Every week I feel like I read something that I want to christen “dumbest column ever.” It’s only Tuesday and already we have a winner. Star Parker tells us how Mary Cheney is a fool for wanting to get married, and how that selfish bitch is undermining thousands of years of tradition with her silly request for “rights.” Oh, and Mary also thinks that the inner city is a utopia and fails to realize that lesbianism occurs in the ghetto because the welfare state has made black men abandon their families. Or something.
Anyone still harboring doubts that we need a Federal Marriage Amendment should read what Mary Cheney has to say about it in her new book. No, you don’t have to buy it. A five-minute skimming session in the bookstore is all it will take.
In a few breezy sentences, Mary Cheney confidently relegates a few thousand years of religious tradition regarding the nature of marriage to a historic footnote and curiosity. According to her, legal formalization of this traditional arrangement would abrogate freedom and be discriminatory.
Cheney effortlessly transforms traditional marriage and family from the core institution on which our free society is built into an instrument of oppression.
With little thought, she glosses over the truth that this is not about freedom but about the exchange of one source of authority for our laws and values for another. Will it be the Bible or Mary Cheney’s youthful passions and impulses?
Funny things:
1. If you want to go back thousands of years, marriage looks a wee bit different than the “traditional” standard that you push today.
2. In defining “marriage,” our choices are somewhat broader than “the Bible” or “Mary Cheney’s youthful passions and impulses”
3. How old is Mary Cheney? In her 30s? Now, 30 may be the new 20, but she’s a grown woman and these are hardly “youthful passions.”
Now, admittedly, I come from a different place than Mary Cheney. Sure, there are lesbians in the ghetto. But they generally don’t “discover” their sexuality one post-pubescent day and break the news to their doting parents, amidst tears and hugs. Growth in black lesbianism is generally the product of a culture where families already have been destroyed. These aren’t pioneers venturing out of an intact family that has given them a good life to discover a new “lifestyle.” The injustice and discrimination they feel is to never have had the opportunity to grow up in an intact family and to understand what it means to have a man in your life who is responsible and from whom you can receive love and respect.
Shorter Star Parker: Black women are only lesbians because black men failed them.
So, as conservative black activists like myself work to put humpty dumpty back together again in the way of the black family, we now have Vice President Cheney’s daughter working to get the message out that there really is no point to it. By her standards, the inner city is utopia. Give vent to every impulse, legitimize every feeling and, by all means, don’t be judgmental.
I love this. As if being sexually attracted to and loving people of the same sex is a fleeting “impulse.” Whereas being sexually attracted to and loving people of the opposite sex is somehow less impulsive, or a feeling more worth legitimizing.
Here is an exchange between her and Chris Wallace of Fox News:
Wallace: … Look at this quote from the Weekly Standard. “Once we say that gay couples have a right to have their commitments recognized by the state, it becomes next to impossible to deny the same right to polygamists, polyamorists, (which I learned means group marriage) or even cohabiting relatives and friends.” How do you respond to the slippery-slope argument?
Cheney: It’s one thing that I don’t take very seriously. You know, look: What we are talking about are relationships between two consenting adults. I think that is the debate that we need to have. That is the discussion that our country needs to have.
Now it is absolutely clear that legalization of gay marriage opens the door to every imaginable possibility. Once the authority for defining marriage moves from biblical tradition to politics, marriage will be defined by whatever might be deemed so by a court or that can be passed into law.
…except that that’s not absolutely true at all. I just have to shake my head when I see someone making the argument, “If you change marriage a little bit to make it more equitable, you’ll just toss out all the rules!”
No. We’ve changed marriage dozens of times. Married women, answer me a few questions: Can you own property? Can you file for divorce? Does your husband legally own you? All those things have come about because of legal changes to the definition of marriage. Everyone else, answer this: Can you marry someone of a different racial/ethnic background? If you have a physical or mental disability, can you get married? Can you get married if you’re extremely poor? Can you re-marry after a divorce?
Then congratulations! Marriage has changed to suit your needs and to fit with modern morality.
The slippery slope argument is ridiculous — especially “Once the authority for defining marriage moves from biblical tradition to politics, marriage will be defined by whatever might be deemed so by a court or that can be passed into law.”
Well, no. Currently, the state confers a marriage license onto people who apply for it and who meet particular requirements (age, etc). Because the state is conferring a benefit, it can limit that benefit as it sees fit, so long as all people are limited equally, the limitations are reasonable, and the limitations aren’t based on suspect characteristics like race. This is part of the reason why anti-miscegenation laws were deemed unconstitutional — they limited who you could marry because of a suspect characteristic with no rational reason behind the limitation. Which is different, obviously, than laws which say that no one under the age of 16 can get married — that’s a rule related to a rational state interest, and it’s universally applied. No one under the age of 16 can get married, no matter who you are. Anti-miscegenation laws, by contrast, say that you can get married, and the person who wants to marry you can get married — but you can’t marry each other because of your race. Pretty easy difference, right?
Well, the same principle applies to the same-sex marriage/polygamy thing. I personally like the sex discrimination argument for same-sex marriage, because I think it gets to the heart of the issue most effectively (and it’s a damn good legal argument): Disallowing women from marrying women, or men from marrying men, is discriminating solely on the basis of the person’s physical sex. Why can I not marry a woman? Because I’m a woman, no other reason. If I were male, I could marry a woman with the government’s blessing. And therein lies the pretty clear parallel with interracial marriage. Here we also see why it would be entirely consistent to oppose state recognition of polymany through marriage licenses while still supporting same-sex marriage. Limiting the number of people who may enter into a marriage contract applies equally across the board, and doesn’t target any suspect class of people. I can only be married to one person at one time, no matter who I am and no matter who they are.
But back to Star:
Such changes would impact every institution of our society, and Ms Cheney’s uninformed casualness about the scope and seriousness of this is frightening. We’ve already seen the impact in adoption. How about in our public school system, our military, our churches or our corporations?
Yes, what a horrible thing gay adoption has been, with all those kids being raised in loving homes… a real tragedy.
We can look at Europe as a laboratory for what to expect. George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington reports in the current issue of Commentary Magazine, for instance, that in Spain, where gay marriage and adoption is now legal, the words “Father” and “Mother” are being replaced on birth certificates to “Progenitor A” and “Progenitor B.”
Why look to Europe when we can look to a far finer place like Afghanistan under the Taliban? Now there were some proponents of traditional marriage!
The gay movement is but a new chapter being written by liberal elitists who brokered the displacement of tradition and personal responsibility with disastrous welfare state policies. Blacks paid dearly and still are paying.
Yep, those liberal elitists sure screwed over the blacks. I mean, traditionally, those Sons of Ham knew their place, right? So how “traditional” do we want to get here? Should we go back to the 1950s? The 1850s? Whaddaya think — just pre-Loving, or should we really harken back to the days when men literally owned women? I mean, why not go whole-hog, right? Really stop this slippery slope from sliding any further? I know the 1950s and before were the golden age of “traditional marriage” — as in, interracial marriage was punishable by life in prison in Mississippi, segregation was still going strong, men could legally rape their wives, married couples couldn’t use contraception in some states, and other states barred married women from having credit in their own name. Now those are “family values” if I’ve ever heard ’em. How about it? Any takers?