Snap Out of It

The proponents of what is called (with unintentional hilarity) gay marriage express the gaiety for which they are named by crowing and gamboling with delight that the Supreme Court has declined to do its core Constitutional mission of interpreting the law, and chastise and check the abuses of activist judges overruling the sovereign votes of the decent and sober majority.

They should perhaps rein in their gay celebrations: gay marriage cannot be justified either in law or logic. This means the law has just departed from the environs of law and logic.

The gay partisans should instead recoil with dread, for the thing, by being given into their hands, is effectively destroyed. Whatever meaning or sanction the pairs of homosexuals are seeking out of the pretense of marriage is destroyed by the very fact that it is a pretense, not a marriage.

I am not speaking about an abstraction, but as a matter of law. The way law works, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the basic principle, is that once a precedent is established, until and unless it is definitively overruled, it has controlling authority over every case standing on similar facts, and the degree of similarity is the core of what all legal arguments are about.

This ruling, now left to stand, will and must create more havoc with family law, with testaments and estates, divorce laws, property laws, far more than if the government simply decreed marriage to be a private contract. No matter what the desires and tastes of the reformers, and no matter their promises, once set in motion, the law operates by a logic and by an inertia of its own.

Let us take it as a given that all men are sinners, and that my personal motives are malign beyond description. Nonetheless, if I speak the truth, my words are true, no matter what my motives are, and if an malign man says twice two is four, the statement is true. Those who argue that twice two is three must address the argument given, not the man who gives it. It is a sign of the deep mental corruption of our times that I must preemptively fend off the yawningly irrational personal attacks and informal logical error that just so happens to be the only counterargument ever encountered to an argument in favor of chastity, marriage, decency, sexual normalcy.

Such nonsense is predictable to the point of tedium. Gossipy, shrill and groundless accusation is the way schoolgirls maintaining a clique punish dissenters, not the way sober men debate the great issues of the day. If one argues that the law concerning marriage must concern marriage and does not concern sodomy, if one argues that a thing is not its very opposite, if one argues that twice two is four and not three, the only response will be an eructation of scorn directed against the speaker, not a response addressing the points spoken.

That said, for those who read these words with the eyes of sober men, with a refined sense of logic and a stern and clear understanding of justice, let us turn to the matter:

First, there are those, including a surprising number of conservatives, who hold that it is a matter of fundamental moral right that two sodomites who wish to solemnize their alliance with a marriage-like ceremony or civil union should be seen and celebrated by the same customs, mores, and obligations society beholds and celebrates a husband and wife establishing a family. We should throw rice, and cheer, and teach our children that such unions are romantic and healthy and normal and permanent, and we should scorn and condemn, and perhaps punish at law, those who teach their children otherwise.

Second, there is a parallel legal argument that it is a matter of fundamental justice that the same legal privileges and rights awarded to a marriage couple should be extended to an alliance of sodomites, such as tax loopholes and hospital visitation rights and child custody and survivor’s benefits.

Third, there is a technical legal argument that the Fourteenth Amendment is properly interpreted to mean that should a state government treat a married couple and an alliance of sodomites with two different ergo unequal rules, such is a violation of the Constitution.

Fourth, there is a Civil Rights argument that for a private individual to refuse to do business, to hire, or to serve a pair of sodomites who wish to represent themselves as a married couple is a violation of the fundamental human dignity of the sodomites. The argument here is that the same penalty at civil law should obtain which prevents, for example, a diner from refusing to serve Negroes, or seating them only in the back of the restaurant. This argument mainly applies to businesses such as bakers, caterers, photographers whose services are purchased for weddings, to bake wedding cakes and such, or to institutions renting halls, or clergy performing the ceremony.

Finally, there is the libertarian argument that a man’s vices are private, and that the state should have no power to say as to which marriage ceremonies shall be recognized and which not recognized, allowed or prohibited, for the same reason that the state should have no power to interfere with private contracts.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.