The last couple of weeks have turned that old song lyric into an accurate description of American culture in the summer of 2015.
Wild fires burning in Canada have turned the Minnesota sky into a pink, smoky backdrop this Fourth of July. The sunsets all last week were spectacular, as they always are when the sky is suffused with pollutants. I remember 1980, when Mt. St. Helen’s erupted; gorgeous sunsets were the hallmark of that summer.
Volcanic eruptions and forest fires, btw, are naturally occurring phenomena. If one had any common sense at all, one would assume that things which occur naturally, are therefore, a part of nature, wouldn’t one? Even a smallish eruption puts more of what we modern age folks call ‘green house gasses’ into the air than all the humans in the entire industrial age have been able to do. Wouldn’t it therefore seem logical to assume that the earth can handle such infusions? Perhaps the current mode of environmental hysteria is unnecessary.
So much for the Hazy, lets’ talk about the Crazy.
Last week, the SCOTUS, made up of guys who have law degrees but no particular wisdom, said in the course of two days that the plain text of the law was immaterial since the clear intent of those who wrote it was otherwise and in the very next breath that the clear intent of those who wrote the Constitution was immaterial because they didn’t spell out what they assumed was universal knowledge.
Can we all agree that the way a thing is accomplished is as important as the thing itself?
Take World Peace for example.
Everyone says they want it. Even assuming that ‘world peace’ meant the same thing to everyone, how one goes about achieving it matters.
If one’s method of achieving world peace is to wipe out all those who disagree with one, then one is not an altruist but a monster.
A MONSTER.
Stalin, Mao and Hitler can all claim that they were only trying to achieve world peace. They just had to get rid of those pesky dissenters (and of course, the Jews) so they could make peace happen. ISIS claims they’re working toward a world Caliphate…they say their religion means “Peace”. I think their methods make the entire project suspect.
Not all the genocidal maniacs of the 20th century had such lofty goals as World Peace; some of them just wanted peace in the general vicinity. The Hutus and Bosnians for instance, just wanted to clean up their own neighborhoods.
Achieving “peace” is such a bloody business!
So yes, I think the way a thing is achieved is very important.
Which brings me to the biggest problem I have with the same sex marriage ruling out of the SCOTUS.
An accurate reading of the Constitution should have admitted that the document says nothing at all about marriage.
Of course it doesn’t; the framers of the Constitution considered ‘marriage’ a concept and an institution so well know and accepted that to define it would have been as time wasting as to define the concept of ‘horse’.
Since the Constitution says nothing about marriage, clearly We, the People, can open marriage up to include same sex couples if we want to. Anything not specifically allocated to the federal government in the Constitution is the business of the states. The Constitution clearly does not stand in the way of same sex marriage.
But that’s not what five of the nine judges claimed.
They claimed that the Constitution (ratified in 1789) forbids the states from defining marriage as one man/one woman.
Got that?
A document written by eighteenth century men didn’t merely omit the definition of what marriage is, it FORBIDS the defining of marriage as being what marriage has been for countless millennia.
Regardless of how you feel about same sex marriage, what the SCOTUS did was say that the Constitution forbids defining marriage as anything at all. Even if you don’t think polygamy or incest is next in line for public acceptance, the SCOTUS, by its own actions, have made all combinations legal. No, not just legal but constitutionally protected. IF the Constitution, by its silence, confers the right of marriage upon other than one man/one woman, then you can’t say that its silence bars one man/six women or one woman/ her own son.
Who cares? Love wins!
Um…what about the consent of the governed? This nation was founded on the belief that government’s legitimacy rests in the consent of the governed. Over the course of the last decade, many states have voted on whether or not to change the laws regarding marriage. Only three states actually voted to change the institution of marriage to become something it has never been. The rest of the states, when given a chance, voted to preserve traditional marriage. Many even voted to change their state's constitution to reflect the popular view. It has been judges, acting against the expressed will of the people who have mandated the change in marriage.
Again, regardless of your support for same sex marriage, what about the consent of the governed?
Even the Libertarian in me, which had supported same sex marriage, was quietly horrified by this ruling.
This was not a blow for love or liberty. It was not.
In essence, this ruling said “Votes don’t matter. The will of the people does not matter. The text of the Constitution does not matter. The silence of the Constitution does not matter. The only thing that matters is our whim and we do not need the consent of the governed.”
In the name of diversity, the Constitution is being flattened.
“And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you, where would you hide…the laws all being flat?” Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”.
This does not bode well for any of us.
My daughter, who is a lawyer and teaches on the Constitution said that this ruling simply upheld equal treatment under contract law.
That’s the kind of thinking you get from lawyers when you stop teaching the Merchant of Venice in Shakespeare class. (The intent of Shylock’s contract clearly included the blood! Today Portia would be called ‘a clown in a dress’.)
Hey, at least contract law is something the Constitution does actually address. (Although it’s ironic since the first thing this administration did was nullify the legal contracts of all the bond holders in the auto industry in favor of paying off the unions instead. I don’t think ‘legal’ or ‘contract’ means any more these days than ‘state’ or ‘marriage’ or the word ‘is’. I digress…)
What if marriage is more than a legal contract?
I’m thinking of the Grinch, shivering in the snow on Mt. Crumpet, early Christmas morning, finally realizing that Christmas may be more than toys and noise…
Marriage is the cornerstone of civilization. Back in the mists of time, when humans first realized that male + female caused more humans, in order to avoid chaos and ensure the survival of the species, they codified sexual unions between male and female to protect everyone. The female knew she’d have help with the offspring that resulted from sex, the male knew he was the father of those offspring he was responsible for and the children knew who they were and where they belonged and the result of this institution called ‘marriage’ was civilization.
Now, it’s certainly possible that as a species we’ve evolved so far that we no longer need such institutions to build families, raise children, form identities and know who we are and where we belong…it’s just that there’s no evidence to support such an idea.
In fact, a quick look at birth rates around the world shows us that the ‘evolved’ cultures are evolving themselves right out of existence. The 13 European nations that have voted to redefined marriage have an average birth rate of 11 per 1000 per year. That includes Ireland, which has the highest birth rate of 15 per 1000 women. The rates in all these countries is falling.
Obviously, falling birth rates can’t be blamed on same sex marriage. Both those cultural trends are evidence of societies that no longer care about marriage or children. Japan has not legalized same sex marriage and their birth rate of 8 per 1000 is one of the lowest on Earth. Japanese is an endangered ethnicity.
The future belongs to those who show up.
There is a crowd that isn’t buying into the diversity scam. They’re poised to swoop into the ethnic vacuum being left by cultures that are so tolerant they can’t be bothered to reproduce. It is a robust, thriving and confident culture. Thirteen nations that have embraced this culture have an average birth rate of 26 per 1000. I’ll give you a hint; they believe in peace on earth via beheadings.
The Devil is going to turn around on us and we’ll have no Constitution to protect us.
So your granddaughter, should you ever have one, will not have the option of same sex marriage or birth control; she’ll have had a clitorodectomy at the age of four and her marriage, at the age of 9 or so, will be less like a contract than a sale to a man who will own her as chattel. But in the Great Caliphate, the world will know peace at last.