St. Paul, Defender of the Faith.

By Capt. Fogg

One of the things I have liked about Congressman Ron Paul is that he's often been on the side of deregulating private life and consensual behavior, but either he doesn't mean what he says or he is willing to say what he doesn't mean in order to curry favor with the Great Regulators of the Religious right.

Speaking in Iowa recently, Mr. Paul said:

"The Defense of Marriage Act was enacted in 1996 to stop Big Government in Washington from re-defining marriage and forcing its definition on the States. Like the majority of Iowans, I believe that marriage is between one man and one woman and must be protected."

That resonates in my ears as a statement of his religious persuasion and of course he was speaking to a group of religions conservatives representing denominations opposed to letting people decide for themselves about such matters. Other religions might have other ideas and indeed some do. In other words these are people quite open about forcing their definition on Americans.

I find it curious that proponents of defining marriage according to religious definitions always use the word "is" where one expects "should be," "ought to be" or "must be" and there must be a reason for it. Marriage, after all is a human institution and marriage customs vary amongst groups of humans. Perhaps "is" is a way to pretend that it's written into the fabric of the cosmos like general relativity or the uncertainty principle. It isn't.

Of course Paul couched his opposition to doing away with the Defense of Marriage act in terms of states rights and whether or not he was following in the tradition of all the other "states rights" defenses of so many other things we now see as unjust, it's a defense of something with as limited a future as our embarrassing misogyny laws of recent memory. A minority of the country oppose preventing people from marrying whom they will and I can't help but find my feeling that the history of humankind's progress toward democracy is once again being thwarted by the notion of a divine will that opposes our allegedly innate liberty.

When someone who has been so stalwart in defending the Constitution and restraining government power, promotes such peremptory views on the most personal of choices, it seems a jarring discontinuity that makes on question the man and everything else he's described as being unconstitutional. It's hard to understand why he's willing to use government power to defend a certain Faith when that is something the government is expressly forbidden to do.

Yes, I know. I've been talking a lot about religion of late, but to me, there is no other force in American affairs more intractable than the movement to force compliance to religious standards on people who have or wish to have no affiliation with those standards and prefer the right to make personal choices according to their own consciences. That ability, that kind of freedom is the beating heart of liberal democracy. If we lose that, we lose it all.

It's sad to see Congressman Paul speaking this way. I once had high hopes for him, if not as Presidential material, certainly as a voice of reason and restraint at a time when the Republican party seems increasingly controlled by anti-democratic, anti-libertarian influences. Now he seems far less of a libertarian, far more of an authoritarian and indistinguishable from any other politician grovelling before the powerful.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Newt preaches to the lemmings

By J. Kingston Pierce

I didn’t actually think it was possible for me to develop any less respect for disgraced former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich. But then this week he counseled his fellow Republican’ts to follow his disastrous lead and shut down the federal government again “if the alternative is compromising on their budget-cutting promises.”

Did Gingrich learn nothing from his 1990s failures?

Apparently not, because he’s also urging the GOP to race right off another cliff by impeaching President Barack Obama over the administration’s conscientious decision to cease defending the Defense of Marriage Act in court, because it’s clearly unconstitutional. Keep in mind, the president did not instruct the Justice Department to stop enforcing that repugnant 1996 law, which defines marriage as “a legal union between one man and one woman”; he and Attorney General Eric Holder have made it quite clear to everybody that DOMA will “continue to be enforced by the Executive Branch.” They’ve left it up to Congress to actually overturn that law. All the administration said this week is that it will no longer submit briefs supporting DOMA against repeal efforts in the courts.

Nonetheless, Gingrich and other right-wing fire-breathers--convinced that their conservative base either isn’t intelligent enough to notice such logical nuances or won’t give a tinker’s damn about them--are now hinting (if not yet outright saying) that Obama should be removed from office, contending that he’s failing to obey his oath to support the laws of the land. This is patently ridiculous, but Newt has never been known to adhere to reason. He’s testing the waters for a 2012 presidential run, and has seen that the kookier and more intolerant a Republican’t is this year (case in point: Minnesota ex-governor Tim Pawlenty), the more publicity he’s likely to generate.

What Gingrich fails to acknowledge, of course, is that the president’s decision to cease defending DOMA is nothing new. As Think Progress points out, “In 1990, then-acting Solicitor General [and now Chief Justice John] Roberts refused to defend a federal affirmative-action law after he successfully convinced the George H.W. Bush administration that the law was unconstitutional. He failed to convince the Supreme Court, however, and the law was upheld. By declining to defend DOMA, the Obama administration is following the exact same approach embraced by Roberts.”

Considering Gingrich’s own abysmal support of marriage as an institution, his campaign to protect DOMA is more than a tad ironic. Whether it will convince his fellow Republican’ts to jump off the same cliff he and the GOP did back in 1996, when they tried to impeach then President Bill Clinton, is a mystery at this point. Republican’ts are anxious to turn the United States backwards and undo all social, economic, and political  progress made during the last century. Are they also anxious to relive the 1990s by launching another coup against a moderate Democratic president, with the likelihood that they will lose public support the same way Gingrich and his right-wing troops did 15 years ago?

Time (and, no doubt, polls) will tell.

READ MORE: “ With One Week to Go Before the Shutdown Deadline,” by Steve Benen (The Washington Monthly).

(Cross-posted in Limbo.) 

Biden: "There's an inevitability for a national consensus on gay marriage."

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Hill:

Vice President Joseph Biden said in a television interview Fridaythat "there's an inevitability for a national consensus on gaymarriage."

The vice president, who backs civil unions but notsame-sex marriage, weighed in on the issue two days after PresidentObama acknowledged his position was "evolving."

"I think the country's evolving," Biden said in the interview withABC News. His comments were not the first time he has suggested thecountry would eventually accept and support gay marriage. Asked in a2007 appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" if gay marriage wasinevitable, Biden replied that "it probably is."

I think Biden's right -- that same-sex marriage legalization is inevitable given the evolution of the country. I would also call this progress, as Americans and American society in general become more liberal, more accepting of difference and diversity.

Now, it's not clear what a "national consensus" would mean. Perhaps, despite his 2007 comments, such a consensus would form around civil unions but not same-sex marriage, that is, around Biden's own position. But I suspect that the country is ultimately moving towards not some separate-but-more-or-less-equal status for same-sex unions but full marriage equality, with the state (most, if not all, states, that is) recognizing both same-sex and opposite-sex marriages equally.

I would be fine with civil unions if they applied equally to same-sex and opposite-sex partners. Indeed, an argument can be made that the state should do away with "marriage" altogether, replacing it with "civil union" as the state-recognized partnership of two people. There could still be "marriage," but it would be religious, and hence private. You could get "married" by a religious official, for example, but while that religion would recognize the partnership as a "marriage" within its own code, the state would recognize it as a "civil union."

Simply, such partnerships, or civil unions, should be purely secular in nature. While the state should not tell religious institutions what to do, within certain broad parameters, religious institutions should not continue to hold such sway over society.

Anyway, while Obama's views on same-sex marriage may very well be "evolving," I don't expect him to push aggressively for the repeal of the odious Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), as I wrote yesterday, let alone for the full legalization of same-sex marriage beyond what some states have done or are doing on their own. Aside from the fact that he has been dragging his heels on gay rights the past two years, whether because of excessive caution (political calculation) or lack of principle (personal commitment), there just won't be any urgency for him to turn his attention to DOMA, not with Republicans in control in the House, with Democrats far from a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and with more pressing political concerns to attend to in the lead-up to 2012.

A national consensus may very well be forming, and it may very well take the shape of support for marriage equality, but there's still a long way to go for any such consensus to be reflected politically.