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There's a lot of hoo-ha going currently going around about the bill in Congress to protect "same-sex and interracial marriage." "Protecting interracial marriage" is absurd; there is nothing threatening it. "Protecting same-sex marriage" is a whole other issue. I've posted this elsewhere---and, possibly, here also in the past, but it is worth posting again:
The gay-rights movement exists for the purpose of destroying the First Amendment without having to repeal it.
The movement is not, and never has been, a civil rights movement. It has always been a "human rights" movement---though it has spent much effort and energy over the last 40-odd years in blurring the distinction between the two. Nevertheless, the difference is profound. The Constitution exists to establish a government of limited powers. Part of that limitation---augmenting the limitations on the government done by enumerating what powers it has---is the limitation imposed by civil rights, which are rights held by the individual against the government. That is to say, the only legitimate civil rights under the Constitution are the rights which permit the individual to slap the government down when it overreaches, the way you slap a naughty dog on the snout with a rolled-up newspaper. "Human rights" are special privileges granted by the government to favored groups---and there is no place for "group rights," or "group privileges" under the Constitution. The gay-rights movement's rhetoric and manifestoes and declarations have usually used the term "human rights"---because there are no genuine civil rights that have ever been denied to homosexuals. They have never been denied the right to trial by jury, or the right against self-incrimination, or the right to vote. They have never been denied, by law---as blacks were, in the past, in some jurisdictions---the right to live where they chose. There is no legitimacy to the gay-rights movement claiming it is a civil rights movement. During the Dade County civil rights ordinance campaign, which most people know as "the Anita Bryant campaign," the gay-rights activists were constantly using the term "human rights," not "civil rights." Their use of the one term in preference over the other appeared to be merely a form of plaint that "we're human too"---but it was actually a term of art, and very carefully chosen. It is much like the references to Obama in the 2008 campaign as being "post-racial," which was intended to convey to the rubes that he would lead us at last past social obsession with things racial, but which to the Leftist cognoscenti indicated that he would be a race warrior who would seek to oppress the whites whom the Left considers always and irredeemably "racist." The gay-rights movement in the US was founded by Stalinists in the 1950s, and taken over by Maoists and SDSers following the Stonewall Riots. Once upon a time, such strong and consistent connections to subversive elements might have merited closer looks at their writings and objectives, but our lazy and agenda-driven Leftist media could not be bothered with this, and most of the opponents of same-sex marriage did not think to delve into this history. If they had, they'd have discovered ample writings which stated that the abolition or destruction of marriage was one of the movement's oft-stated and oft-celebrated goals---a goal which the movement has never repudiated, and has not, in the course of the marriage agitation, discussed at all. So..."marriage" has gone from the movement's must-destroy to the movement's absolutely-must-have---this, despite the prior increasing, accelerating acceptance of civil-union protection. Indeed, California had a civil-union law that was "marriage" in all but name---yet look at the acrimonious fight (and aftermath) that attended the Prop 8 vote, which was to decree same-sex marriage in the state despite the already-extant civil-union law. Why was that word "marriage" sufficiently important to cause this upheaval? Because "marriage" was the key to giving the gay-rights movement a toehold in equal-protection law, i.e., giving the movement a sheep's pelt of "civil rights" claims to cover the human-rights wolf beneath. The movement had tried for years to equate itself to the black Civil Rights Movement (much to the annoyance of many blacks, until recently)---and the false equivalence which the movement made (and the judges bought) between same-sex marriage (the invention of a new kind of marriage) and the anti-miscegenation law rulings of the 1960s, gave the movement its chance. The anti-miscegenation rulings struck down laws that voided otherwise-valid traditional marriages on the basis of the extraneous element of race. That is not the same thing as refusing to legalize an entirely new form of marriage, which is what same-sex marriage is. Now that it has gained its toehold in "equal protection law," the gay-rights movement has a siege platform from which to attack other people's freedom of speech, freedom of association, and free exercise of religion, on "equal protection" grounds. That is the entire reason for the push for same-sex marriage. Was the passage of laws pre-emptively banning legalization of same-sex marriage ill-advised? Probably. Conservatives, as usual, allowed themselves to be suckered by the Left; passing a pre-emptive ban on same-sex marriage---something that at the time did not exist—set conservatives up to appear, spuriously, to be in the position of those racists who had supported banning interracial unions. By banning something that did not exist, conservatives called that thing into being and set themselves up for the Left's knockout punch. Same-sex marriage should have been opposed from the beginning---not based on appeals to Biblical strictures, nor on appeals to the highly-malleable and transitory utterances of the psychiatric pseudosciences, but on the basis that a) a movement founded upon opposition to marriage, and dedicated to its destruction, has no standing to demand it, and b) "Civil union" laws meet whatever legal needs the community might have, the more so since the movement has, for decades, insisted on the difference between heterosexual and homosexual couples, and therefore, if the homosexual community needs legal protections for its relationships, those protections should be different from those for heterosexual relationships.
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JCM
12/3/2022 5:54:13 PM
Kosh's Shadow
12/8/2022 5:47:36 PM