Signal-to-Noise Ratio
I've spent a lot of time over the last two days watching the #LoveWins hashtag on Twitter (where, as most of the online world knows, you get an automatic little rainbow heart easter egg on the hashtag). It's been, mostly, great -- astonishing and glorious and vibrant, a massive shout of joy ( Read more... )
And one of the well-established patterns of the civil rights struggle is that it is very hard to persuade people to vote away rights. This is why the conservatives originally put the bans in place: they wanted to block the right before it was seen as real, before it became something that could be taken away. Prior to the formal bans, we did not have the right to marry. It simply hadn't been banned formally, because nobody dared try.
As for "if it is that easy, why didn't they do it years ago" -- it wasn't easy. It has never been easy. People have died for this, and many more have died waiting for this. We reached this point because a steadily growing section of the country kept looking at the bans and saying, "Wait a moment, that's not right."
It's been astonishing living through it -- in some ways, as overwhelming as the Soviet Union collapsing and the Wall coming down. I no longer live in the country where I was born, even though the map says I do.
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Guess Germany should hurry to not be left behind...
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Some things can be done just once, at the federal level. Some require a majority of the states, some require a supermajority. The Founding Fathers here actually did a very good job of balancing all that out, and it's managed to stay pretty well locked down over the many decades since then (with notable bad patches).
The whole point of the Supreme Court is that when they say something on a point of existing law, it's final -- that's why they're the *Supreme* Court of the US. But they can't actually make a law, and they can only change it by clarifying the interpretation based on existing precedent, or by killing it, also based on existing precedent.
That's basically what they did here: they took the existing laws banning gay marriage by some states, and the existing broad laws that involved overall rights and how rights are administered under law, set them side by side, had an incredibly long and complex discussion about it that came after YEARS of other incredibly long and complex discussions. At the end of all that, 5 out of 9 of them said "This state-level law is in conflict with this federal-level law. The state-level law is now dead, and so are all other state-level laws that say the same thing. This is what the law means (marriage is equally accessible to all, regardless of gender), and no law can stand that tries to say otherwise." That's the super-summary. The entire decision, with all the legal details, was over 100 pages long.
At the same time, 4 of them did not agree, and wrote long and in some cases very strangely unprofessional declarations saying why they thought their colleagues were wrong. One of them in particular, Scalia, wrote such crazy shit in his dissent that he's become a whole set of internet memes, and has generally undermined his stature to a shocking degree. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean he'll lose his job, but he certainly lost a lot of face.
And I so hope that Germany and Australia are able to follow suit soon! The sooner the better! And oh so many other countries.
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Ah - here's an amusing thing - The "Justice Scalia Sick Burn Generator"
that uses his writings to generate seriously bizarre put-downs.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/low_concept/2015/06/justice_scalia_insult_generator_how_the_supreme_court_justice_would_mock.html
Mine follows:
“One would think that lemonpiefirefly's views are a Cheop's pyramid. No man should see how laws or sausages are made.”
Yes. No man should. And yet, I have made sausage. It's fairly "meh," if you're generally ok with meat.
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