The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Fanatic Disciples of Equality

Posted on | March 27, 2013 | 19 Comments

The top 13 threads this morning at Memeorandum are about the Supreme Court arguments over same-sex marriage — the latest items being by Dana Milbank and Megan McArdle — and it’s tedious beyond words simply because it’s so far above our pay-grade.

This is a pageant of the elite. Once the Nine Robed Ones agreed to hear these cases, anything that you or I might think about the subject ceased to matter. The Supreme Court has in recent decades become the antithesis of democracy, the weapon employed by those who, unwilling to work patiently to change law by the usual processes, instead seek to have their opponents’ views ruled unconstitutional.

A 5-4 decision = “shut up.”

What’s a blogger to do? It’s not as if anything I write here will be footnoted in the court’s ruling. My opinion is entirely moot, as is yours.

We could examine the bogus presumption of superior wisdom invested in the Supreme Court, the idea that the justices are more enlightened than the rest of us, simply by their tenure on the bench. But this is easily disproven, merely by citing the absurd pretzel logic of Justice William Douglas’s infamous 1965 argument in Griswold:

In other words, the First Amendment has a penumbra where privacy is protected from governmental intrusion. . . .
The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen.

Any honest person can see that Justice Douglas began with the object of achieving a desired result (i.e., nullifying Connecticut’s law restricting contraceptives) and then went rooting around in court precedents to improvise some justification for this conclusion. A similar process was at work in 2003 when Justice Anthony Kennedy decided to strike down the Texas sodomy law, and improvised this ridiculous gibberish:

The Nation’s laws and traditions in the past half century are most relevant here. They show an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex.

Ah, yes — the “emerging awareness” principle, forever enshrined in our hearts, right next to the “penumbras, formed by emanations,” as the defining quality of what America is all about. For these intellectual abstractions, patriots marched bleeding through the snow at Trenton.

We are too accustomed to this decadent age described by Yeats:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

What the intensely passionate desire is that the Nine Robed Ones will overturn “Prop 8,” the California referendum passed by a narrow majority in 2008. I wrote about the reaction that year:

Taking to the streets in furious indignation, activists created an “enemies list” of those who had contributed to support the measure, targeting them for boycotts and protests.
The elderly co-owner of a Mexican restaurant, who had given $100  to support the referendum, was  driven to tears as she confronted “60 members of Los Angeles’ LGBT community” who demanded an apology and an equal contribution to a proposed effort to repeal the referendum. . . .
One activist who helped compile the enemies list told Time magazine: “My goal was to make it socially  unacceptable to give huge amounts of money to take away the rights of one particular group, a minority group.” Of course, the  restaurant owner’s $100 contribution to the “Yes on 8” cause was not “huge,” but the principle is the same.
As the California activists spewed their fury — allegedly vandalizing Mormon temples, making terroristic threats toward Catholics, and hurling racial epithets at African-Americans (who voted 3-to-1 in favor of Prop 8, according to exit polls) — their vitriolic rage highlighted how the progressive rhetoric of “rights” undermines and destabilizes political consensus. . . .

You can read the rest at The American Spectator, but it’s not as if it matters. Justice Kennedy will decide what result he wants and then gin up an argument to justify that 5-4 decision and, whatever the result may be, the fanatic disciples of equality will continue using terroristic threats to intimidate all who might disagree with them.

 

Comments

19 Responses to “The Fanatic Disciples of Equality”

  1. Mike G.
    March 27th, 2013 @ 8:50 am

    The days are getting dark indeed. America vis a vis Obama backsliding on supporting Israel and this latest monstrosity from the left on SSM are pulling down the curtain over our continued existence as a free country.

  2. Cahoots
    March 27th, 2013 @ 8:57 am

    It’s the elitists’ fashion show of conditional jurisprudence. http://www.americavictorious.com/2013/03/27/the-elistists-fashion-show-of-conditional-jurisprudence/

  3. bobbymike34
    March 27th, 2013 @ 9:13 am

    Thousands of years of ‘One man and One woman’ can be struck down by 1 of 9 of 315,000,000 people this is not freedom.

  4. The Monster
    March 27th, 2013 @ 9:19 am

    Actually, it’s millions of years of “one man and at least one woman”. Polygamous marriage has been practiced by many societies for as long as marriage has existed. But same-sex unions have NEVER been considered “marriage” until very recently. There is no argument for SSM that does not also apply to polygamy.

  5. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    March 27th, 2013 @ 9:47 am

    Might as well go fully soddom/gomorah and wait for judgment to rain down. I hear it is now in Palm Springs.

    The right decision for the court is not some sweeping decision on this but to leave it for the states. Let them work it out (and frankly they are already doing that).

  6. Dai Alanye
    March 27th, 2013 @ 10:12 am

    Lincoln supposedly asked, “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs would the dog have? Four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one.”

    Likewise, calling a regulated liaison between two people of the same sex marriage doesn’t make it so, any more than calling a homosexual gay makes him/her joyous. Doesn’t matter how many licenses are purchased, ceremonies held, laws written or court decisions recorded, it’s not marriage.

  7. Bob Belvedere
    March 27th, 2013 @ 11:15 am

    A is always A.

  8. CrustyB
    March 27th, 2013 @ 11:22 am

    I like those two signs, “Marriage is a constitutional right” and “Queer Jesus loves us more.” Both equally untrue.

  9. Self-Hating Honkies and the War on Easter | Andrew J. Patrick
    March 27th, 2013 @ 11:31 am

    […] They’ve been honkified by the fanatic disciples of egalitarianism, who are busy in other areas as well. […]

  10. Finrod Felagund
    March 27th, 2013 @ 11:41 am

    Offtopic–

    I imagine Ronald Reagan smiling that the Berlin Wall is endangered by high-end housing projects:

    http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/03/27/pre-dawn-operation-removes-part-berlin-wall-that-protesters-had-sought-to/

  11. richard mcenroe
    March 27th, 2013 @ 11:53 am

    A minor correction. The Prop 8 opponents very briefly confronted African-Americans outside their churches.

    In the words of Sepp Dietrich, “Well, that could have gone better…”

    After that, they stuck to picketing Mormons and elderly Mexican women. Because there’s no fabulous! way to get your ass kicked.

  12. Rob Crawford
    March 27th, 2013 @ 11:57 am

    Well, “Queer Jesus” is probably an illegal Mexican working at a bathhouse in San Francisco, so that part might be true.

  13. WyBlog - The real purpose of same-sex "marriage" is to persecute and marginalize Christians
    March 27th, 2013 @ 12:23 pm

    The real purpose of same-sex “marriage” is to persecute and marginalize Christians…

    The Titans of Tolerance don’t tolerate no Christians….

  14. DaveO
    March 27th, 2013 @ 1:56 pm

    Why 5-4? It could as easily be 9-0 and 7-2.

  15. Dan Levitan
    March 27th, 2013 @ 3:00 pm

    Doug Mataconis tried to do this. I told him that the Supreme Court is irrelevant to me, and that what they say holds no sway over my opinion.

    For me, the Supreme Court can suck my left nut. My opinion will stay my opinion no matter what the law says.

  16. Bob Belvedere
    March 27th, 2013 @ 4:56 pm

    Dear Dr. McCain…

    Sometimes my penumbra has emanations when I’m sleeping. What should I do? Is this something I should be worried about?

    Signed,
    Onan The Barbarian

  17. K-Bob
    March 27th, 2013 @ 7:06 pm

    Limbaugh made a very solid prediction, one that I’d lay money on:

    If the SCOTUS essentially presents us with another Roe v. Wade moment, the polarization will INCREASE (not decrease, nor remain flat).

    I think the undercurrent is that we are no linger “inching” toward open rebellion anymore, but in fact clearing out the battlespace between the sides.

  18. Fred DeRuvo
    March 27th, 2013 @ 8:24 pm

    Political correctness at its finest…

  19. Kevin Trainor Jr.
    March 28th, 2013 @ 2:27 am

    Kevin Trainor Jr. liked this on Facebook.