Way to go, SCOTUS!

Parent Cafe
561

Scalia was pretty well respected when he was appointed to the court,for his legal mind especially. As time has gone on he lost a lot of that respect as he seemingly became a lot more ideological. For example, he has pressed for ‘original intent’ in reading the constitution and promotes the idea of ‘strict constructionalism’ when it comes to the constitution, which legally are problematic (to argue that the constitution’s writers meant it as some sort of document like the 10 commandments, that we were supposed to read it literally, goes against the very history of the document or those who wrote it). Scalia, for example, has argued that the 14th amendment was meant only for blacks coming out of slavery, so therefore it could only apply there; yet the writers could have enumerated that it applied only to blacks, but they didn’t, they wrote it as a general right,it kind of makes his argument fall of its own weight, because if they wanted original intent, why was it written the way it was? Why in other rights did they write them generally, rather than saying “this applies only to his?”. Scalia also has contradicted himself, when the Bush administration took the Oregon assisted suicide case to the Supreme Court, Scalia, who goes on about will of the people, sided with the government’s case that the practice was unconstitutional, despite the fact that it was put in place by popular ballot.

There is no doubt he is a very intelligent man, the problem is he has allowed his personal ideology and those of his political brethren to take over from legal reasoning, he has turned a lot more anti rights. When he wrote the dissent in the Lawrence decision he blotted out a record that was about individual rights and basically made the case that religious morality as law was in the interest of the state. This was the same Scalia 10 years before that heaved out the so called child protection act, that was designed to ‘clean up the internet’, he pointed out (rightly), that the law was so broadly worded, and so non specific, that it would likely be more used to censor people someone didn’t like in the name of ‘protecting children’ then regulating the content they were worried about, that no matter the justification, it hindered a basic right. When I have seen him on roundtable programs, like Fred Friendly’s old roundtable programs on PBS, he was also quite funny and witty, as well.

562

Re: Texas

Seems like the anti-LGB politicians in Austin didn’t notice that the university there named an honors program in one of its best known departments after a gay guy.

563

Unless you happen to be a corporation, which in his view is a person (Citizens United), in fact may be a religious person (Hobby Lobby). But presumably this corporate person, if gay, should not be allowed to marry (Obergefell).

564

Interesting historical factoid: Wyoming was the first state to let women vote. Along with that, women could also sit on juries and run for office. Wyoming was trying to brush up its Wild West image and encourage more women and families to settle there.

Just a few months later, Utah gave women the right to vote. Women were NOT allowed to run for office or sit on juries. Utah was trying to discourage the influence of all the new settlers by basically giving all the men in plural families all the extra votes of their extra wives (legal or otherwise).

That is why legal polyandry scares me. It wouldn’t just be a few big couples here and there who would balance each other out, it would include massive amounts of women married to relatively few men (in some parts of the country) and a large skewing of numbers. I realize it is happening now anyway, with young men being driven out of these communities to even the numbers, but I think legalization would make it worse.

565

Re: #563

Looks like you really mean polygyny (1 husband, >1 wife) rather than polyandry (1 wife, >1 husband)…

566

Yes. The foils of typing on my phone! Polyandry is quite rare.

567

@greenwhich:

I think you overstate the case that polygamy would influence voting, I doubt very much that you would see many Mormon women wanting to be in a Polygamous marriage, for example, and I wonder if the LDS itself would reverse its ban on Polygamy (yes, Mormons were forced to ban polygamy to allow Utah to become a state, in 1887 congress took away the right of women to vote in the Utah territory, as an anti Polygamy measure). Women were given the right to vote in Utah after they banned polygamy, around 1890.

I think the biggest concern with polygamy might be with immigrants from countries where that is allowed, specifically from the Middle East, and protecting the rights of women because the culture and laws of the places they come from are not exactly friendly towards women. If we make that legal then you have problems with idiot judges (and it has happened, this is not just Faux News mythmaking), where a judge decides that the cultural law of the place the couple comes from trumps civil law protecting rights (this happened in NJ, where some idiot judge agreed with the husband in a divorce petition, that the fact that he had hit the wife was not a grounds for divorce where they came from, Morocco, that under the version of Shariah Law practiced there it would be irrelevent, so he ruled not to allow the divorce petition on those grounds. An appeal court wisely vacated the decision and in scathing words told the judge he was an idiot, that foreign rules or cultures have no bearing in our laws. I don’t know why that judge wasn’t tarred and feather, or at least impeached, but that is another story). I myself am doubtful that is a great argument, I suspect that if anything, that women from Muslim countries ,who usually are in arranged marriages, would want out of those marriages, I suspect in the end very few would end up in polygamous marriages here. Not to mention that in places where polygamy is legal in the Middle East, it generally is only practiced among the very well off elites, like the Saudi Royal family and Kuwait and such, among other things, Islamic law requires that a husband cannot take multiple wives unless he can prove he has the means to support them, and as with most immigrants to the US, most Muslim immigrants are generally not that well off to start, and I think that economics and other factors would make polygamy very undesirable to most.

Put it this way, the number of people who live in a polyamorous relationship today is a small percentage of the population, and among those, those who for example live together as a family in one household (the type likely to want to get officially hitched I would guess) is a smaller percentage of that. Barring the LDS requiring polygamous marriages (which as far as I know, they never did) or there being this huge swath of Mormon society wanting polygamy (again, doubtful) or a mass wave of immigrants fro the middle east or Africa wanting polygamy (none of these places as far as I know support Polyandry), it is likely to be such a small group that unlike Utah in the 1870’s, would have little influence.

568

I can see the advantages to either several wives sharing responsibilities and friendships or several husbands to round out what a woman wants. But I think the concept of marriage is tied up with ownership (exclusivity,) even in modern times, among modern sorts. People tend to want a spouse to be “mine” and officially recognized as such. I think we’d meed a much deeper exploration of what marriage serves, today, to worry about poly-whatever.

569

@lookingforward:

It is obvious from the state of marriage today that people do need to question what it means. Given how long we live, is a lifetime committment a realistic thing? Easy to be married for life when you got married at 18 and died in your 30’s, then living into your 70’s and 80’s. Marriage as a property thing worked when generally the man was the breadwinner and thus in many ways “owned” the wife, these days with both people working and with women often equalling or exceeding what the man brings in, what is that? Personally, I think that there is a lot of work to turn marriage of any kind into what it is, a partnership, based in love and need, where people bring into it the things they can, and it is recognized that neither ‘owns’ the other person, that they choose to be together, form a family together, rather than the mystical mumbo jumbo that is still out there, and the right of how that forms and why should be up to the people. Marriage can be sacred to people, but when you say that marriage is this thing God created for his own purposes, you are putting an element into it that may not work for other people, and also leads to abuse when you decide your type is the only type and everyone should live into it. I think the biggest part could be learned from people in so called power relationship, D/s (dominance/Submission) and the like, that marriage should be a negotiated thing, thought out, rather than the kind of haphazard mess that many marriages are, if you think about roles and responsibilities talk about them, rather than simply going in front of someone and mouthing words, you have a real relationship. In D/s relationships people formally go through what they want and don’t, and many continually have a period to renegotiate them, whereas in marriage a lot of people have anger and hidden agendas they don’t dare talk about, which is sad. Strong marriages IME do this instinctively, that the people are mindful of each other and negotiate, talk about things, others seem to take the tag line of an old New Yorker cartoon, showing this old couple sitting in the living room, basically ignoring each other, and I think the tag line was something like “Here lie the mortensons, fifty years of marital bliss” or some such.

570

Today in “No Really, You Can’t Make This Up” Land…

http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/the-buzz/article27171772.html

571

Gee, that should really help the children of gay parents whom opponents of marriage equality ostensibly sought to protect. :frowning: My heart breaks for those little kids.

572

“Welcome to Dent Co, MO where three men decided that they have the same reaction to a declaration of love as they do to the loss of a life and that, by extension, the whole county must appear just as hate-filled as they are.”

573

Sick.

574

Talk about drama queens.

575

Some people have lost their minds.

576

It might also be illegal, while you can argue the right of protest is enshrined in the constitution, using a public facility,in this case the flagpoles, to protest a court decision they don’t like can fall into a gray area, as public officials are supposed to carry out the law without prejudice, and lowering the flags in this case is giving official sanction to a private viewpoint about same sex marriage.

No,l they didn’t lose their minds, that is too easy an excuse, it shows how people can twist religious faith into something hateful and why the term ‘religious’ these days leaves such a bad taste in people’s mouths. The evangelical/fundamentalist Christians in particular have set a tone of anger and hatred and vicious rhetoric that has helped turn off a couple of generations of people from faith, and it totally overshadows, for example, the religious traditions, the various Jewish groups, mainstream protestant churches, liberal churches like UCC, independent churches like Riverside Church in NYC, that have not only fought for same sex marriage but embraced it. Unfortunately, the politicians have catered to the loudmouths and the haters for far too long, and it has nothing to do with party, the Democrats and Republicans both catered to these morons, talked about ‘understanding their faith’ and so forth, and it has left a pretty sour legacy about religion in this country.

577

It just reminds me of a three-year-old having a tantrum. Immature “logic”.

578

I’ve been doing some fascinating reading about this mindset, of which the reaction to gay marriage is but an example. There are certain people who get their self-image/self-value from belonging to a group which is top of the rung. Until recent decades that top group, of course, has been white, straight, Christian, Anglo. Those for whom belonging to that group is the core of their identity, but who see the world around them becoming ever more diverse and ever more tolerant, are in panic mode. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the ruling group is changing (a black, foreign-born, secretly Muslim President, for crying out loud!). For a straight white Christian Anglo with some psychological health, the reaction to all of this change is, at the least, to recognize and accept that this is the arc of history and cannot be held back, and possibly even to welcome it. But for those who are rigidly stuck in an identity which no longer rules the world, these are tough times. We saw exactly the same thing this weekend, in Arizona (“Take back our country!”), and at various confederate flag rallies (“It’s about our heritage!”). Different issues, but same fear that they’ve lost the good old days when their group ruled. SCOTUS sanctioning gay marriage shakes the foundations of their world.

I disagree slighty, @musicprnt , in that I think one side has been MUCH more active in exploiting and amplifying these fears for their own short term gain.

579

@lasma:
Without getting into the nitty gritty, both parties have had their problems with same sex marriage and challenging the religious. During the 2008 primary, for example,Hillary Clinton said she was proud of DOMA, and were she president, she would have voted for it, and it was outright pandering to the religious right. Other Democrats ran away from the issue as well, for example they refused even a nominal effort at trying to pass ENDA (a national anti discrimination bill covering LGBT people) because 'they didn’t want to offend the religious".

Even within the GOP, the motives varied. Yep, you have the Santorums and the Cruz’s and the rest of the religious wrong, but you also have the money GOP, the libertarian GOP members, who should have been all over the issue (sorry, Rand Paul, you and your father are phony libertarians, no libertarian would ever justify legal discrimination against someone based on religious belief), the moderate GOP members, who ‘didn’t want to offend the base’ (meanwhile, the reality is the GOP base would vote GOP no matter what).

Part of this is the myth that the media portrays, they made it seem since Reagan that the country was dominated by religious conservatives, that conservative Catholics and fundamentalists and such were ‘the majority’, and they aren’t, and if anything the country is shifting and the religious right’s teeth are blunted. While the Democrats gave lip service to LGBT issues and same sex marriage, they also did very little to push it, they were very, very careful. Put it this way, Obama only embraced same sex marriage when polls showed it wouldn’t hurt him to embrace it, and I won’t even mention Hillary, who quite frankly on the issue, is disgustingly self serving.

What will be interesting is how the big money GOP and the libertarian branches are going to handle the issue, because if they nominate someone who makes a big deal of same sex marriage, if the GOP keeps their plank on banning it in the constitution, it is going to kill them. There was an interesting article in the NY Times when same sex marriage was legalized by SCOTUS, that said basically that the issue of opposing same sex marriage had a very high correlative index among those who otherwise might vote GOP, not to do so, and it was mostly the young and independent voters, whom the GOP needs, that responded like this. If they present themselves as the holy halalujah party, it is going to hurt them.

580

This is an issue in which the public has been ahead of the officials, and for sure the Ds were not profiles in courage. But now that public opinion is clearly going only one way, and SCOTUS has weighed in, one side is still resisting and stoking fears. Remember the grandmothers-will-start-marrying-their-granddaughters nonsense? Most people knew that was ridiculous, but it genuinely frightens some people, and some pols intentionally play on those fears. You’re right about them losing a generation of voters over it.