marriage movement. “I don’t know the answer to that yet.”

“The thing I miss is the specialness of being gay,” said Lisa Kron. “Because the traditional paths were closed, there was a consciousness to our lives, a necessary invention to the way we were going to celebrate and mark family and mark connection. That felt magical and beautiful.”

Already, just one week into same-sex marriage, and the spark is gone.

–Dana

22 Responses to “Same-Sex Marriage: One Week Later”

  1. Hello.

    Dana (86e864) — 7/1/2015 @ 7:04 pm

  2. Disrespectful narcissism.

    Colonel Haiku (2601c0) — 7/1/2015 @ 7:15 pm

  3. We’ve always suspected that the left is motivated more by being afraid of becoming
    no longer relevant.

    It’s why the Race hustlers have to gin up a racial conflict every so often. It’s
    why the gays pressed so hard about forcing acceptance.

    It’s why the complainers always have another complaint once you try to satisfy the
    current one.

    They’re never satisfied. They never will be. That’s why apologies are a waste. They
    make the apologizer look weak and dilutes whatever was relevant or correct about what
    they said to rouse the masses.

    Time to start striking back. Refusing to buckle under to their every whim. Make
    them answer for their insanity and ridicule them for their lack of seriousness.

    Time to stand up for truth and reality because the continues insanity is leading us
    further and further into a very dark place.

    Time to reject the cowards that are the supposed leadership of the GOP. Time to
    forge our own leaders and they need to be the ones willing to stand up and fight back.

    jakee308 (c37f85) — 7/1/2015 @ 7:15 pm

  4. It was amusing to me today to read the rash of leftist articles where SSM proponents are out banging the drums against polygamy.

    JD (3b5483) — 7/1/2015 @ 7:17 pm

  5. I read this story about a place where the Druids would make giant wicker cages in the form of a crow, cram about fifty prisoners in them, and set the thing on fire burning the sacrifices alive. A new king sent in some troops, who cut off some Druids’ heads, freed the prisoners and demolished the crow and the Druid temple. The surviving Druids sat around scratching their heads wondering why anyone would do such a thing. One of them suggested, “Perhaps the crow is the king’s personal totem and we offended him”, and the others thought that the was the likeliest explanation.

    Don’t try to get into perverts’ minds. They don’t think like normal people anymore than than they f*** like normal people.

    nk (dbc370) — 7/1/2015 @ 7:37 pm

  6. It was amusing to me today to read the rash of leftist articles where SSM proponents are out banging the drums against polygamy.

    JD (3b5483) — 7/1/2015 @ 7:17 pm

    How could they possibly care about that?

    Gerald A (949d7d) — 7/1/2015 @ 7:39 pm

  7. On the other thread there was this from a judge’s previous ruling concerning a polygamy case:
    None of us are any obligation to morally approve of the relationship, of course, but moral disapproval in and of itself should not be a sufficient basis to make something a crime or to forbid it from happening.
    https://patterico.com/2015/07/01/polygamist-family-applies-for-marriage-license/#comment-1773326

    Ruling that SSM is a Constitutional civil right is more or less saying the government declares it at least “invalid” if not “immoral” to think homosexuality is in any way “wrong” when it comes to discussion in the public square, correct?

    Aphrael has pointed out that the cases where people have lost their businesses have not been based on SSM but on including sexual orientation in their anti-discrimination laws. Now that SSM has been declared a federal right, are businesses in all states under this threat, or only where there are explicit anti-discrimination statutes? Does the fed guaranteed right to a SSM automatically guarantee a right to demand equal service of a baker or florist or wedding chapel owner?

    MD (Back) in Philly (f9371b) — 7/1/2015 @ 7:57 pm

  8. The only part of the Constitution which restricts individual conduct is the Thirteenth Amendment. Every other provision relates to government action. Including the Fourteenth Amendment under which the gay cases were decided. There would need to be legislation. Federal under the Commerce Clause, or state under the states’ plenary police power.

    nk (dbc370) — 7/1/2015 @ 8:04 pm

  9. FWIW, was the picture “shot” or photo-shopped? I can’t account for the L leg of the fellow 2nd from R.

    MD (Back) in Philly (f9371b) — 7/1/2015 @ 8:05 pm

  10. So, in states where sexual orientation has not been explicitly included in anti-discrimination legislation, a business can decline to provide service for a ssw and risk only social media castigation, etc.?

    MD (Back) in Philly (f9371b) — 7/1/2015 @ 8:11 pm

  11. Yes. And I don’t think there’s a federal law yet, either, for private discrimination, except in employment. In 2012 (of course) the EEOC (of course) ruled by regulation (of course) that sexual orientation means sex under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

    nk (dbc370) — 7/1/2015 @ 8:35 pm

  12. Now that SSM has been declared a federal right, are businesses in all states under this threat, or only where there are explicit anti-discrimination statutes?

    The latter. The marriage decision really changes nothing in this regard.

    Does the fed guaranteed right to a SSM automatically guarantee a right to demand equal service of a baker or florist or wedding chapel owner?

    Of course not. Federal anti-discrimination law does not include sexuality, so as far as federal law is concerned it is perfectly legal, not only to refuse to participate in a gay marriage, but even to openly discriminate against gay people. Some states have laws against that, some don’t. In states that don’t one can openly fire someone for being gay.

    That’s what was so silly about the fuss over Indiana’s RFRA. Indiana has no anti-discrimination protection for gay people, so they didn’t need a RFRA to protect those who didn’t want to cater gay weddings. Their RFRA was passed for the same reason Congress passed a federal one, and many other states have passed theirs: to protect ordinary religious people in ordinary situations where the law would otherwise force them to violate their consciences. It had nothing to do with gays.

    Milhouse (a04cc3) — 7/1/2015 @ 8:42 pm

  13. I don’t think being gay is a sin, and I don’t care and even would hope they have stable relationships. I only worry about the whole issue as a political cudgel and an attack on the Constitution, which I love because it constrains the excesses of humanity.

    As I’ve said before, and I’m sure our commenter here who is married would disagree, but we will not see a huge number of gay marriages. I remember at a rally in Laguna Beach the guy with the mic cried out, “And who will be getting married when we win?” Everyone kind of looked down and not a single person raised their hand. It’s politics, not love.

    Culture is always ahead of us, and the gay character who is properly domesticated, with a partner and kids like a new Ozzie Nelson, but who longs for the bad old days of transgressive gay life is becoming a thing in more than one novel I’ve read.

    Patricia (5fc097) — 7/1/2015 @ 10:47 pm

  14. 13. Not an expert, but I get the feeling vis a vis single parents are no longer favored via the government when an aggregate of taxation, transfer payments and legal accomodation are considered.

    Just another item on the prog bucket list. Phuck the Good where e’er you find it.

    DNF (6cda3a) — 7/2/2015 @ 7:11 am

  15. As a heterosexual woman married for 35 years – I actually feel triumphant and special and glowing – like I have achieved a MAJOR accomplishment. I tell people we have been married for 35 years and they all respond like I said “I just climed Mt. Everest!” Seriously.

    Janetoo (0c6e40) — 7/2/2015 @ 8:01 am

  16. 4. It was amusing to me today to read the rash of leftist articles where SSM proponents are out banging the drums against polygamy.

    JD (3b5483) — 7/1/2015 @ 7:17 pm

    It is amusing. Because all the rational arguments for marriage precludes SSM. To get SSM, its proponents had to resort to emotional blackmail.

    Marriage equality! #LoveWins!

    If you read Kennedy’s decision it reads like a 17 year old’s facebook page. It isn’t about reason. It’s about the right to dignity and spirituality and lonely people crying out and affirming people’s love.

    In other words, it’s the exact opposite of the rationale for the government had to recognize marriage in the first place. As Blackstone noted, the government left all the emotional and spiritual aspects of marriage to the church. The government only had one compelling interest in marriage. To ensure a man stayed around to meet his obligations to his children, and consequently his wife. The government was only interested in marriage as a contract.

    Now it’s reversed. Government isn’t interested in the contract. The more Julias who are dependent on government from cradle to grave the better, as far as people like Obama are concerned. And as Kennedy’s ruling shows, it’s the government’s role to ensure people’s emotional and spiritual needs are met by affirming their love.

    Now the people arguing that SSM doesn’t lead to polyamorous marriage are trying to put the toothpaste back into the tube and are demanding we be completely unemotional, but instead hard nosed rationalists and entirely practical.

    And that truly is hilarious.

    It should by now be abundantly clear that the laziest cases against the inevitability of polygamy are starting to push up the daisies. Before Justice Kennedy decided to appoint himself the nation’s most cherished arbiter of dark magic and inscrutable liberty, it was sufficient for the champions of matrimonial transformation to wave their hands and to cast their inquisitors as madmen. “Nobody is talking about multiple marriage,” they would scoff. “And even if they were, the people wouldn’t stand for it.” Today, in the first week of the Age of Substantive Due Process, neither of these rejoinders will fly.

    …It is not just that polygamy is an old idea, Rauch continues, but that it is a bad one. To underscore this judgment, he cites the “extensive literature,” which apparently demonstrates that “polygynous” cultures exhibit “significantly higher levels of rape, kidnapping, murder, assault robbery and fraud” than monogamous cultures, and shows that “monogamy’s main cultural evolutionary advantage over polygyny is the more egalitarian distribution of women, which reduces male competition and social problems” — among them, increases in “long-term planning, economic productivity, savings and child investment.”

    …It is possible that Rauch’s empirical judgments are correct; feasible, too, that Young has offered up a fair adumbration of exactly what it would take to adjust the legal order to accommodate polygamous relationships. And yet, in the long term, these roadblocks will almost certainly prove irrelevant. As anybody who followed the debate must surely recognize, same-sex marriage did not win the day in the court of public opinion because Americans came to believe that the “literature” supported it, or because the empirical evidence apropos of divorce rates and domestic violence bolstered the case, or because it became possible to convince judges that there was no “rational basis” on which the status quo could be maintained. It won because it was presented as a moral imperative (#LoveWins), because its opponents were cast as “haters” and thereby frozen out of the debate, and because its champions came to make heavy use of two ideas that Americans rightly cherish: namely, “rights” and “equality.” The precise moment that the specter of Jim Crow was raised, the traditional-marriage movement was dead in the water.

    …Which is to say that Fredrik deBoer appears to know instinctively what Jonathan Rauch and Cathy Young do not: That this is a culture in which spending time repudiating your naysayers’ objections is wasteful and counter-productive. As deBoer writes on his blog, he starts not from the position that polygamy makes sense in a vacuum, but that there exists a “natural moral right to group marriage,” and he proceeds with gusto from there. “If my liberal friends recognize the legitimacy of free people who choose to form romantic partnerships with multiple partners,” he asks puckishly at Politico, “how can they deny them the right to the legal protections marriage affords?” Give him this: The man knows his audience. To the reader who wants to be “on the right side of history,” words such as “deny,” “legitimacy,” “free people,” and “right” are potent indeed. “Literature,” “empirical,” “constitutional,” “statistical,” “historical”? Not so much…

    Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420614/polygamy-gay-marriage-supreme-court

    Steve57 (4c9797) — 7/2/2015 @ 11:41 am

  17. #FirstWorldProblems

    and calling Randy Andy an intellectual architect is to utterly debase the meaning of the term.

    redc1c4 (dab236) — 7/2/2015 @ 11:51 am

  18. i’d make a joke about the whole article reeking of “butthurt” but that might get me accused of homophobia…

    😎

    redc1c4 (dab236) — 7/2/2015 @ 11:53 am

  19. Just for saying it: Homophobe! I denounce you! Say ten Hail Jenner’s and put $1,000 in the Gay box.

    Rev. Barack Hussein Hoagie (f4eb27) — 7/2/2015 @ 12:06 pm

  20. red @18, the article does reek of butthurt. But that’s only because Cooke is describing the perpetually butthurt nation we’ve become.

    This country indoctrinates children to grow up butthurt. That’s why they need trigger warnings and safe spaces.

    If it wasn’t for the perpetually butthurt, Obama never would have been elected. The only argument to elect him was, his supporters would be butthurt if you don’t.

    Racist.

    And that’s the only argument to elect Hillary!

    Sexist.

    Look at how the butthurt react every time something bad happens, like in Charleston or Sandy Hook.

    “Somebody did something horrible to other people, and now you have to give me something I want or I’ll be butthurt. And call you names.”

    Say what you want about the SCOTUS gay marriage decision, but Kennedy knows what his and the court’s roles are in butthurt nation. Respond to somebody’s hurt feelings, and cater to their self-esteem.

    I expect the SCOTUS decision legalizing multiple marriages to be written using emojis.

    Steve57 (4c9797) — 7/2/2015 @ 1:34 pm

  21. ==I expect the SCOTUS decision legalizing multiple marriages to be written using emojis.==

    I expect the supreme court decision legalizing multiple marriages to be not written at all.

    elissa (b17622) — 7/2/2015 @ 2:01 pm

  22. elissa, if you believed what Kennedy said in his Lawrence decision you could have said the same thing about a SCOTUS decision legalizing SSM.

    And here we are.

    The fact is, in order to arrive at this decision legalizing SSM the court had to remove every barrier that would have prevented multiple marriage as well.

    …A case called Washington v. Glucksberg (1997) presented an obstacle to Justice Kennedy in his goal of finding a substantive-due-process right to same-sex marriage. Rather than simply ignore this case, as he ignored the legal principles governing equal-protection claims, he gutted it and removed the main precedent preventing courts from fashioning any number of new rights.

    …Under the Glucksberg standard, same-sex marriage has no roots whatsoever in American history, and the existence of a general right to marriage does not help. The right to marry might be deeply rooted, but nearly every state for nearly all of American history has limited marriage to individuals of opposite sexes.

    …In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Justice Kennedy went out of his way to assure readers that even though he found a right to homosexual sodomy, the case “does not involve” same-sex marriage. In fact, in her concurrence, Justice O’Connor explicitly stated that the opinion’s reasoning did not apply to “other laws distinguishing between heterosexuals and homosexuals . . . such as . . . the traditional institution of marriage.”

    In Obergefell, Justice Kennedy admitted that this was nothing but a ruse…

    Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420564/obergefell-and-constitution

    The brakes are entirely off. There are multiple marriage cases in the pipelin. And in the Brown v. Buhman case the US district court judge, Clark Waddoups (a GWB appointee), determined when throwing out a Utah law banning not only multiple marriages but polyamorous relations that there is only one reason you or anyone else could oppose polyamory.

    Bigotry. Which is exactly the same reason Kennedy said in his Windsor decision I oppose SSM.

    So no doubt in twenty years you’ll be in the same position I’m in now.

    Steve57 (4c9797) — 7/2/2015 @ 3:04 pm


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