Skip to main content

We Will Not Obey!

By



So say Christian leaders, who among other things are asking Justices Ginsburg and Kagan to recuse themselves from the final vote on the case to legalize same-sex marriage across the country.  Of course, such brashness has come to be expected from the religious right, who created this situation by pressing for these State Restoration of Religious Freedom Acts across the country.

The funny part is that these religious conservatives regard Justice Ginsburg as biased because she spoke out on the case.  Has Justice Scalia been any less outspoken?  Should he recuse himself as well?

It has been a very raucous proceeding, with most of the justices speaking out at one point or another.  It is pretty clear that Justices Scalia, Alito and Thomas have made up their minds, just as have Kagan and Ginsburg.  This leaves the balance in the hands of Sotomayor, Beyer, Roberts and Kennedy.  I'm guessing the vote abolishing gay marriage bans goes 6-3 with the religious right clamoring for the recall of Roberts and Kennedy.

Sadly, it is the ugly battle we have come to expect on civil rights issues.   Our nation remains as deeply divided as ever.  It has always struggled to accept change, especially what it regards to be religious moral values.  You'd be hard pressed to find any direct reference to homosexuality in the Bible.  One diligent reader managed to find eight references in the Old Testament, most of them oblique, but none in the New Testament.  For many on the religious right, the Old Testament trumps the New Testament. True of the Vatican as well, which hasn't brought itself to see homosexuality as appropriate sexual behavior.  However, Pope Francis famously said, "Who am I to judge them?" forcing religious conservatives to do a lot of hand wringing.

The religious right would have us believe that by accepting gay marriage we will bring God's wrath down upon us, as he did Sodom and Gomorrah.  They see themselves as the messengers of God, who were sexually assaulted by the evil men of Sodom, not stopping to think that they are the ones doing all the bullying here.

This is what Pope Francis emphatically spoke out against.  Not like hard-line Catholics Scalia and Alito are paying any attention.  They have effectively used the Supreme Court as a bully pulpit for expressing their own religious convictions.  Scalia was particularly upset when the Supreme Court voted not to delay same-sex marriage in Alabama over state protests.  He joined Clarence Thomas in a blistering dissent of this ruling.

Whether state pastors, politicians and pizza vendors choose to abide by the decision or not, states will no longer be able to explicitly ban gay marriage or discriminate against same-sex married couples.  After all, the US Constitution, which these Supreme Court justices swore to uphold, is about individual rights, not what some regard to be the word of God.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
229 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more