The positivism of the conservative movement in this country is amazing for its constancy. Its fealty to absolutist dogma never fails, and it is never questioned, yet all the while conservatives decry any effort to impose socially conscious duties on them--health insurance reform comes immediately to mind--by the very government that they seek to imbue with the power to rule over all those who disagree with them. And there are two specific examples of what I mean in the news this week.
First, the right to marry for homosexuals is being reconsidered by the federal appeals court in Colorado relative to a referendum passed in Utah intended to ban same-sex marriage, and a similar ban in Oklahoma will be considered by the same court next week. In the Utah case, a federal court declared the same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional, and the state of Utah appealed. The law with regard to constitutionality is quite complex, and the arguments in court reflect that, but it comes down to whether the State of Utah has what is called "a compelling interest" in curtailing the rights of the group affected by the curtailment, and whether the type of curtailment of rights chosen by the state was necessary as it was the only effective way to accomplish its compelling purpose. Put simply, the state must demonstrate that the well-being of the people of Utah requires that same-sex marriage be banned and that banning it is the only way to preserve that aspect of the public's well-being: they need to do it and this is the only way. That burden of proof requires very complex social science data and philosophical and moral considerations, and that is what is being argued now. Thus, the central consideration will not be whether homosexuals have the right to marry each other, but whether their doing so is harmful to the rest of us. That is why these efforts to ban same-sex marriage have not succeeded in federal court so far; the courts have essentially decided that whether homosexuals marry each other is no one else's business. But the positivistic conservative movement continues to assert that the public is harmed by what homosexuals do in public, having given up on the futile effort to prevent what they do in private, and the courts keep telling them to mind their own business. And the righteousness of that position is not in question. The Supreme Court of the United States struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which was intended to impede same-sex marriage on the federal level by barring same sex spouses from receiving any kind of federal recognition as beneficiaries under federal programs or from benefiting from federal law protecting marriage in general. The Court said that homosexual spouses had the same standing as heterosexual ones and thus could not be deprived of the equal protection of the law and the rights and privileges that it provides. That should have been the end of it, but conservatives persist in doggedly pursuing their sanctimonious ends, and in this case, I believe that they will fail.
The other instance of conservative sanctimony in the news is the budget passed--gratuitously, I might add--by the Republican controlled House of Representatives under the aegis of Paul Ryan, the House Budget Director. It's essentially the same budget he got passed in The House each of the past two years, although this time without the unanimity of his party as eleven Republicans are reported to have voted against it. Like each of its predecessors, this budget will languish, or even be voted down in The Senate, and everyone knows that, but there are elections coming up in seven months, and the Republicans are stating their national platform with this budget, and that platform never changes. They want to cut the food stamps program, increase defense spending and lower the taxes for those in the top tax bracket, and in the past, that has been a relatively successful position on the local level since the "gerrymandering" enabled by the last census. The conservatism of conservative house districts has been solidified conservative Republican state legislatures, and conservative doctrine prevails in those homogeneously conservative districts, just as liberal philosophy prevails in homogeneously liberal districts created by Democrats when they had control of state legislatures at census time. And right now, there are more uniformly conservative districts than there are liberal ones, but when you take a vote statewide, as we do when we elect senators, those concentrations of support become meaningless as the state population at large elects a senator, and so far, that has meant that more Democrats prevailed than did Republicans, and when it comes to budgets, it is party lines that matter, not philosophical considerations. The Republicans can pass a budget in The House, but as they know, the Democrats can prevent it from becoming law in The Senate.
So, with the coming elections in mind, the Republicans, conservatives in particular, are showing their hand to the American public, and conservatives in general are scrambling to augment their influence by litigating their way to control of the American ethos. It's all part and parcel with the effort to control each of us so that we conform to evangelical mores while pretending to defend civil liberty and social consciousness. The question is this. Will the American people vote for hypocrisy or not; that is the issue in politics these days. What the Democrats need to do now is point that out.
Your friend,
Mike
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