{"id":2271,"date":"2015-06-26T18:45:29","date_gmt":"2015-06-27T00:45:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=2271"},"modified":"2015-06-26T18:45:29","modified_gmt":"2015-06-27T00:45:29","slug":"10-thoughts-on-obergefell-v-hodges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/06\/10-thoughts-on-obergefell-v-hodges.html","title":{"rendered":"10 thoughts on Obergefell v. Hodges"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

In no particular order, some thoughts on the gay marriage decision today. \u00a0(What, are you living under a rock? \u00a0By a 5 \u2013 4 vote, the Supreme Court declared that, across the United States, same sex couples have the same right to marry as opposite sex couples. \u00a0But I admit that I haven\u2019t read the decision \u2014 both due to a lack of time and because, to be honest, as with the Obamacare decision yesterday, I don\u2019t want to set myself up for more frustration.)<\/p>\n

1. \u00a0Yes, it\u2019s scary that five individuals had the power to enact such a significant change, and codify a new social order. \u00a0What else will a future Supreme Court determine they have the authority to decide?<\/p>\n

2. \u00a0The legal \u201creasoning\u201d or lack thereof (see Ann Althouse<\/a> today for some excerpts) certainly makes it highly unlikely that the justices reviewed applicable law to arrive at their decision, and extremely likely that they knew the decision they wanted, and worked backward from there to identifying precedent and justification. \u00a0Again, very unsettling.<\/p>\n

\u201cMarriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there.\u201d Is \u201cunlike any other\u201d relationship between 2 persons. It\u2019s about the assurance that there will always be \u201csomeone to care\u201d for you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s a mix of quote and Althouse paraphrase, and, in the year 2015, with no-fault divorce, hardly a guarantee that marriage provides; in fact (yes, I know this is anecdotal), the first time I read of a wedding vow that promised to stay together \u201cas long as love shall live\u201d it was in a book describing (positively, I might add) gay weddings and commitment ceremonies.<\/p>\n

3. \u00a0On the other hand, this isn\u2019t unprecedented. \u00a0Roe v. Wade (and Doe v. Bolton) similarly invented a \u201cright\u201d \u2014 and one might even say that the finding of a right to abortion in the constitution was even more unprecedented, given the fact that the court even found\u00a0a specific trimester structure to that \u201cconstitutional right\u201d as well. \u00a0So no one should claim to be shocked. (Oh, and remember back when we were told that it was preposterous and thoroughly unnecessary to contemplate a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, or protecting against the risk of such a Supreme Court decision as today\u2019s?)<\/p>\n

4. \u00a0The use of terminology around \u201cidentity\u201d and \u201cautonomy\u201d means that, well, really, it\u2019s hard to see any legal grounds for opposition to polygamy. \u00a0Of course, it\u2019s pretty clear that the court listens pretty heavily to the prevailing winds, and there is no groundswell of support for polygamy yet, so there\u2019s that. \u00a0But just as the court has discarded arguments that, in intangible ways, future children will be harmed, so too arguments that women will be harmed because past connections between polygamous societies and ill treatment of women may be equally seen as too intangible to legitimately put a brake on multi-partner marriage.<\/p>\n

5. \u00a0Oh, and, yes, the court found concerns about children to be irrelevant. \u00a0Now, it\u2019s not clear to me whether this decision automatically means that, nationwide, lesbian spouses to women who give birth will automatically be entered as Parent B on the birth certificate, nor whether the same will be true for men who adopt, or even whether gay men will be deemed to have the right to acquire a child by surrogacy (after all, if marriage is a fundamental right, then surely parenthood is), but I assume that\u2019ll be inevitable.<\/p>\n

6. \u00a0But, ironically, this court decision was built on\u00a0the fact that, as far as the Court, and the government is concerned, children have nothing to do with marriage<\/strong>, will surely solidify public opinion on the matter. \u00a0But so far as I can tell, the impact on future fatherless (or motherless) children is\u00a0too abstract a concern to make headway against the concrete harm of a loving couple denied marriage.<\/p>\n

7. \u00a0And speaking of concrete harms: \u00a0we have moved far away from the notion of marriage as the norm for coupled and child-rearing life, and this decision likewise solidifies that: \u00a0marriage is a legal status entered into for the dual reasons of government benefits and social recognition. You\u2019d think that a consequence would be to rethink what the benefits are, anyway \u2014 after all, if the decision today was about remedying unfairness experienced by married couples, what about the unfairness of singledom? \u00a0But that\u2019s not likely, given the inertia in government.<\/p>\n

8. \u00a0Oh, and by the way, the benefits of marriage that Kennedy found gay couples to have been unfairly deprived of \u2014 that\u2019s not due to marriage as a government-recognized status so much as a societal recognition, and the next push is inevitably what we\u2019re seeing already, the punishing of dissent. \u00a0Pew predicted<\/a> that everyone would be reasonable and accommodating, but there are too many people using the language of \u201cbigotry\u201d already for this to seem likely; far more probable, so far as I can see, is for conscience protections to be extremely narrowly proscribed, due in particular to the power of individuals to file discrimination lawsuits.<\/p>\n

9. \u00a0We are in the middle of a huge social experiment. \u00a0The move to secularism, the rejection of mother\/father pairings as best, or even better, for children, assisted suicide, and you can add to the list \u2014 we don\u2019t have any idea what the end destination is. \u00a0We use trite statements like \u201ceveryone believes in the Golden Rule\u201d to say that people will fundamentally always be good and moral, but a lot of what we see as moral is fairly abstract and is being discarded already.<\/p>\n

10. \u00a0Blog traffic is way, way down today. \u00a0I don\u2019t know what to make of that \u2014 maybe everyone\u2019s headed out of town, in less rainy parts of the country. \u00a0Maybe I have fewer \u201cregular readers\u201d and more post-specific readers than I thought. \u00a0Or maybe large numbers of you also feel extra discouraged, especially with the double-whammy after yesterday\u2019s decision, and with all the celebration on twitter, facebook, etc., among your socially-liberal friends. \u00a0(Or, if you\u2019re one of my socially-liberal readers, heck, maybe you\u2019re too busy celebrating.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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