The Junta of Government Lawyers
It really was The Week That Was. Where do I begin? The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down all prohibition of gay marriage in the manner that it struck down state laws forbidding abortion in 1973, and the ramifications for that will be around for the rest of our lives.
In response to the murders of the nine black Christians in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, the Confederate battle flag and, indeed, pretty much anything that has to do with the old Confederacy, from flags to statues of Confederate Civil War generals, to monuments to names on schools and public buildings, are being banned or are likely to be removed. Activists are demanding that the Jefferson Memorial in Washington be torn down because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. This one seems like a prairie fire that won’t be going out for a while.
Then there was the Supreme Court’s decision that pretty much ended all formal legal opposition to ObamaCare, save what would be an unsuccessful attempt at repeal, and that would have to be done legislatively, not through the courts. One can say that this was a very successful week, politically speaking, for President Barack Obama and the political Left.
Not surprisingly, the Left has launched an immediate victory lap. E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post wrote that he “cheered the results” and called it an “acceleration of history.” What he really meant was an acceleration of state power, and as a good Progressive, Dionne cannot enjoy enough statism.
However, while in today’s society we tend to measure the success of things via political standards, that does not mean that the Law of Unintended Consequences is eliminated or that these events should be viewed in entirely negative or positive ways. The kind of political victories won by the Left means that there is going to be hell to pay for the losers, and I doubt the Left will waste any time. In today’s post, I deal with the gay marriage decision.
Gay Marriage and its Aftermath
At one level, I believe that SCOTUS made the obvious decision regarding gay marriage and it is this: if people want for the state to define marriage, then we should not be surprised when political forces within the state decide to change its long-held meaning. After all, the state is justified by…the state.
What do I mean? Marriage is an ancient institution, and it has been practiced since humanity has appeared on the earth. Whether one holds to the Bible or to some other ancient text, we see that marriage has been a part of human society. To put it another way, marriage existed long before even the ancient state was in place, and certainly long before the modern state came into being.
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