The Other McCain

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

A Strange Thing to Say

Posted on | July 17, 2023 | Comments Off on A Strange Thing to Say

OK, first the news:

Biden National Security Council adviser John Kirby on Friday told CNN host Kate Bouldan that it is “very difficult” to see the president signing an NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act, i.e., the Pentagon budget] that does not include abortion and trans rights.
“It’s very difficult to see the President supporting legislation that would make it harder for Americans to serve in uniform, and to not be able to do so with dignity, would not be able to do so with the proper care that they need both medical and mental care,” Kirby said. “It’s very difficult to see that the President would ever, ever sign legislation that would put our troops at greater risk or put our readiness at risk.”

This is lunacy. Does anyone really believe military readiness will be “at risk” without transgender treatment or taxpayer-funded abortion? As if it were self-evident that “proper care,” as John Kirby calls it, is somehow essential for America’s ability to win wars? Such a claim can only be believed by those indoctrinated with an ideology which places “inclusion” and “diversity” as the highest values. How dare you deny mentally deluded people the “proper care” necessary to engage in a sad effort to imitate the opposite sex? In this worldview, the military becomes just another agency of the liberal Welfare State, with an agenda that must be pursued without regard to what actual “readiness” requires.

At HotAir-dot-com, David Strom reacts:

Republicans didn’t “insert” culture war
into Defense bill; Democrats did

While agreeing with most of what Strom writes, I found myself perplexed by a couple of sentences here:

The Republicans have to become the Party of Parents, who are waking up to how radical the Left has become. We have to go around the MSM, ridicule them, and keep the pressure on. The more parents dealing with normal kids suddenly swept up in the alphabet movement, the more we need to recruit.
Like all social movements, progress is slow until the moment it goes into hyperdrive. That is what happened with gay marriage. We can make it happen here.

Wait, is he saying that mandatory recognition of same-sex “marriage” is “progress”? Whether or not Strom intends such an interpretation, the idea that the “social movement” suddenly had a “moment” where it went “into hyperdrive” is patently false. Voters of 31 states approved state constitutional amendments that defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Even before that happened, of course, President Bill Clinton had signed the Defense of Marriage Act, affirming that the federal government would do nothing to undermine a traditional understanding of marriage. The assertion by Strong that same-sex “marriage” became mandatory because the “social movement,” after years of slow progress, somehow reached its “moment” of “hyperdrive” — that’s not how it happened at all. What actually happened was a series of three Supreme Court decisions, beginning with Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, in which a 6-3 majority of the justices claimed to have found something in the Equality Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that prohibited states from outlawing and prosecuting sodomy. Of course this was absurd; every state that ratified the Fourteenth Amendment had laws against sodomy, a topic that the amendment itself never addressed.

Justice Antonin Scalia saw very well where the majority’s argument was leading, and I endorse his Lawrence dissent 100%. As soon as the Lawrence ruling was issued, activists in several states, led by Massachusetts, claimed this ruling as a de facto mandate for legalizing same-sex “marriage,” even while voters in other states approved ballot measures defending traditional marriage. Even in liberal California, gay activists could not prevent passage of Proposition 8 in 2008.

There followed the U.S. v. Windsor case in 2013 (see Scalia’s dissent), which was the foreshadowing of Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 (see Scalia’s dissent). It was not a “social movement” that made this happen; it was liberals on the Supreme Court, using fictitious interpretations of the Constitution to impose their policy preferences nationwide. What the majority did in these three decisions (Lawrence, Windsor and Obergefell) was an insult to the Constitution, and an attack on the procedural norms of democracy, per se. The way David Strom speaks of “what happened with gay marriage” ignores the Court’s role in all this.

It is important to point out this history, because what actually happened was something that has happened before, i.e., the liberal elite using the Supreme Court to impose policies opposed by a majority of voters and then, celebrating this as “the law of the land,” using the court’s ruling as a mandate to silence dissent. Once criticism of the policy is effectively prohibited, no one is permitted to point to social problems and describe them as negative consequences of the policy imposed by court fiat.

“How dare you say this is not progress?”

Even conservatives are now expected to act as if the Obergefell decision was inherently praiseworthy, and risk denunciation from our supposed “friends” in the Republican Party if we refuse to play along.



 

Category: Gays

Comments

Comments are closed.