Long decision

Ok, well, I just spent the evening reading the court's decision (almost all of it: I skipped the section on why they didn't retroactively undo the "marriage" designation for those married before the ruling, and I skimmed some of the case history about the amendment/revision distinction)--so, yay me. But it's damn late, so I'll have to do a post about the decision for tomorrow.

Note, though, that for this issue I think the Pundit Equivalence Threshold is about 20 minutes--where the PET is defined as the number of minutes you need to read in order to know more about it than 90% of the pundits on TV. The court decision is surprisingly accessible and the first couple of pages give you a nice summary of the legal context of the case as well as an overview of how the state amendment process works. I'd say the first couple of pages are a must-read for all Californians.

A quick note on the Prop. 8 ruling

First, the I'm-not-a-lawyer-and-don't-really-know-much-about-the-law disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, and don't really know much about the law.

Now, tactically and politically, this has got to be chalked up as a desirable result for those--like me (and Andrew Sullivan)--who are pro-gay-marriage. The reason is simply because an overturning of the popular vote would have caused an enormous backlash, divided supporters of equal rights, and in the eyes of many people would have reduced the moral and democratic legitimacy of the California Supreme Court. Moreover, it would have retroactively made the anti-Prop-8 movement an exercise in bad faith: it is unfair to engage in a public debate over an issue only to go ahead and nullify the result if it doesn't suit you. That is perhaps an unfair reading of the situation, but it is a reading that I'm sure many Californians would have subscribed to.

If and when California can reinstate gay marriage (and if demographic trends continue, it should be any year now), it will be a victory all the more powerful and convincing, because the law will have been changed by the people, and not by some imagined elitist liberal cabal. Opponents of gay marriage will have no retort.

Now--all that's the strictly political side. But what about the legal, and, indeed, moral side? Well, in this respect--and on the face of it (I haven't read the opinion)--I couldn't disagree more with the decision.

The thing I don't understand is: what's a right in California? Certainly, any right that can be overturned by a simple majority vote is hardly a right at all. My understanding was that in a previous decision, the Court agreed that equal rights guaranteed by the California constitution mandated that there could not be "separate but equal" institutions of marriage; that gay couples were entitled to all the rights and privileges of marriage, including the legal title of the arrangement--"marriage". It would seem that this decision makes a hash out of all that.

Well--I've gone and committed the sin of having an opinion about something without properly researching it first, but I just couldn't help myself. Consider this an "initial reaction".

I will read the court's opinion and report back what I find.

(Photo by Jamison)

Newt Gingrich: A Reminder

There has been an idea floating around that erstwhile Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is the heir apparent for the struggling GOP, and may end up running in 2012. If that comes to pass, I hope everyone remembers well the sorts of things he says today, because he really does say batty things. A snippet from a Bill O'Reilly interview about the aftermath of the Prop 8 result:

O'REILLY: OK, now the culture war, I know you’ve been flying around the country and doing stuff. In the last three or four days, really nasty stuff. I mean, you know, hyper. We’re going to show you some of the video. A woman getting a cross smashed out of her hand. We had a church in Michigan invaded by gay activists. We’re going to show you the video on Monday of that. We have exclusively. We had a guy in Sacramento fired from his job. We have boycotts called on restaurants. I mean, it is getting out of control very few days after the election. How do you assess that?

GINGRICH: Look, I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants impose its will on the rest of us. It is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government, if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact, and frankly for that matter if you believe in the historic version of Islam or the historic version of Judaism, you have to confront the reality that the secular extremists are determined to impose on you acceptance of a series of values that are antithetical, they’re the opposite of what you’re taught in Sunday school.

Gingrich has an interesting habit--on display here--of taking some emotionally charged but unrelated concept, such as fascism, and shoehorning it into his argument via the strategic deployment of adjectives. Thus, we get constructions like "gay and secular fascism" and "historic Christianity"--phrases that don't actually mean anything, but are just academic-seeming enough to not sound completely ridiculous on television. It's pseudo-intellectualism providing cover for the ugliest kind of divisive rhetoric.

I mean, think of it: even if we accept for the sake of argument O'Reilly's (shamelessly) exaggerated portrayal of secular/gay reaction to the Prop 8 results, Gingrich's comments are still out to lunch. Surely, violently "invading" churches and knocking things out of people's hands is unjustified and wrong, but how on earth is it the 20th-century-era anti-liberal form of government known as fascism? When an extremist pro-lifer bombs an abortion clinic, is that "pro-life fascism"? When some civil rights protesters went too far in the 1960s, was that "black fascism"? The only way "fascism" has any bearing at all to any of this is if we trivially define "fascism" to be merely the violent pursuit of some political ends--a definition that renders the observation "the violent gay reaction to Prop 8 is fascist" completely redundant.

And what does it mean to add the word "historic" to the front of "Christianity", "Judaism", and "Islam"? Certainly, Gingrich could not say simply that "if you believe in Christianity, then you will be confronted with the reality that secular extremists will impose values that are antithetical to yours", because it's not true: there are plenty of Christians who are okay with gay marriage, separation of church and state, and other secular values. And so he says, "if you believe in historic Christianity...". But what kind of Christianity is that? It is a term that he just makes up, and which apart from having a sort of anti-modernity tone to it, doesn't really contain any information aside from what we can trivially infer, which is that someone who believes in "historic Christianity" is someone who is a Christian that believes that gay marriage is antithetical to Christianity. And what does "historic Judaism" mean? Does it mean Orthodox Judaism? It's true that Orthodox Jews are anti-gay-marriage, on the whole--but it's also true that most Jews aren't Orthodox and are, in fact, a fairly liberal and tolerant bunch. Is Newt really pandering here to Orthodox Jews? And what does "historic Islam" mean? If it means a strain of Islam that has remained relatively untouched by modernity, well then, er--isn't that what Republicans like Gingrich are always so quick to label "Islamo-fascism"?

I get the impression that when Gingrich orders a bagel, and it is not toasted to his liking, he decries the bagel fascism he has been subjected to, and yearns for a proper historical bagel.