House of Eratosthenes

Completing what President Obama called his “evolution” on the question of gay marriage, the administration late Thursday called on the Supreme Court to strike down California’s voter-passed initiative invalidating same-sex marriages.
:
In the new brief, the Justice Department argues that the ban on gay marriage violated same-sex couples’ constitutional guarantee to equal protection under the law. But the brief focused on the California case and stopped short of calling for a nationwide guarantee that same-sex couples have a right to marry.

“The government seeks to vindicate the defining constitutional ideal of equal treatment under the law,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement Thursday evening. “Throughout history, we have seen the unjust consequences of decisions and policies rooted in discrimination.”

Hat tip to The Other McCain.

I’m having a tough time wrapping my head around this, I must say. This country does not allow discrimination because we have Equal Protection Under the Law. And so…we, the lowly sheeple who don’t have the slightest clue what we’re doing, pass a law through our state government, to apply to our state — and some guy who has achieved fame we haven’t achieved completes his evolution, way off somewhere, well outside of our state…well, He’s seeking to overturn our law because He knows better than we do. Even though He doesn’t live here.

Equal protection under the law!

You need to shape the fuck up and start doing it Barry’s way!

Same sentence. Same breath.

If we really think so highly of equal protection, then Barack Obama’s evolution is not truly complete until He moves to California, shows all of the paperwork in the process of becoming a California citizen that the rest of us had to show — and I’m having trouble envisioning that at this point since Obama’s stock answer to “show me a document” seems to be “Why should I have to?” — and works to convince a majority among his fellow Californians that we need to pass a new law. That’s how it’s done for us peons out here in Flyover Country, Mister constitutional law professor president guy.

But of course, if He did it that way, He wouldn’t be special.

Equal protection! Know your place and do what Emperor Barack says! All in the same document, same gesture. I just don’t know what to say about that. The cognitive dissonance, it’s just staggering. Mind-blowing.

Thing I Know #415. No practical or effective thinking can proceed from a fundamental confusion of a thing with its opposite.

Update: Come to think of it, this whole Voting Rights Act thing is more of the same. If any of these selected, historically bigoted states want to change anything, they have to stop everything and check with whoever the Attorney General is before they can go further. Premise underlying this bizarre rule is, obviously, that the AG must believe in the equal-treatment thing, and the bigoted states’ credentials in that matter are not so stellar. What makes the system flawed is that the premise is foundational and indispensable but there isn’t any mechanism to validate it in whole or in part.

Eric Holder believes in equal treatment? Who says? More dedicated to this than anyone in those states that have to do things his way? Who really thinks so?

How would I condense this summation of the bizarre times in which we live…it’s coming to me…it’s coming to me…ah yes, here it is:

Do what I tell you to do and think what I tell you to think, for it is not proven that you abhor slavery as much as I do.

The task now arises to look around and see how much of our modern, egalitarian “equal protection” society works according to this unworkable paradox. And right off the bat, I suspect it would be easier to make a list of what does not work this way. We’re seeing it in quite a few places now. Masters bossing around slaves, because the masters fancy themselves to be more faithful to the equal-treatment principle, even as they betray the principle in the bossing.

[…] House of Eratosthenes is not enthused. […]
- ‘Evolution,’ Complete : The Other McCain | 03/01/2013 @ 06:59
Lenin was a mass-murdering commie who earned his spot in Hell many times over, but he did have one of the sharpest observations ever about politics: Political questions all boil down to: “who? whom?”

In this case: who is to be protected from whom? The answer, it seems, is “gays, from the will of the voters.”

And that’s where the analogy to the Voting Rights Act falls flat. The practices the VRA was designed to combat were depriving a certain group of the exercise of the franchise, which is the constitutional right of all citizens as enshrined in the 15th and 19th Amendments.

The word “marriage,” last I checked, doesn’t appear in the Constitution.

The analogy to the 1964 Civil Rights Act also fails, as it is designed to provide “equal protection under the law.” The law, duly approved by the voters of the great state of California, defines “marriage” as “between a man and a woman.” Hence the point of the initiative.

If that’s “discrimination,” then I propose we remedy racial discrimination by passing a law defining every citizen of the United States as African-American. Problem solved.

The real who, whom here is, of course, “who does this charade of ‘gay marriage’ benefit, at the expense of whom?” For if we wanted equal legal status of both heterosexual and homosexual unions, we could simply remove any special status from straight marriages. No leftist has ever proposed this, or ever will. Wonder why?
- Severian | 03/01/2013 @ 13:44
14th Amendment –

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

From Wiki –

“The Fourteenth Amendment was enacted in 1868, shortly after the Union victory in the American Civil War. After the Thirteenth Amendment, which was proposed by Congress and ratified by the states in 1865, had abolished slavery, many ex-Confederate states adopted Black Codes following the war. These laws severely restricted the rights of blacks to hold property, including chattels and real property and many forms of personal property; to form legally enforceable contracts or enter into agreements involving securities, or other negotiable or commercial paper. These codes also created harsher criminal penalties for blacks than for whites”

…

The Supreme Court has seemed unwilling to extend full “suspect classification” status (i.e., status that makes a law that categorizes on that basis suspect, and therefore deserving of greater judicial scrutiny) to groups other than racial minorities and religious groups.
…
In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the Court struck down a Texas statute prohibiting homosexual sodomy on substantive due process grounds. In Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion concurring in the judgment, however, she argued that by prohibiting only homosexual sodomy, and not heterosexual sodomy as well, Texas’s statute did not meet rational-basis review under the Equal Protection Clause; her opinion prominently cited City of Cleburne.

Notably, O’Connor did not claim to apply a higher level of scrutiny than mere rational basis, and the Court has not extended suspect-class status to sexual orientation.”

BTW, it’s always fascinating how liberals will go to such great lengths to loosely interpret an amendment like this while at the same time hold such a (nonsensical) strict interpretation of –

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

They get so hung up on “well regulated militia” yet willing choose to ignore the ‘comma’ and which follows – “the right of the people”. As if it has nothing whatsoever to do with anything. It’s not difficult to understand. Unless of course you’d rather not.

So denying gays the right to marry is a violation of equal protection but yet outlawing certain guns and magazines isn’t infringing? Yeah, OK.
- tim | 03/01/2013 @ 13:44
I also like the fact that the same people who claim “The government seeks to vindicate the defining constitutional ideal of equal treatment under the law” are the same folks who, in another context, will tell you how the Constitution enshrines all sorts of systematic inequalities, designed as it was by wig-wearing quill-feather-writing bucket-poopers. After all, everybody knows that the Founding Fathers only considered blacks three-fifths of a person!!eleventy.

[rolls eyes, retches]
- Severian | 03/01/2013 @ 14:13

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The “Equal Protection” ScamFriday, March 1st, 2013

The “Equal Protection” Scam
Friday, March 1st, 2013