27
Jun
2015
Quick Comment on SSM and I’ll Move On
If you want to see my thoughts, see FB. I want to make one quick comment here, but first, watch Obama:
I am not shocked by libertarians saying, “On balance, I am glad this happened, though I totally understand people who are alarmed that consolidated federal power will end up destroying any prospects for liberty long-term in this country.”
But I DO have a problem with people–and yes I have specific people in mind, I’m not just throwing out strawmen–who would have, without irony, called Obama a war criminal on Thursday, on Friday gushing about how beautiful the White House rainbow light show was, and denouncing any opponents as cold-hearted bigots.
*Facepalm.*
Also, your last question does not follow from.
“…does not follow from the SCOTUS ruling.”
“..last question in your Facebook post…”
*Facepalm*
Bob, wouldn’t you expect a libertarian who is socially liberal to celebrate now? Can’t you celebrate the end-result of something even if you object to the methods used? Would it be wrong for an anti-war protestor who opposed the Iraq war to celebrate when the statue of Saddam Hussein came down?
It depends on if you are a humanist and think human desires are something wonderful or valuable. Some of us believe love is a force that has developed through evolution and culturally because it helps a society grow and survive and that’s the only significance it has. Is it something intrinsically valuable? Maybe not. I don’t really celebrate gay or any other type of love nor do I curse it. I see no reason to attach such value to it. it’s just something that exists in the world like a piece of granite. We don’t really go around celebrating and gushing over granite.
Z, I don’t think there are many people that share that viewpoint. In any case, I’m curious about your view. What do you think is intrisivally valuable? What do you celebrate and gush over?
I don’t much celebrate and gush over anything. I don’t think there is anything intrinsically valuable. I’m not even sure what such a thing even means, and I suspect nobody else does either. it’s just something we pretend to understand because people want to believe their lives are meaningful or valuable or whatever.
There are likely not very many people who share this view, as you mentioned, but not because it is not true. It’s because in harsher times, societies or people who felt this way likely did not have the drive to survive. What keeps people going through hard times is some feeling that they have a destiny. If you look at the early history of almost any religion, when they were small in number, this is how they thought that kept the religion alive.
In any case, this is how I started to think once I became a moral nihilist. Morality is perhaps one theory of intrinsic value, and once I stopped believing in that, everything else quickly followed.
Z, I am a little surprised that you exist. It appears that you perfectly embody the characteristics that I imagine when I think of what I would call the “consistent atheist.” Reading your words leaves me with a single question. To me, this question seems rude to even ask, but I’m not certain that you even believe in rudeness as a concept. Since you don’t celebrate anything, I imagine that you don’t condemn anything (rude words, for example) either. In any event, my curiosity exceeds my tact and so I will ask the question: Why do you go on living?
Thanks in advance for any time you spend responding. Sorry in advance if I have offended you.
Well, don’t you think existentialists, like Sartre and Camus, are also “consistent atheists”? Yet they don’t think life is meaningless, they just think life has whatever meaning you give it, rather than an external meaning derived from a higher power.
For the record, I’m a devout Hindu, so I’m just playing Devil’s advocate.
I’m using atheist in an unorthodox fashion here. I’m defining atheist as someone who disbelieves all unscientific information. This type of atheist believes not only that there is no God, but that anything resembling theology is a lie.
If you ascribe meaning to things beyond their physical characteristics, then you are acknowledging that there can be more to life that what we are able to learn from the physical nature of the universe. Do your thoughts and desires have some intrinsic value, or are they simply impulses curated by evolution to improve your survivability? I argue that the type of atheist that I am describing must choose the latter in order to remain consistent with his disbelief in all things theological/unscientific. If all of your urges are just part of nature’s trial-and-error attempts to create a hearty beast, then by what honest metric could you assign them intrinsic meaning/value?
Andrew Keen, why can’t you simply say “I acknowledge that my thoughts and desires have no intrinsic value in the grand scheme of things, and that they’re completely determined by evolution and biology, but it makes me feel good when I satisfy my desires, so I’m intend to try to satisfy them.”? Isn’t that a reason to continue living?
In other words, even if you think life has no *intrinsic* meaning, can’t you still assign it a meaning? What is unscientific about observing that doing certain actions creates happiness in your brain, and then trying to do those actions?
Keshav,
Yes, your first paragraph would be a perfectly acceptable response to my original question posed to Z. I just wanted to see him say it. Something to the effect of, “Well, I like spending time with friends, playing video games, and commenting on blogs more than I hate my job, so life is still worth living for now.”
His second comment implies that he would commit suicide if his perceived pain ever exceeded his perceived joy. That is a very different life philosophy than anyone I know. I am curious how committed to it he is in reality.
In response to the first question in your second paragraph: I would be surprised if Z claimed to “assign meaning” to anything whatsoever based on my impression of his comments. I would expect him to say that both his happiness and his pain are meaningless and that the only reason he doesn’t off himself is that suicide seems no more pleasant/less painful than to continue living.
Andrew Keen, regardless of whatever Z believes, I’m just saying that a “consistent atheist” as you define it could coherently choose to assign meaning to life even if he believes that it has no intrinsic meaning.
Hmm. I guess I’m not 100% sure what you mean when you write about non-intrinsic meaning. It reads to me like you’re talking about purpose. Sure, the consistent atheist could assign his life a purpose. But he would also need to believe that his life’s assigned purpose is arbitrary and (intrinsically) meaningless.
@Keshav:
“but it makes me feel good when I satisfy my desires, so I’m intend to try to satisfy them.”
Yes, I agree. That is what I meant. But this is a far cry from what both religious and secular people talk about when they speak about ‘meaning’ in life in different situations. Religious people explicitly say that God created them for a specific reason. People say that when they are in love with another person, that person is ‘special.’ People speak of having a destiny in life. And of course we have morality as we mentioned before. When both religious and secular people talk about these things, they almost certainly mean much more than that these things only result in them feeling good.
“can’t you still assign it a meaning”
That’s the question. What does it mean to ‘assign a meaning’? Do you mean that actions and people in your life make you feel good and therefore you want to continue to enjoy their presence or is there something else?
@Andrew:
“hen you are acknowledging that there can be more to life that what we are able to learn from the physical nature of the universe.”
I think there are things more than the physical nature of the universe. From what we understand, consciousness and the emotions we feel resulting from that do not appear to be physical matter But I think there is no evidence for most or all of the ‘higher level emotions’, such as morality. I don’t think there is any such thing as a ‘moral intuition’, for example. What we call moral intuitions are in reality other emotions, such as anger, sadness, horror, etc which have been mislabeled with moral terminology. For example, when you were a toddler, if you did something in certain situations, your parents would get mad at you and they would use moral terminology, such as ‘bad’, ‘wrong’, ‘immoral’, etc. As a result of such repetitive experiences since age 2 or 3, we learn to associate certain emotions in certain situations with moral words. So now, if that action comes up, we have a non moral emotion that comes up, but also a moral word as well. And we think that therefore we have experienced a ‘moral intuition’ when in reality we have experienced a non-moral emotion and associated moral terminology that we have learned to associate with it.
HOW DARE YOU!!! Just joking, I don’t have any problem with the question.
I’m a bit surprised I exist as well. Evolution and natural selection are very powerful, but I guess it hasn’t wiped out this sort of thinking completely. Or maybe in an era of more scientific knowledge and material abundance, we aren’t actually adapted for such a world yet.
I suppose, to answer your question, I keep on living just based on inertia. I am already living, and it’s too much out of the way to end it. I think if, knowing what I know now, I was offered a choice of being born or not being born in the first place, I may choose to just not be born.
But There was a time, in the initial few years of when I first discovered all these things, that I was very depressed almost constantly, as I took morality as I conceived it very very seriously. I was the guy who was going to feed the homeless every week, building homes with habitat for humanity, never looking at pornography or even at girls in that way, always returned the carts to the proper place at the shopping mall, etc. So it was a big loss. I probably would have killed myself if it wasn’t that I didn’t want people to like cry and stuff when I was gone. I mean, it would be a big thing, like the police would show up and all those things. However, if the universe worked in a way that when you died, everyone just forgot about you instantly, I honestly don’t even think I’d be here. But now, I guess that acute phase has passed, and there are numerous distractions that you can use to keep busy that still don’t have intrinsic value, but release endorphins. There is lots of good food to eat and video games to play.
Ha, I replied to Keshav above before I noticed this reply here. Thanks for sharing Z. I’m sorry that your life has been difficult and I am happy that you found something that brings you peace.
Would you still consider the grief that you might cause others when contemplating suicide? Or is that something that no longer carries weight with you now that you are a moral nihilist?
At least in terms of evolution, survival is an intrinsic moral value. The logic is pretty simple: all the people who don’t survive also don’t contribute to the definition of moral values. OK, there have been a few important martyrs in history who have been remembered for facing death and thus contributed to other people’s moral understanding, but I think those are unusual and quite special cases.
Survival may not be the only moral value, but it tends to be tangled up with the others, often somewhat indirectly. Let’s give an example, a group of people have a commandment “Thou shall not steal” which they believe is based on the authority of God. By following this commandment they create the incentives for productivity and thus the entire group is successful and grows.
Another group of people spend their efforts stealing from one another, and they are much less productive, find themselves weak and hungry all the time. This group doesn’t do so well.
Long discussions on “group selection” especially in the context of religion and morality. If you haven’t gone there yet, might be worth a look.
Also Epicurus, who had some early ideas on how to be a consistent Atheist and what that does with morality and human relations.
Your example is exactly why I think religion is almost universal.
Altruism should not normally be able to evolve (not stealing is a form of altruism if one can do it without getting caught).
Although groups may be more succesful if they contain altruists, generally each group will end up being taken over by non-altruists as they are the most succesful members of every group.
It was demonstrated a while ago that altruism could evolve, but the groups needed to periodically mix and separate again. Groups containing more altruists grow larger, and although the proportion of altruists in each group declines, the proportion of altruists in total increases (similar to Simpson’s paradox). This arrangement does not seem to reflect the reality of most human groups.
However, if we can impose altruism on every (or most) members of the group, then we can have a more succesfull group that out-competes groups with no such imposition.
The groups we see toaday are by defimition the succesfull ones, so are those that have a way of imposing altruism – mainly by religion.
It remains to be seen if the benefits for the group of containing a large number of altruists can be maintained in the absence of religion.
A reciprocal deal between individuals is not “altruism”, the correct name for this is “trade” (based on both the use of common language, and also on the established principle that the oldest name always wins).
Trade can indeed evolve, and we have many examples of this. Biologists just have a grudge against calling it “trade” because that would concede that economists got there long long before they did (and also there tends to be a connection between evolutionary biology and “Progressive” politics).
A group of people who agree amongst themselves to adopt a moral code on the basis of mutual self interest is not altruism either, it’s more like a contract.
http://www.epicurus.net/en/principal.html
This is from a school of thought 300 years before Christ, and long before evolutionary biology.
Keshav wrote:
Would it be wrong for an anti-war protestor who opposed the Iraq war to celebrate when the statue of Saddam Hussein came down?
Do you think a lot of anti-war protestors were celebrating when Bush announced “Mission Accomplished”?
I was specifically talking about people lauding the White House rainbow show. People who would have said Obama was a war criminal the day before. That’s why I showed this video. I can’t believe how easily cynical anarchists are endorsing politicians riding the wave.
“But I am QUITE sure that it is a horrible idea for the U.S. federal government to impose its own standards on states when it comes to issuing marriage licenses.”
I don’t see why this is a problem from an ancap perspective; both are unjust institutions. If the Mafia tells some other criminal gang to stop messing with people as much, I would be supportive of that too. Furthermore, state marriage laws impact federal policy. If the Mafia was robbing me specifically because another criminal gang was robbing me, and then some guys in the Mafia told the other gang to stop, I especially don’t see how this would be bad from a libertarian perspective.
There are possible future repercussions (I think the states deciding is better on average), but from a libertarian ethics stand point, I think they clearly made the right decision. I actually don’t even think this will cause the federal government to get involved in more state issues. The government has already been involved, so this case doesn’t really break new ground in that area. If this was the first case where they intervened in state decisions, then this argument would be stronger.
Marriage rights are extremely important in some states where the adoption laws are strict. Restricting a child from having willing parents is an extreme intrusion on liberty.
“Should this diversity be allowed, or should the feds come in and insist that all aspects of marriage licenses conform to a national standard?”
I would say the federal government should get involved in both cases, and particularly for marriage without fault. But only if they take the right side!
I can see two main arguments against what you said. Firstly, centralization of power… so you have a small local crime gang and a large out of town crime gang, you generally want to support the local gang because they are just a little bit more likely to want to get along with the people in town (after all, they have to live there too). The out of towners don’t even slightly care about who you are, other than as a source of revenue.
Second point is rule of law. If you think of liberty as fundamentally a protection of individuals then this can be threatened by a small group of powerful individuals who somehow seize power and hold onto in ruthlessly, or it can be threatened by a mob where by force of numbers the majority just takes what it wants from minority groups and those individuals who happen to have something worth taking (or often you get a combination of both). So the rule of law is designed to offer some protection from that, if you are going to have an armed crime gang, better that at least they lay some ground rules and behave consistently, rather than arbitrarily.
Usually the rule of law is of benefit to minority groups, and I think we have seen a lot of perversion of rule of law in recent years:
* Holder and guns going to gangs in Mexico, just refused to provide documents, seems to have got away with it.
* Clinton and Benghazi, we still don’t really know the story, and questions just get answered with “What difference does it make?”
* The IRS acting as a political operative, then destroying evidence.
* Clinton using a dodgy private email server, then destroying evidence when caught.
* Obama ruling by decree, bypassing the requirement that Congress are responsible for budget control.
* Clinton and the Russian uranium business, still don’t know what happened there.
* SCOTUS redefining Obamacare as a tax, when the law was written as a regulation under the infamously overused “interstate commerce” clause.
* SCOTUS redefining Obamacare again by changing the actual wording, because they presume the intention must have been something different.
* Now SCOTUS taking a perspective on the US Constitution that couldn’t possibly have been intended by the people who wrote that amendment.
* probably others, the list is long.
So we are at a point where a small people at the top can get away with pretty much anything, with impunity, and no way to even investigate the details. That cannot possibly come out well for disenfranchised minority groups in future. If there isn’t a rule of law to fall back on, then it will be rule by man, which means either the mob, or a small central elite group of ultra-powerful people.
We could also look at the mechanism by which socialism works: you have a small group of agitators who encourage envy, sense of entitlement and discontent, until they can channel that envy into political power. Once they have political power, they maintain that by finding “enemies of the state” or in modern language you say it differently, you say we need to punish people who are “selfish”, or “not public-spirited”, or people “not in tune with the community”, or “too materialistic”, or any similar target that satisfies the anger of envy and sense of entitlement.
You can see why, in order to maintain power, the elite need a regular supply of scapegoats to blame for anything going wrong, and anyone with an unusual or fringe lifestyle will eventually come under the hammer. Socialists are fundamentally not interested in diversity, they are interested in making all people equal, and that means equal, no exceptions (except the ruling class of course, but we aren’t allowed to talk about that).
This didn’t centralize anything.
Speak for yourself. History shows the states to be pretty damn egregious when it comes to running roughshod over people’s liberty and a lot of times it took the Supreme Court to fix it. They’ve made some bad rulings (like with the healthcare law), but that is hardly a reason to let the states defy the Constitution.
Well that’s somewhat false. In any case, there is nothing wrong with the Supreme Court overturning unconstitutional state laws.
“… and a lot of times it took the Supreme Court to fix it.”
Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
The scope and area of federal opression being now bigger, blacks can’t escape to states which don’t make them poorer through Minimum Wage and Section 8 Housing laws.
Both are currently destroying the black community, even as they are seen as helping.
Now what?
Nope.
Lulz.
This has nothing to do with the Supreme Court.
“Firstly, centralization of power… so you have a small local crime gang and a large out of town crime gang, you generally want to support the local gang because they are just a little bit more likely to want to get along with the people in town (after all, they have to live there too). The out of towners don’t even slightly care about who you are, other than as a source of revenue.”
I think that logic might work on a very small level (local), but neither the state politicians or the federal politicians know me. And the federal politicians have to “live there too” just like the state politicians, just on a larger level. I think the more convincing argument for switching power from the feds to the state would be that there would be more competition for effective government.
If the same-sex marriage decision impacted this, I would be more concerned, although not enough to be against expanding essential rights to same-sex couples. The problem is that I don’t really think it does, or at least only to a small extent. The government already thinks it has the right to get involved in this stuff. All the Supreme Court did here was expand the 14th Amendment to marriage, and only for equality (hence, they can’t strike down something like polyamorous marriage based on this – they can only expand it to this). It didn’t break new ground except in a good way.
“Second point is rule of law…”
1) The federal government has already ignored the rule of law, as you point out. I don’t think a small case like this will change the pace of these changes, particularly since they’ve done essentially the same thing before.
2) I think they were actually right on this. The words of the 14th Amendment seem to pretty clearly call for equality in rights:
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Treating people differently because of their gender is wrong based on this amendment (before the law was that men could only marry women and women could only marry men – clearly a non-equal stance).
So this brings us closer to a rule of law, since it follows the actual law.
In order for the State to treat each person equally, it would need to treat unmarried individuals, in exactly the same way it treats married individuals. That would be the correct “rule of law” decision from my point of view.
However, we aren’t about to see the activists push for this, nor are we going to see any State allow it. Equality is not really what this is all about, merely a lever used by one tribal group against another.
Speaking of equality, I find it interesting that activists are happy to push court cases against Christian bakers, and Christian photographers, and Christian “bed & breakfast” owners, and Christian landowners. But strangely they aren’t slamming the table demanding to be married in a Mosque, nor are they antagonizing the various Muslim groups that have a much less tolerant view of homosexuality than the Christians.
In the Middle East we have gays being tossed off buildings to die in the street below, but in the USA we have a tantrum being thrown because the wedding cake must come from that particular Christian shop and cannot possibly come from any other. I don’t think this is leading us towards equality. Looks very strategic to me.
It’s not “federal involvement” to begin with, though.
What do you mean? I think the Supreme Court telling the states what they can’t do is federal involvement.
Nope.
For someone so smug, arrogant and condescending, you never have any arguments. Not surprised though. You just come here to be incendiary.
Would you care to explain? Since the Supreme Court is part of the Federal government, and you seem to agree that they are telling the states what they can’t do, I don’t see how this isn’t federal involvement.
Yep.
“Furthermore, state marriage laws impact federal policy.”
Constitutionally, the general government doesn’t have a marriage policy. It’s a States-rights issue.
As Ron Paul said:
“There are only four crimes listed in the Constitution: counterfeiting, piracy, treason, and slavery. Criminal and civil laws were deliberately left to the states.”
“Constitutionally, the general government doesn’t have a marriage policy. It’s a States-rights issue.”
I don’t get what you mean by this. The Constitution doesn’t magically stop the federal government from having a marriage policy. If you mean the Federal government isn’t involved in marriage, that is wrong. They clearly are. Since they are involved, they should give the benefits (or, really, not violate the rights) equally. If you mean that they shouldn’t be involved because the Constitution says so, I disagree. The Constitution has no rightful authority. And states don’t have rights.
“The Constitution doesn’t magically stop the federal government from having a marriage policy.”
That’s what a constitution is for: to stop the government from doing certain things.
The States created the general government, so all the authority of the general government is delegated authority – delegated by the states.
Any authority not delegated by the states is prohibited to the general government.
And since each state delegates authority, each state may secede from the Union of their own volition.
Granted, since there’s no such thing as collective ownership, a state cannot legitimately bind an individual to another without their consent.
Which is also the reason negotiable debt instruments are a problem (LK mentions these a lot).
“That’s what a constitution is for: to stop the government from doing certain things.”
No, you misunderstood me. I said that the government actually is involved right now. The Constitution doesn’t magically change what they’re doing right now.
And the Constitution is often used to push the government to do bad things.
“The States created the general government, so all the authority of the general government is delegated authority – delegated by the states.”
Where did they get this authority? They never had any authority to give. They have no more authority than the federal government.
“Granted, since there’s no such thing as collective ownership, a state cannot legitimately bind an individual to another without their consent.”
Okay. So since probably every government in history has done that throughout their respective histories, and are doing so now, they’re all violating rights on a massive scale. This includes the state governments. Since they continually did this throughout history, and I see no reason why one group of people should be treated differently than another group (under any reasonable ethical system I think equal rights is a necessary standard), it is clear that they have been acting as criminal organizations. Hence, even if they had authority back then (which they didn’t), they certainly have no authority now.
For example: 16 year olds being bound to their parents.
As for LK, I don’t get why you’re bringing him up. I recognized the name, and from a quick Google search I found some previous “discussions” of ours. I’m not overly impressed with his level of discourse. (For example: http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2014/08/the-problem-with-the-police-is-that-its-not-just-a-few-bad-apples.html#comment-826116, http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2014/09/government-plea-bargains-are-a-horrible-practice.html#comment-889906, http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2014/09/potpourri-231.html#comment-962395).
Yeah, well, Ronny doesn’t really know what he is talking about, especially if he is claiming that those are the only things that can be federal crimes. But the bigger hole in this logic is that that has no impact on judicial review.
The media is really underselling the true scope of this decision by talking exclusively about ssm. What the logic of the court creates is not a mere right to same sex marriage but a right to marriage however an individual may conceive of it. Per the courts reasoning I dont see how a state can legally deny any claim to marriage and its associated benefits. A man’s desire to marry his car or his dog is just as much a matter of personal autonomy as his desire to marry his boyfriend afterall and the opinion makes marriage – both entry to it and the very nature of the thing itself – entirely a matter of individual choice.
So a truck driver could marry his truck and then put in a joint income tax return to the IRS, dividing the income between himself and the truck… sounds like a marriage of convenience, mind you they could easily prove they spend time together.
Since law can now be written on the fly by the IRS they can just decide to make a special case when it suits them.
That’s fine with me. If someone wants to marry their truck, let them. Since when is it the government’s authority to determine which arrangements of matter have consciousness? To a man, a truck may be alive and loved, the same way a child may see their stuffed animals as alive.
But of course, the more proximal marriages that will likely be approved will be polygamous marriages.
I’ve always been puzzled by the conspicuous absence of libertarians arguing the state should get out of the business of telling people what to recognize as a marriage all together.
Ideally, would the way it would work be that anyone could try to call whatever they wanted a “marriage” and the people in their community could decide for themselves whether they considered it legitimate or not?
The thing is that if marriage were purely a matter of an individual (bilateral?) right, there’d never have been an issue here at all. Gay couples could go around claiming to be married and their more liberal straight friends could go around agreeing with them and treating them differently. But marriage is in fact not at all about one’s relationship with one’s spouse. It’s about one’s relationship with the broader community, or more specifically it’s about the broader community recognizing a relationship between people as legitimate, as something the approve of, and something they’ll elect to treat the people in differently than they would treat them as separate individuals. The problem is that the way things presently work people are *obligated by the state* to treat people in relationships the *state* approves of, differently than we would treat those people separately as individuals, regardless of whether we want to or not, if we want to recognize any relationships as legitimate and treat the people in them differently than we’d treat them as individuals otherwise.
There are issues like next of kin, child responsibility and inheritence that are sorted out automatically by marriage. That is partly why you cannot marry your truck and can only marry one person at a time.
I don’t think those being sorted out automatically is a good thing.
I only have two problems with this ruling:
(1) It is the Supreme Court’s job to interpret the law, not invent it. So this ruling says that SSM was legal all along and we all were simply misinterpreting the constitution prior to this ruling. I think that this is pretty clearly incorrect. This is another instance of a court inventing laws to suit its preferences. Five justices have, on their own authority, decided what is law for a country of 320 million. While most agree that SSM should be recognized by the federal government, I think that the practice of courts inventing new laws rather than accurately interpreting existing laws is bad for the health of the republic.
(2) I believe that this ruling will be used as a weapon to attack religious organizations that refuse to recognize and/or allow gay marriages and relationships among their members. Now that SSM is the law of the land, it will be much easier to argue in court that refusing the legitimacy of SSM is illegal discrimination. In this respect, I believe that this ruling will eventually prove to be harmful to religious freedom in the USA.
The court said that the right to marriage had long been protected by the constitution – pointing out that the court decided that the 14th ammendment protected the rights of interracial couples and and prisoners to marry. It is not as if this is the first time the SCOTUS has been involved.
It then said there were 4 principles and traditions that demonstate why marriage is fundamental under the constitution that apply equally to same sex couples. These are personal choice, uniqueness of marriage as an institution, safeguarding children and because marriage is a keystone of the Nation’s social order. It was thought unconstitutional to disallow same sex couples from these benefits under the due process clause.
The right of same sex couples to marry was also derived from the 14th ammendment’s guarantee of equal protection.
The dissenting view has it that States are entitled to define marriage how they want, and are not required by the constitution to extend their definition. They say that the court need not concern itself with whether laws are right, but whether they are laws. That is somewhat undermined by their lengthy discussion of the history of marriage, which it seems should not matter to the dissenters. And surely the court is there not to decide if a law is right, niether if a law is a law, but if a law is constitutional.
I suppose it comes down to whether you view allowing SSC to marry is an extention of the right to marry, or if preventing them marrying is an unconstitutional restriction on their right to marry.
We can compare it to the previous ban of interracial couples. That does not prevent anyone marrying (within their own race). Requiring States to remove such restrictions seems pretty similar to me to removing the restrictions on sex. One could argue that indeed, it is similar, and that should be left up to the States. There is not much appetite for fighting that ruling.
Fortunately, we have a case where that exact point was raised in 1972 in Baker vs Nelson. The challenge was that if different races must be allowed to marry, so too must different sexes. The State court ruled that SSM was not required. Why was this now overruled by Obergefell vs Hodges?
Well, according to Wikipedia, in the earlier case: “This restriction, the Court reasoned, did not offend the Due Process Clause because procreation and child rearing were central to the constitutional protection given to marriage.” The current ruling dismisses that since procreation is not implied or required for marriage. And “With respect to the claim of an equal-protection violation, the Court found that childless marriages presented no more than a theoretical imperfection in the state’s rationale for limiting marriage to different-sex couples.” The current ruling disnisses that because marriage does not imply or require children -childlessnes is not a theoretical imperfection but a very real aspect of a great many marriages.
So it seems that the reason given in 1972 for NOT widening the lifting of the ban from multiracial to same sex couples was entirely to do with childbearing. If you either allow same sex couples to adopt or agree that marriage has not the sole purpose of child-rearing, then this objection would seem to fade away.
I have no training or experience in USA law, so this is all based on my reading a few articles.
Andrew Keen: “So this ruling says that SSM was legal all along and we all were simply misinterpreting the constitution prior to this ruling.” Not quite, surely. It says that previously it was not legal, but that illegality was unconstitutional. That inconstitutuionality was simply not recognised. Now that it is, the practice must be made legal.
“So this ruling says that SSM was legal all along and we all were simply misinterpreting the constitution prior to this ruling.”
I don’t think they are saying that. They are saying that the understanding of SSM and its intricacies and ramifications has changed, not that the understanding of the constitution has changed.
“This is another instance of a court inventing laws to suit its preferences. Five justices have, on their own authority, decided what is law for a country of 320 million.”
In this instance they are belatedly embracing public opinion, which had already turned decisively in favor of SSM. There are cases where the supreme court is starkly at odds with public opinion (e.g. just about any free speech case), but this is not one of them, so the “5 unelected weirdos are imposing their eccentric Harvard Law tastes on the rest of us” argument is strange.
I tend to take an “original intent” rather than a “living document” view of the law, so in my opinion, new information about SSM would require the congress to change the law to fit with our new understanding. I don’t think that courts should be in the business of changing laws to fit the preferences of the majority. That’s congress’ job. You know, checks and balances and whatnot.
I 100% agree with both you and Harold that this type of ruling is not unique to this case. That’s why I write ‘another instance of’ rather than ‘the first time ever that.’ You could say that I should be happy because I personally believe that governments should sanction SSM if they are going to be in the business of sanctioning marriages at all. But even though the end result suits my preferences, I still think it weakens the republic when one of the branches leaves its jurisdiction. To me, this isn’t about “unelected weirdoes;” it’s about what is the proper avenue to change the meaning of a law, especially one as longstanding as this.
This all makes a lot more sense if you believe that the rule of law is a myth, a poser similar to Murphys Obama video.
http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm
The idea of the separation of powers, the constitution, etc started out as a legitimate idea, not a plan to fool people into total sheeplesness. But that’s what it’s become because the powers have started to figure out that it’s even better, far better, than totalitarianism. The only battles left are the battles within the power structure. Within that framework, this ruling makes total sense. Any proposed policy change that is populist and more or less harmless (or perceived as harmless) is going to happen. In fact, everything starts to make more sense with this line of thinking. A black president followed by, possibly, a female? See, we are on board with the people! Tariffs? Trying to protect business! (even though this has been discredited for centuries). Welfare, minimum wage – helping the poor! (with a big smile).
This isn’t going to end well. It’s only a matter of time.
“A black president followed by, possibly, a female?…This isn’t going to end well. It’s only a matter of time.”
If you cut out the bits in between, I don’t think that looks too good.
yep, I knew it when I wrote it, thought of rewriting, but I’m quite jaded by the PC-ness of the era I live in, so left it. But thanks for noticing