UltraBanner

 

Bar_WorldBlue_Ultrapolis_World.jpg 

  

 

 

Sunday, July 19, 2015 - Volume 6, Number 8

© Copyright 2015, The Ultrapolis Project.  All Rights Reserved.

The Forced End of the Gay Marriage Debate?

And Will Supreme Court Ruling Pave Way for the End of All Civil Marriage?


ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:

Cartoon Commentaries: Nate Beeler and Rick McKee on Icy Worlds & Fetus Parts

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Marriage Wars

Will the Court Have Brought Them to End or Ignited a New & Enduring Conflagration?

 

All civil states, with their officers of justice, in their respective constitutions and administrations, are proved essentially civil, and therefore not judges, governors, or defenders of the spiritual, or Christian, state and worship.

- Roger Williams

A Plea for Religious Liberty

 

The Gauntlet Now Down

 

The decision of the decade has been made, and done so by the margin of a single man’s vote.  On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court, in a bitterly divided decision on the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, decreed all votes in the question of legalized gay marriage void.

 

We need not cover in detail all the reasoning here.  There has been enough of it already, and anyone in this day can access it at will.  We will merely cite two quotes from the opposing view points on the court that were at the core of their decision.

 

From the pro-gay marriage pivotal Justice Anthony Kennedy:

 

Without the recognition, stability and predictability marriage offers their [gay people’s] children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser. They also suffer the significant material costs of being raised by unmarried parents, relegated through no fault of their own to a more difficult and uncertain family life. The marriage laws at issue here thus harm and humiliate the children of same-sex couples.

 

From the dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia:

 

They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a ‘fundamental right’ overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since.

 

These two quotes somewhat encapsulate the basis of the division for each side:  the slim majority cited their own perception of what would be better and fairer law, and their view of self-esteem concerns; and the minority objected to the changing of Constitutional law on the basis of changing views on issues nobody knew they were voting on when the laws were passed.

 

Justice Kennedy’s reasoning does beg the question: Is it then that people who chose not to get married or choose to get divorced are choosing to stigmatize their children and to make them feel ‘lesser’ (to use his language of the left)?  What should be done about them?

 

The Rule of One

 

There is no denying that the court denied the people the right to vote on the subject of changing the definition of marriage; and moreover, nullified actual votes held in most of the country*, relying instead on quickly shifting public opinion, measured only by polls reported on by a media almost monolithically sympathetic to one side, to change the Constitution of the nation.  One has to wonder what this same court would have voted (or more specifically, one Justice by the name of Kennedy) if this case had come before the court just five years earlier.  Would the Constitution have been a different one then?

 

*The mainstream media, from CBS to PBS, often mentioned prior to the court decision that ‘already 37 states have passed’ laws legalizing gay marriage.  However, this was at best sloppy reporting, and at worst, deliberate misinformation, as in fact only eleven states had done so, and in the rest of the states the courts overturned their votes against gay marriage.

 

Repeatedly most of the media and all other gay marriage supporters insisted that the public was now in favor gay marriage recognition identical to traditional marriage, and therefore, the court decision was the right one. Yet, as with so many other issues in hot contention the last forty years, despite the certainty expressed about public support, the course selected was judicial imposition, not legislative democracy.

 

True, there have been past court decisions that dramatically altered the legal landscape, but these have tended to be unanimous court decisions, with of course the glaring exception of Roe vs. Wade (another five to four decision).

 

Whatever final and lasting legal resolution might have been devised through a voting process that was seeing a more gay-friendly generation replace a less gay-friendly one, we do not know.  And, the push is now on to make sure it stays that way.

 

Hell Hath No Fury Like

An LGBT Scorned

 

The second assurance also repeated long and often until recently was that religious freedom will not be infringed as a result of this ruling.  Specifically, that people who morally objected to same-sex marriage would not be persecuted or oppressed, or forced to violate their beliefs.  That assurance is at an end.

 

In the last two years, in an effort that manifested itself very suddenly and simultaneously in several states, small, sole-proprietor businesses that declined to participate in activities related to gay weddings have been targeted with aggressive PR, legal, and boycott campaigns resulting in great harm to those businesses.  Human lives have been harshly affected because somebody insisted on a cake or photos for their gay wedding from a specific business. 

 

Just a week after the Supreme Court decision, Chief Moral Inquisitor Brad Avakian, whose real job is supposed to be as Oregon’s state labor commissioner to address employment disputes, ruled that the owners of Sweet Cakes bakery pay $135,000 to a gay couple for the “emotional and mental suffering” the couple suffered when they were denied a wedding cake from that specific bakery.  This on top of the closure of their shop due to public pressure brought on by the lesbian couple, which the Christian couple had spent their lifetime investments building.

 

It strikes us that if someone suffered $135,000 worth of emotional and mental suffering for not being able to order a wedding cake from a specific bakery, they are in serious need of psychiatric care, and should immediately seek that help instead of focusing their mental demons on destroying the lives of two other human beings who asked for nothing more than to be left alone (is that not what gay people used to ask for?).

 

Imposition by Refrain

 

Sadly, many pro-gay marriage advocates have explained, including supposed unbiased news anchors, that no one may now enter the marketplace (i.e. make a living), if they are not prepared to participate in gay weddings.  And, this all began before the Supreme Court ruling.  It now will get worse.

 

When the likes of gay marriage activist George Takei, (who referred to Justice Clarence Thomas as a “clown in blackface”) and their followers say they “believe in religious freedom, and people who argue that are entitled to their freedom…But they do not have the freedom to impose their religious values on to others,” what they mean by that is that no one can impose their values by refusing to participate in gay weddings.  That this is a rather strange use of the word ‘impose’ will cause not any qualms in the least from the new morally absolute busybodies.

 

See next column >

 

 

Ultrapolis World Forecast & Review

Ultrapolis Project – ultrapolisproject.com

832-782-7394

 

Editor: Marco Antonio Roberts

Copy Editor: Michael Alberts

Contributing Editors:

Mark Eastman

Mark Steele

 

contactproject@ultrapolisproject.com

 

 

Our forecast record cannot be beat.  One can follow the herd chasing the latest hyperbolic, melodramatic, and soon-forgotten micro-trend, or one can be wisely and judiciously in front of it with UWFR. 

 

 

 

 

< From column 1

 

Public Accommodations

- by Definition

 

As we have stated in previous UWFR issues, and in the column published in the Battalion of Texas A&M University this April 1, what we have here is a deliberate conflation of any and all services or products with ‘public accommodations’.  Instead of applying the limited definition of public accommodations as clearly outlined in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this new definition essentially means any product or service.

 

Libertarians have always objected to any law, including the Civil Rights Act, that forces businesses to do anything at all. They have done so on the grounds that this violates a person’s right to determine the use and purpose of their own labor and property.  They also feared that once established, the right to coerce businesses into activities they object to would be expanded, as it now appears to be the case.

 

On the first point, this real imposition on businesses was accepted by the Republicans who passed that law in 1964 because the price was relatively small compared to the wrong it intended to correct: the real inability of people to secure basic services, or be secure in obtaining services while traveling, due to their physical characteristics or religious beliefs.  And, everyone ultimately benefited in knowing that, regardless of where one traveled in the United States, they could obtain food, lodging, housing - all products and services essential to daily life and the ability to move about the country.  Additionally, it also required this unrestricted public access to any “motion picture house, theater, concert hall, sports arena, stadium or other place of exhibition or entertainment” that is open to the general public.

 

It is critically important to understand that none of the public accommodations listed in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 required any business to either have knowledge of, or participate in, any customer’s beliefs.  (Remarkably, while libertarians have pointed this out, no Republican or social conservative seems to be aware of this.)   Moreover, the Act did not require a business to change the products or services it delivered to suit any customer’s preferences.  For example, a paying customer of African descent cannot be denied entry to a movie theater simply because of his race.  But, the customer cannot then call upon the power of the state to force the movie theater to show movies that feature more people of his race, or even that it not show racist movies.

 

Whether marriage should be indifferent to the sexes of the parties involved or not is a matter of belief.  Although many talk about the 14th Amendment and ‘equality’, and deliberately equate having an inclination with the right to act on it, in truth, being homosexual is not the same as believing that gay people should be able to marry, or even to believe that acting on homosexual feelings is morally good.  Possessing a trait is not the same as possessing a belief, or a moral trump card, for that matter.

 

The Born Identity

 

Let us take a moment to pause here and re-state again, lest anyone try to say otherwise, we here at the Ultrapolis Project and UWFR have a long history of unequivocally advocating for the rights of free speech, freedom of association, and freedom from religious persecution, that is for all the First Amendment rights, of all gay people, along with all the other proper political, civil, and human rights that should be accorded all persons in our country.

 

Still, this is a difficult matter to discuss because the political and civic gay identity is so closely tied to specific behavior and choices of belief on that behavior. 

 

Nonetheless, regardless of why someone wants to engage in certain behavior, society does have a right to discuss and consider whether any behavior is permissible, or should be, under its laws – being “born this way” remaining totally irrelevant to the merits of the case except in the extension of compassion.  People are born with all kinds of conditions that vary from the norm.  As we have said before, a condition’s mere presence says nothing about whether it is good or bad.  A homosexual man always had the “equal” right to marry as any heterosexual man – he just was not interested in that right as it existed in the recent past.  Now, if there had been a law that said homosexuals cannot get married to anyone – period – then one could have honestly argued for an “equal” right to marry.  What gay people were asking for – understandably – was a new, different right that no one had: the right to marry someone of the same sex.  And they demanded it for a brand new reason: to have the state recognize (approve of?) their romantic love.

 

Marriage was previously not seen as a ‘right’, but as a moral (later legal) ‘license’ to engage in heterosexual sex.  In fact, marriage was so closely associated with the need to ensure children were not through any heterosexual encounter born outside a stable partnership of a mother and a father that in some instances in history marriage was not permitted to infertile couples or couples that did not declare their intent to have children. (One can imagine a conservative back then arguing strenuously that allowing the infertile to marry would eventually lead to allowing men to marry men, and then being laughed out of the public square.)

 

Belief Upon Belief

 

Now, we always supported here the discussion of what ought to be the legal terms of marriage, and openly advocated the extension of civil unions for gay people for purposes beneficial to society (NEVER to legally certify who loves who).  However, what has transpired instead is the setting of a Constitutional premise that has established as supreme law the notion that male and female are interchangeable (a long-sought goal of the radical lesbian feminists that control the L-led LGBT movement).  Worse, it has also cemented into that supreme law the principle that the choice to believe that acting on homosexual inclinations is morally benign is the same as possessing a physical characteristic that one cannot change, rather than simply another belief, like the belief that marriage is only between man and woman; and therefore, that the first belief trumps the second.

 

Put another way, because of the determination of homosexuality as more like a physiological trait, it is being legally and rhetorically treated more like race or ethnic background.  However, in the process, we have merged the protection of a person based on their traits with an equal status protection of their choices as traits instead of as beliefs.  Thus, instead of saying “I have an equal First Amendment right to believe being gay is OK and not to have someone else’s views on homosexuality imposed on me”, they say “My beliefs are part of my unchangeable traits, and therefore you must treat my beliefs as if they were my skin color or ethnic background and thus, with 14th Amendment protection.”

 

This is critically important, because while most people may not understand this distinction of protected classes, it does subtly as well as firmly place one belief (that homosexual behavior is morally benign and equal to heterosexual behavior), over any other belief, religious or not, on the matter.  And this will be the new launching pad for the restriction of the First Amendment rights on any other beliefs in conflict.  Furthermore, as history runs like a current, so will this new precedent run its course.

 

It may seem to the gay left that it has won a great victory, and it has in so far as to the specifics.  But in the long term, its adherents too will be caught up in the negative implications of how this victory was won.

 

Continued column 3 >

< From column 2

 

Inclusion and Diversity

Total & Absolute

 

Now, we are in a new place, where any person making a living is demanded to surrender any right to refuse to perform a specific service, or provide a specific product. Even religious institutions that officiate weddings are being targeted for compliance, with articles, columns, and public comments now questioning church tax-exempt status for any institution that refuses to perform same-sex weddings.  We forecast here that an earnest campaign worthy of Soviet admiration, against any expression of disapproval of same-sex marriage, will continue to grow, even as its new belief enforcers deny – a la Takei - what they are doing.

 

This belief suppression will extend even to most U.S. employees, as major corporate employers will now require in job descriptions an employee’s commitments to ‘inclusion’ and ‘diversity’ as defined by the corporation (and the left).  Already this is being done in some corporations.  If you work for a major corporation, look for it in your next job description, if it is not already there now. 

 

A black printer refusing to print perfectly legal white supremacist flyers, a gay atheist photographer declining to be part of a Christian Revival event, a Christian employee mentioning to anyone at work that they attended a traditional marriage rally – these will be the potential new outlaws (but only the last will be targeted by the left).  Only money to be made is an allowed consideration, not personal conscience (except as sanctioned by the state or corporation) – or you don’t get to eat.

 

Nobody Here But Us

Lovers of Free Speech

 

Interestingly in our own Ultrapolis Facebook discussion group we saw an instance of this new thinking when one member posted a link to a story where a newspaper announced that following the Supreme Court decision, it would no longer allow any letters to the editor advocating against same-sex marriage published on its pages.  After dozens of posted comments arguing over what are the true and proper terms of free speech, with some arguing that speech that “hurts gays” can be “curtailed”, and that now using the term “gay marriage” is offensive, we put this question to the two main advocates of the Supreme Court decision who were engaged in the discussion:

 

…So, the question here is, as was at the start of this post: Is it now [] OK to say that expressing opposition to marriage among gays…is speech that can be curtailed, discouraged – whatever, because it can “hurt gays”, while the opposite speech remains fully protected and considered polite and appropriate in all venues? Is speech saying “I oppose same-sex marriage” deserving of the same protection and consideration as equally appropriate in all venues as speech that says “I am for marriage for gay people?” or is the first speech now like using the “N” word, and no longer on equal-footing with the 2nd speech which remains fully protected and appropriate in all venues?

 

Did our indefatigable friends, after dozens and dozens of postings, take the one last opportunity to clarify and unequivocally express their support of the equal right of those on other side of this issue to have their say?  Here were their responses:

 

I have said all I want to say on this.

-Discussion Partner 1

 

As have I.

-Discussion Partner 2

 

Lastly in this regard, urgent speed in suppressing any speech ‘hurtful to gays’ will be of vital importance to the left, in an effort to pre-empt any possible coalescing of opposition.

 

A Gay New World

 

But there is more to this UWFR forecast then the new blitzkrieg to establish new precedents further restricting public speech that offends the collective.  To summarize:

 

There will be a counter-current initiative, not as strong at the beginning as the left’s assault, but decades-long, that will seek to reverse the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage.

 

A new movement to eliminate civil marriage, either through replacing it with a different legal mechanism, or by its total abolition, will surface and grow.  Many voices who have always objected to the idea of civil marriage on the grounds the state has no business ‘licensing’ love, will now become much louder, with added proof of their claim.

 

Marriage ‘rights’ will continue to expand in new ways both predicted and unexpected, adding to the movement to eliminate or replace civil marriage.

 

The soft sciences, led by the social, lesbian-feminist construct called Gender Studies, will roll out a train of studies on the equality, if not superiority of gay marriages as compared to those of husband and wife.  (Incidentally, how many poor gay couples do you think will be raising children?)  Again we stop here to be clear that this is NOT an argument saying gay people cannot be allowed to raise children.

 

In 50-100 years, the hard sciences will inevitably uncover new evidence that many behaviors are driven by inborn traits, and will make available new pre-natal genetic therapies that can target sexual orientation, and these developments will erode the moral foundation of this 2015 gay victory.  Having built upon the cheaper but fundamentally flawed ‘born this way’ argument* instead of the more stable ‘freedom to choose’ foundational premise, gay rights will begin to wither, while leaving in place all the precedents of state control of public expressions of belief classified by the state as ‘hurtful’, ‘offensive’, or as ‘hate speech’ – unless a movement does coalesce to more strongly protect ‘hurtful’ speech.

 

*The premise that being ‘born this way’ has relevance was supported by the far right and social conservatives when they argued over whether people are born gay, and this led to the inevitable dispatch by the left of their untenable arguments – Just another example of how social conservatives accepted the premises of the left, assuring yet another political retreat.

 

The More Traveled Road

 

Now, it is true that often prejudicial religious feelings led to the establishment of a legal form of the religious institution of marriage, as when marriage laws were passed to prevent inter-racial marriages.  And yet, despite the warnings of the 17th century religious leader of colonial America Roger Williams, who stridently called for the separation of church and state – not to protect the state from religion, but to protect religion from corruption by the state – conservative Christians handed their religious sacrament over to the state.  And now the state has redefined it for them.

 

Thus, it may be fitting that the civil institution that was born from the attempt to suppress religious freedom may die by it.  Yet another lesson that how we accomplish a goal is just as morally important as the goal itself.  And thus it is that to override today the Constitutional process for changing laws or effecting new ones for the purpose of expanding freedom today is to destroy freedom tomorrow.

 

Description: cid:image003.jpg@01CD8765.85884780


 

Comments may be directed to contactproject@ultrapolisproject.com, or if you receive the newsletter email, also via a reply to the email address from which you receive it. OR CLICK BELOW

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Icy World (1of 2)

 

Frankenfetus (2of 2)

 

 

 

 

Main Index of the Ultrapolis World Forecast & Review

 

 

© Copyright 2015, The Ultrapolis Project – All Rights Reserved.