The 5-4 Supreme Court decision in favor of gay marriage was too close for my taste: I predicted 6-3. Too many decisions are being decided by that 5-4 vote—a serious sign of political polarization in the highest court of the U.S. And the problem is that the conservative justices show no sign of retiring, while many of the liberal ones are old. At least Hillary will be around to fill any vacancies.
In this week’s Secular Sermon, brother Tayler discusses the reaction to the court’s ruling in his Salon piece, “Let’s kick God off the Court: Marriage isn’t the only place where the law has been infected by religion.” It’s larded with telling quotes, from the Justices and others. Thomas’s and Scalia’s opinions were particularly invidious:
The dissenters, led by Justice John Roberts, presented their counter-argument. Roberts worried that “stealing this issue from the people will for many cast a cloud over same-sex marriage, making a dramatic social change that much more difficult to accept.”
. . . Justice Samuel Alito announced that, “Today’s decision shows that decades of attempts to restrain this Court’s abuse of its authority have failed.”
Justice Antonin Scalia, a hard-line Roman Catholic, joined Roberts in objecting to the ruling. In his telling, “The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.” Well, to a rationalist, talismanic reverence for his cult’s holy book looks a lot like belief in fortune cookies. No one should take either seriously.
Justice Clarence Thomas bizarrely reasoned that “human dignity cannot be taken away by the government” – even by, say, chattel bondage. “Slaves,” he held, “did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved . . . . The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.” This from a justice so faith-deranged he isn’t sure the First Amendment should do what it is supposed to do – prevent the government from establishing an official religion.
Seriously? The government can neither bestow nor remove dignity? What was the 1964 Civil Rights Act all about? Thomas has always been a lost cause, but, following Scalia, I see that the man has either totally lost it or hid his religious delusions much better earlier in his term. As for Alito, I’m not sure why he considers this an “abuse of authority”. Marriage is, in the U.S. a matter of law, and the law must ultimately adjudicate who can get married. That it did so in the right way, despite the split vote, is a testimony on how fast public opinion can change when what is right is so obvious.
To those who oppose gay marriage, I say this: Is it really hurting you? What does an opponent have to lose if two homosexuals get married? I suppose they could say it could lead to the dissolution of society, but that’s clearly not the case.
No, the ultimate objection must be a religious one—or a feeling that gay marriage is somehow “unnatural.” But it’s unconscionable to run America based on religious dictates, and we’ve progressed beyond the point where we should equate naturalness with rightness. To my mind, a consequentialist one, “rightness” is largely (à la Sam Harris) what increases the well being of society. And clearly allowing people who love each other to have the same marriage rights as everyone else is good for society.
Tayler goes on, recounting the predictably negative reactions of religionists and the sour-grapes journalism by people like Rod Dreher, and reaches an eminently sane conclusion:
What ultimately transpires through all the Christian objections to the Supreme Court’s decision is their mean-spiritedness. Recourse to rancid old myths and “divine” injunctions that would be laughable were they not so pernicious only makes our days on Earth less pleasant, less livable. Some context: In some 5 billion years, our sun is destined to die in a supernova, which will incinerate whatever life remains on our planet. In the extremely improbable event that we humans still exist then, we will have evolved beyond anything recognizable as human today; evolution never stops, never slows. Our habits, customs, and laws need to evolve too.
