I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
Why Stop At Gay Marriage?
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David Boies today in the Wall Street Journal writes about his decision to sue to overturn California’s Proposition 8. In his piece he rebuts several outdated arguments that almost no one is making anymore (“there is no longer any credible contention that depriving gays and lesbians of basic rights will cause them to change their sexual orientation”), while failing to adequately explain the basic premise of why homosexual marriage is a “right” and failing to address some of the more common arguments opponents of gay marriage make today.
For one thing, Boies talks about how the Supreme Court “has repeatedly held that the right to marry the person you love is so fundamental that states cannot abridge it.” What he doesn’t mention, though, is that the Supreme Court’s definition of marriage, as implied by every case they were writing about (including the cases Boies references), is the union between a man and a woman. Nowhere does the Supreme Court extend the concept of marriage to any other type of union. Boies’s hijacking of the Supreme Court’s sentiments and his re-interpretation of them for use as “proof” of this “right” is disingenuous.
One specific popular argument that he doesn’t address is quintessential “slippery slope” argument. Opponents of gay marriage want to know why a proponent would stop at gay marriage; if marriage to someone you love is such a fundamental “right”, why prohibit incestuous marriage? Why prohibit polygamy or plural marriage?
In fact, based on the points he makes (the “right” to marry the one you love, the separation between religious stigma and basic rights, etc.), he actually makes a good case for why the “slippery slope” argument has merit, because all his points supporting gay marriage can easily be applied to all the other “slippery slope” cases! In fact, I’d be most curious to know if he’d be equally as active in fighting for the “right” of a man to marry his daughter, or the “right” of five people in love to all marry each other.
In short, his piece is far from convincing and conveniently ignores the most common arguments of his opponents in this debate, while attempting to re-interpret Supreme Court decisions to apply to cases to which they were never intended to apply.