THE DEMISE OF MARRIAGE ACT

This is from my blog at the Currier Times.

THE DEMISE OF MARRIAGE ACT

Thomas O. Meehan

7/3/13

Judge Kennedy made it plain that he believes any resistance to so called "Gay Marriage" is a form of bigotry.  This bigotry entails and unreasoned desire to hold certain classes of people or their practices in a lesser regard than others.  According to Justice Kennedy, this creates the class of Homosexuals who must not be kept from every right or privilege enjoyed by all the rest of us.  

Here Kennedy advances the mentality endemic to late democratic societies in decline.  Tradition and the cultural norms of preceding generations, along with those of large numbers of living voters, have no standing in this point of view.  It does not phase Justice Kennedy that up until the day before yesterday any proclivity to sanctify homosexual unions would be anathematized universally and deeply.  I wonder why the justice has so little feeling for his countries history or culture.  I can only imagine that he agrees with the late Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, that his function is to help society get to any destination it seeks to go, including hell if that's where they desire.   There is something to this.  The court cannot mandate the nations culture.  Justice Kennedy lives among the great and the good where Homosexuality has lost it's stigma.  Too many colleagues or their families stand to be offended.  I think it's true that homosexuality flourishes in highly developed bureaucratic societies.  It's handy to have no biological children to raise and attend to for instance.  Such societies inevitably come to value verbal, social skills over other skills.  Released from the pressure of survival and the immediate consequences of action, societies become more tolerant, more susceptible to emotional appeals.  They come to believe that social norms are nature's norms. This process of of softening and decadence can take centuries in more traditional and organic societies.  In our hyper-democratized America it's happening very fast.  Justice Kennedy seems to assume that millennia of of hetero-normative dominance came about by pure ignorant bloodymindedness.  If so, it's amazing that it came about under numerous belief systems  in cultures as unlike as the Persian, Hebrew, Roman etc.  How did this same bigotry evolve so broadly?   In another venue I suggested that what matters most in a cultural or legal system is what it assumes.  It is the things that need not be spelled out that are the ground of any healthy society.  But as those societies decay the assumptions dissolve and the whim of the populace takes hold.  If a society is large enough and rich enough it can do a lot of harm to itself before the roof falls in. I am particularly struck by the way that traditional marriage was defended.  For some reason marriage's defenders never seemed to defend it as an ideal.  They defended  it in the same manner as one would a social program, for its utility.  But heterosexual monogamous marriage was the ideal of those who founded our society.  Heterosexual monogamy is one of the founding pillars or Western Civilization.  It is an ideal that has served all its adherents well from time out of mind.  We have replaced that ideal with marriage as a form of going steady certain legal documentation.  How well has that innovation served us?  I believe that the willingness to grant marriage to homosexuals is not a measure of how important marriage is in our society, but how trivial it has become. With the value of oaths and the sacral nature of the marriage a thing of the past, why not let anyone have a nice little wedding if that's what will make them happy?  If marriage is unserious, why hurt people's feelings? So we are a society rapidly unshackling from the ideals and norms of our ancestors.  What are our ideals now to be?  It seems that the only ideal we are to have is that everyone must be free to act out their desires without reference to any common enterprise.  I maintain that a culture too decadent to codify ideals into law has no future.  For ideals generate distinctions, and distinctions make for excellence.  Alas, Kennedy's egalitarian vandalism of the ideal of marriage is only a symptom.