Quotation of the Day

I

 marvel at the audacity of those who are now so terribly concerned that those who oppose marriage equality will be ostracized as bigots after showing no concern whatsoever for the decades, centuries, in which gay people have been ostracized from society and treated as pariahs. They clutch their pearls at being considered as bigots after not objecting, and in many cases themselves participating in, the wholesale demonization of gay people as demon-possessed pedophiles deliberately trying to destroy the country, the world, the species. If you didn’t say anything about that abuse, and especially if you participate in it, I don’t want to hear one fucking word about how unfair it is that the opponents of equality are being called bigots.—Ed Brayton

[from “Posner Shreds Chief Justice Roberts’ Dissent,” Dispatches from the Culture Wars, 29 June 2015]

Sic Transit

W

ell, it looks like the Supreme Court has ruled that “The Fourteenth Amendment requires a State to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-State.” It’s about time. I never could see what business the state has telling any two unmarried adults whether they could get married or not. The only plausible reason ever advanced was eugenic—the prohibition on close relatives marrying was supposed to minimize the occurrence of unsound offspring—and with that concept having fallen into disrepute the whole point seems moot.

People can yammer all they like about marriage being redefined, but that ship sailed centuries ago. Parents may still arrange marriages in the backwoods parts of the world, wives may be legally required to obey their husbands in societies mired in the mud of medieval superstitions, marriage may be a very unequal partnership in the tribes of tradition, but not here in the United States. Marriage was redefined out of its traditional existence a long time ago. And frankly, that marriage was nothing more than a form of legalized slavery, a kind of forced prostitution, and there is nothing to mourn in its passing.