It was somewhat surprising that Supreme Court struck down the Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) much to the shock of those good Christian family groups. Considering how conservative the court is, it was somewhat encouraging that five justices saw DOMA as discriminatory and ruled it unconstitutional. Good for them.
Of course it didn’t take long for the far right loonies to come up with the “America going to hell in a hand basket” argument. With same sex marriages becoming more and more common, the flakies like Michelle Bachmann and Pat Robertson were warning that next we will let people marry animals and other assorted creatures like Texans….oooops.
Old “foot in his mouth” Pat Robertson spoke up right away. From crooksandliars.com -
Robertson later complained that what had been "called a an abomination in the Bible has been given the status of a constitutionally-protected class."
"Unfortunately it's been cast as a civil rights struggle, and once you say civil rights, you look back to Martin Luther King and the others and say we've got to stand for the oppressed," he shrugged. "So ladies and gentlemen, your liberties are in danger because read the Bible about Sodom and Gomorrah. That's where the term comes from, Sodom."
"Look what happened to Sodom. After a while, there wasn't any other way, and God did something pretty drastic."
Last year, Robertson told his viewers that homosexuality "is somehow related to demonic possession."
And Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars said quoting Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel -
“Today, the United States Supreme Court has lost its legitimacy as an arbiter of the Constitution and the rule of law. Today is the death of the Court’s legacy, because the decision in the Federal Defense of Marriage Act case defies logic and is a pure invention of a handful of Justices.”
Again? That’s the same thing they say after any ruling they disagree with. Whenever they disagree with a ruling, that ruling “delegitimizes” the court. Except, of course, it doesn’t. The Supreme Court gets some cases right and some cases wrong. That is inevitable.
The far right is upset at those “unelected activist judges” that have ruled the way they did, except when they rule to the liking of the evangelicals. Then they are OK.
The far right keeps harping on the sex aspect. Citing over and over again that the Bible says that gay sex is an “abomination”. To my mind marriage is not primarily about sex. Most people these days don’t wait for a marriage license to have sex. Marriage is, at the core, a social contract between two people. In this contract they will share property, earnings and debt. They speak for each other in end of life decisions as well as many, many other things. If they have sex fine. People don’t go to city hall after getting married and declare that they’ve had sex and therefore the marriage is now legit. If sex was the deciding factor in marriage then what about those folk, many older people, who get married and really don’t have sex? Is their marriage not legit?
The Bible thumpers seem to be hung up on sex all the time. My advise is to have some. Maybe it will calm them down. Get off and chill out!