House of Eratosthenes

I just don’t see this as a terribly big event. The pattern has been nearly perfect, has it not? Gay marriage appears in a court, and it wins…it appears at a ballot box, and it loses. I’m looking for a break in the trend, and there hasn’t been one yet, so the trend is going to be the story until such time as it is disturbed.

And what is the story about this trend? Our courts are defining for us, over our protests, what marriage is.

I do think it’s pretty sad this legal framework, and culture, that we’re setting up. The adoptions that will take place, effectively guaranteeing that the child(ren) will entirely grow up without the benefit of a female mother, or a male father, as the case may be. The specific instances I don’t find quite so tragic — two gay parents, a whole lot better than none at all, right?

The tragedy is the culture. We will be required to pretend, on pain of civil suit, that a motherless or fatherless household is just as good as a two-parent home with a genuine mother and a genuine father.

Which takes us to exactly the same Ground Zero destination point, to which all left-wing ideas inexorably lead…

This particular individual isn’t contributing anything truly irreplaceable and may be discarded at will.

“Kidzmom” and I disagree on just about everything. And I do mean everything. But since we split up, she has always acted like there is no substitute on this entire green planet for my fine self when it comes to fathering that child. And I have reciprocated on the subject of mothering him. The boy had to go under the knife yesterday. Know how many phone calls there were to the next state over? I lost count. Why? Because like all strong wise men, I know my limitations. I can’t mother.

Some human efforts are irreplaceable. This is the idea that our society is gradually losing. And the people are not in favor of it. Generally, we want to matter, and we want to matter as individuals. Not as a herd of livestock that has to be managed and told by our aristocrats what is a marriage & what isn’t a marriage.

It’s a religious concept. Now government is telling us what it is. That means, with enough time, government can define for us all other aspects of our religious “freedom.”

Since the judge who presided over this, is gay, (yea, no conflict of interest there) can’t we
get a judge in Arizona to uphold SB1070 who is,,,I dunn’o, maybe a parent of a child who
killed by an illegal alien or who owns a ranch that is overrun by Mexican drug
runners…something that impinges he’s decision. Seems fair to me.
- tim | 08/05/2010 @ 09:32
I hope your son’s surgery went well, Morgan. I also hope the surgery was as routine as far as surgeries go and it wasn’t something life-threatening.
- bpenni | 08/05/2010 @ 10:10
Relatively routine, not life threatening, thank you. Let’s just say there was high drama because 1) it was his first time going under & coming back out of it, which is more than a little unsettling, and 2) success was not guaranteed, so everyone was dealing with that.

I’m the stoic Viking type. His mother is not, and neither is he…for now. It was an interesting day. I’m feeling rather smug about the way I managed to tie it in to the goings-on in SF.

It really comes down to that conflict of visions. There are these designated individuals like Obama, Stephen Chu, James Hansen, the Nobel Prize Committee, and Superman…who can be in the right place at the right time to save-the-human-race. But then among “ordinary” people, nobody has a specialty that can’t be done by somebody else. That’s the presumption that underlies this drive to legitimize gay marriage, at least where the child adoption is concerned.

Small-tee, your point is well taken. We should all be able to agree, with regard to these contentious issues, that it isn’t right for a judge to harbor a personal passion about something — even if that’s just like everybody else — and then get hold of just the right case and with a hearty “Oh, Goody!” lower the gavel on one side or the other. Being straight, I really couldn’t care less about this particular issue on a personal level. But it has a stronger potential than most others to finally start a civil war.

There’s a quote in 1776, something to the effect of “my state is split squarely down the middle on this, the people are on one side and I’m on the other.” I think that summarizes the way our superior perfect overlords are looking at it.
- mkfreeberg | 08/05/2010 @ 11:32
And that’s the thing, the whole disregard for what the people wanted.

Look, I also could care less what hole ya’ want to visit, but as we’ve seen what is
happening to our beloved country we all know it will not end with gay marriage. Oh no,
it’s just the beginning without going on and on about that.

So on that principle I’m against gay marriage, gay folks are not equal. No I’m not
homophobe or against gay this or gay that, do whatever you want, just don’t tell me that
you’re equal, or the same, or whatever adjective you want to use, ‘cause you’re not and
it’s easy to prove. One word – procreation.

Have legal protection or life partner rights, or, or, or…I’m totally down with that, just
stop with the marriage crap.

Anyways…glad to hear your son is OK.
- tim | 08/05/2010 @ 13:36
“This particular individual isn’t contributing anything truly irreplaceable and may be discarded at will.”

Which is also, neatly, the root of the indignation leftists/progressivists feel when contemplating the reverse idea: If you assert that a particular someone else simply can’t do what you do, that they cannot replace you in a particular function no matter how they may want to try or feel they can, then you are basically denying them their (as they see it) entitled “right” to try anyway, simply because they want to.

Such assertions of irreplaceability or unique superiority can themselves be based on false assumptions, or irrelevant generalities, of course; much historical racism was based on a genuine but mistaken belief in the inherent superiority of one phenotype to another. That is its own failure to grasp reality and must ultimately fall. But the leftist/progressivist mistake is to assume that because some discrimination was unjust all discrimination must be unjust.

Reminds me of Tom Lehrer: “The modern U.S. army has taken non-discrimination to its final perfect form: They refuse to discriminate not only on the bounds of race, or sex, or creed, but also ability.”
- Stephen J. | 08/05/2010 @ 21:42
Maybe this is why they despise capitalism so much: It allows for, indeed calls for, a categorization of human contributors according to degrees of difficulty with which they might be replaced.

Their system is strictly integral. The Chairman is absolutely irreplaceable. He and His cabinet, are a 1. Everyone else is a 0. What’s fascinating is every loyal member of the left-wing rank & file is to be just as replaceable as The Loathed Ones from the other tribe…the knuckledraggers who don’t believe in fundamentalist evolutionary theory or anthropomorphic global warming. The loyal & loathed are indeed different, but along another axis.

But suitability for being replaced is absolutely yes-or-no, no fractions allowed. It is royalty, when you get right down to it. It is precisely what was not supposed to exist on these shores.
- mkfreeberg | 08/06/2010 @ 04:31
The California Supreme Court, and now this federal judge, have now invented a “fundamental right to marry” out of thin air where none exists, by pretending to find it in the California and U.S. Constitutions, respectively, when neither of them mention the institution at all.

The federal judge found a “right” that was somehow missed by voters in 31 states, including two separate elections here in California – one of the bluest states in the Union. I’m merely surprised he didn’t refer to a judicial precedent from some foreign country in order to accomplish this. He fretted about “equal rights,” ignoring the plain fact that gays already have as much right as anyone else to marry someone of the opposite sex, while straights cannot marry the same sex either.

“But the gays want to marry the same sex, and the straights don’t,” comes the objection. Exactly correct, as a poster over at HotAir put it. This cuts to the heart of the matter – gays don’t want equal rights, they want special rights. I have also noted that when the government gets in the business of guaranteeing everyone’s personal happiness, disaster is certain to follow.

I am always amused when judges claim to find rights that don’t exist, while ignoring ones that do. Four justices on the US Supreme Court just tried to tell us that we do not have a right to keep and bear arms, and those same four will find a “right” to marriage.

Thomas Jefferson was right about these black-robed tyrants.
- cylarz | 08/06/2010 @ 23:32
Liberals love to worship Thomas Jefferson. As long as you’re not talking about guns. And free expression.

They also love to worship (Republican) Chief Justice Earl Warren.

They fail to realize, if you could somehow revive those two gentlemen and invite the two of them to dinner…the house would not be standing afterward. Remember the scene in War of the Roses where Michael Douglas pisses on the fish? Multiply that a few times, that’s how it would go.

Incidentally, the whole “finding the right in the Constitution” is an interesting sleight-of-hand. In this case and in many others, it comes from reading prior SCOTUS decisions on matters mostly or entirely unrelated. Here, the “right-to-marry” seems to trace back a few generations, to a decision about Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws.

This is not to say that particular SCOTUS would have written up a decision any different from what came down this week. But even people who agree with this week’s decision should be alarmed at what is taking place here. Constitutional rights, according to the intent of the men who wrote the Constitution, are supposed to be worked-over and scrutinized diligently before being officially recognized…at least, if they have the potential to cost somebody else something. You’re supposed to go into a big chamber with a bunch of other loudmouths and get into fisticuffs during a long hot summer — what seems plainly obvious to one guy, is suddenly ambushed with an unexpectedly logical assault by the other.

Fast forward 180 years, and here’s Earl Warren, zipping along on his way to make some other point about why he’s deciding the way he is, just casually scrawling down some words about a “basic civil rights of man.” And from that day forward it’s constitutional. Gay marriage certainly would have met with his approval, but it was outside of even his intent…and I assume bestiality might not have met with his approval. But going by his literal words, as long as one of the marriage partners is a man, why not? It’s a basic civil right, it’s in our “constitution” now.

So writing these decisions, in such a way that a weakness isn’t incorporated into the accumulating design that takes decades to metastasize, is a skill. Even if you have the skill, you might as well not have it if you’ve got an agenda to re-mold the constitutional framework from within. Once it’s a “basic civil right” to do anything & everything we might as well close up shop altogether, for at that point we’ve traversed all the way around a circle and stepped into anarchy.

This is just one of many reasons why it’s a bad idea for our Senate to stop debating and vote to confirm an Associate Justice just because she’s funny.
- mkfreeberg | 08/07/2010 @ 05:42

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