Unless you have been stranded on an island that resides in another dimension, you are now aware that the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that any prohibition on same sex marriage is unconstitutional, effectively making gay marriage legal in all 50 states.
According to most legal pundits, it will be difficult and very time consuming to reverse that decision. In fact, it probably will not happen. Like Roe v Wade, like it or not, this controversial topic is now the law of the land.
Of course, many gays and lesbians are jubilant, and many religious conservatives are anything but.
In this anything but humble writer’s opinions, both groups have it dead wrong. At best the SCOTUS did not make the right or wrong decision, it just made the right wrong decision; the best bad choice.
The fundamental problem is that both gay rights activists and religious conservatives generally and often unquestioningly accept the state as the legitimizing authority of their relationships.
Perhaps the greatest hypocrisy is from the religious right, many of whom vehemently demand “small government” that respects their religious freedoms with huge bureaucracies to enforce their morality on the entire population and a massive prison-industrial system to back it up.
Gay rights activists want the government out of their bedrooms by insisting that said government license and legitimize their relationships. At least part of that mentality can be attributed to the feminist mindset of “Keep the government out of my vagina but give me free birth control and abortions.”
It is not that the SCOTUS got it wrong so much as they were ruling on the wrong issue.
Certainly, I agree that the law of the land should apply to all people, and I have no inclination to say otherwise regarding gay marriage. So with that I will say congratulations to the gay community.
And welcome to the governmental tyranny over your lives with the rest of us.
Marriage, before they licensed it in the manner one does to drive a car or own a dog, was a religious institution in which the government was not involved. Well, with the exception of many places where the church actually was the government and vice versa.
Eliminating the church from legal governance, and keeping the government out of church has been an important but very slow process over the past three centuries. We have done much better at keeping the government out of church than the other way around. Freedom of religion still faces minor challenges. Freedom from religion has a long way to go but I digress.
Unless anyone has not noticed, the church, at least some sects, have changed a great deal with the social climate. Many churches will now marry anyone with a license.
That license is the problem.
It is somewhat baffling that two groups, often at complete ideological odds with each other, still bend knee and worship at the altar of the State. In the case of religious conservatives, it is even more perplexing that they so often loudly bemoan government interference in family life and divorce, while demanding the government sanction their model, and only their model, of marriage.
Truth is often stranger than fiction.
For some gay people the right to marry embodies their desire to have recognized the love and family that the law previously denied. I also realize that for many gay people that the issue is not so much the license, but the legal rights that come with it, from hospital visitation to health insurance to tax incentives and inheritance.
All of that, every last bit of it, serves as evidence of where we have failed to remove the church from governance. They are matters that could be remedied by enforcing the separation of church and state. That could be accomplished without the destructive intrusions into family breakup that are sure to follow the SCOTUS ruling.
Instead of less government intrusion in their private lives, the gay community has just seen the floodgates open. They will start figuring it out when the divorces start rolling in, especially for couples with adopted children and one crazy spouse. It will be even worse for gay parents. Adopted children are already damaged from some form of abandonment. A follow-up of dose parental alientation is hardly what they need.
It is exactly what many of them will get.
I have never taken a directly political stance on this issue for this very reason. I support the right of every gay man to be treated no differently by society or under the law than anyone else. So in a system that sucks, and laws that suck, and the beatings they and their children will take I will be happy to make room in the foxhole right alongside the rest of us.
Perhaps a generation or two in the trenches of family law will convince them a little more thought should be put into their cause. They will realize that behind the façade of every government license lives the very real threat of governmental control and abuse.
When that control walks into your family’s home, the results can be catastrophic. When stripping you of assetts, rights and children, the government is certainly on record with their willingness.
