Here’s a completely valueless op-ed by Gary Bauer in today’s Washington Post, railing against court-“imposed” gay marriage. (As if courts will force heterosexuals to marry people of the same sex.) The piece contains not a single substantive argument against gay marriage itself, nor does it explain why gay marriage is a “threat” to traditional marriage. It just makes these assumptions. Same old crap. Then again, who’d expect substantive arguments to work in a country where approximately half the electorate supports George W. Bush?
His arguments against federalizing marriage are easily refutable. He states that “in 1862 Congress passed the Morrill Act prohibiting plural marriages throughout the western territories.” Yeah, but federal territories were under the control of Congress. Territories, not states. “In order to join the Union, Utah had to write into its state constitution a prohibition against polygamous unions.” But we’re not talking about polygamy, we’re talking about letting two people who love each other solidify their ties. “Second [um… third?], in 1996, Congress passed the federal Defense of Marriage Act, whereby Congress defined marriage in federal law as the union of one man and one woman.” Yeah, and when did the Supreme Court rule this was constitutional?
Keep yourselves alert.
Not related to your point at all, but Bauer makes it sound like 19th century Utahns actually stopped polygamous unions when asked. As any rural Utahn will tell you . . . soooooo not true.
Gary Bauer doesn’t have to worry. He is so amazingly f’ing ugly that no gay man will ever propose to his lame Traditional Value ass.
Wonder how he’d square his “thesis” with the Court’s decision outlawing anti-interracial marriage laws. This whole thing is so exactly like Loving v. Virginia, down to the majority of Americans at the time of that decision being quite simply wrong.
Will this crap ever stop? Sometime I think we’re in the dark ages. Then I remember what my parents tell me, “it doesn’t have to make sense.”
reading that column, I’m starting to wonder if they are right (the folks who argue that LAWRENCE will lead to gay marriage, and the only way to stop it is a constitutional amendment). For most of the summer, I disagreed. Lawrence is about criminal law, and throwing someone in jail (a very basic liberty interest, your freedom) is just so much different than allowing the “right” to marry who one chooses. But with all the writing about how awful gay marriage is, without, yet, a single actual REASON – just conclusiions that somehow it breaks up the (str8) family unit. So, with nothing BUT the evidence that they simply hate us, perhaps there really isn’t a legal rationale for prohibiting gay marriage.
http://web1.ami-admin.com/images/45842.jpg