All this is coming from the second most powerful person in the country (third, if we have to count Bush in addition to Cheney):
[Senate Majority Leader Bill] Frist said he feared that the ruling on the Texas sodomy law could lead to a situation "where criminal activity within the home would in some way be condoned."No, the problem is as usual that he's not thinking. The ideologue was speaking in the context of his announcement today of support for a constitutional amendment which would ban gay marriage, because"And I'm thinking of, whether it's prostitution or illegal commercial drug activity in the home, and to have the courts come in, in this zone of privacy, and begin to define it gives me some concern," Frist said.
"I very much feel that marriage is a sacrament, and that sacrament should extend and can extend to that legal entity of a union between, what is traditionally in our Western values has been defined, as between a man and a woman."So, now the Radical Right, which has always said it is opposed to any extension of federal power, thinks the federal government should be given final authority over religious rites.
On some level I cannot get too enthused about the latest sodomy decision of the Supreme Court. I did not receive a gift last week. The justices did not give me the right to be me or the right to fuck. The rights were always mine, whether those people recognized them or not.
What has changed is the official opinion of 5 or 6 judges, and with much work that change will come to mean much more. [And we must not forget that the strategic appoinment by this administration of just 2 replacements could reverse the decision.] But Frist reminds us that the country itself hasn't been changed overnight by Lawrence and Garner vs. the State of Texas. Opinion and behavior is not the direct product of the judicial system. The opposite may be closer to real experience, but there too it's the lags and the snags which are always so painful.
I'm really an optimist, in spite of these musings. I just hate to see decent people take these things for granted. The malevolent ones never do. Also, like so much that has advanced humanity in the past, whether material or ethical and cultural, we must not think that there was anything inevitable about progress, or that only ordinary, individual mortals were responsible for it, or that we could start from scratch tomorrow and do it over. There are giants and saints, and they've been working at these things for a very long time. Sometimes they get a lot of help.
Thanks LAMBDA and so many other wonderworkers.