Letters to the Editor
-
@Arne
Arne, all congratulations on your coming nuptials. Don't worry, it'll go off perfectly. After all, marriage is a lot like deep-sea diving! A few minutes of narcosis, and then an interminable decompression.
I got married 18 years ago, and I've still got bubbles in my blood.
So best wishes, Arne, and the rest of us will just go on dreaming about the brave new world of polygamy and polyandry.
What the hell, they can't divorce you for thinkin' can they?
-
@WT
Yeah, I'm trying to tread carefully on the OT part of this; our momentary frolics are one thing, but all this meaty stuff that tends to swell as it goes along ... well, we ought to find a more suitable venue to take up that discussion.
I'll say this, though:
So yes, kinship wasn't something described in language, it was a language, and it could be read by those who lived it.
I agree, and this is where Lacan would be beneficial, since the dynamic viewed within that framework tracks systems-of-meaning, of which kinship and social relations are constitutive, not the other way around ... i.e. the 'common sense' way we look at language as being something objective we merely spill out of our mouths. Mircea Eliade comes to mind, too. Others, natch. Ain't no royal road, as they say.
But we're already on the edge of the tar pits here ...
Underneath our language, remnants of it undoubtedly remain, and in my opinion, motivate -- if only we knew how -- much of the emotional confusion which crops up whenever we attempt to discuss or regulate it.
Agree here, too ... though I would argue with you about how much of it is 'underneath' any language that is a thing separate from that-which-is-under, if we were to wade out into it. Having a more satisfying way of understanding the eruptions, either for practical reasons or just to understand, would be great.
The 'how', to me, isn't so much a mystery as a case of overdetermination; we've got a fistful of explanations, many of which fit the bill for any particular eruption (such as this one) for a specific group of people, but since we're talking about human beings, we can't say for sure what's operating on which group, when.
Maybe when they develop the 'phenomenological MRI' ... :>
-
@Dan Greaney
One need not review precedents to doubt that a constituon which tolerated a legal status quo for years suddenly forbids it.
I'm with you Dan! THE SOUTH SHALL RISE AGAIN!!!
We'll have Obama mixing us mint juleps on the verandah, when we get the laws back (or forward?) to where they should be!
See, any day now science is gonna come up with a whole new proof for racial theory and sexual identification- and we'll know just what to do with it, huh Dan!
Civil rights was just a passing fancy, but our love is here to stay!
-
@Pedinska, Trainman
I experienced the longest attempt to explain how gay marriage somehow harmed those against it about a dozen years ago, when my team and I were getting ready to go live on a project we'd been death-marching for almost fifteen months.
The CIO at this company was a flaming RW ass, with very involved but ultimately contradictory or non-sensical opinions about everything. No boundaries with this guy, so he went off on a week long tangent, throughout our sixteen-hour work days.
The gist was that gay marriage somehow eroded the value of the marriage contract for which the state was acting as third party insuror. Marriage was by definition an arrangement that was exclusive, required investment by its principals, provided a stream of returns, and that by reducing its exclusivity and diluting the pool of those returns provided by or guaranteed by the state (not all of which were material), the value of the overall contract was diminished. Though only a part of the package, this dilution also undermined the social value placed on the institution, deepening the harm. Also, extending (social) benefits produced what economists would call a collective action problem, a tragedy of the commons.
We had multiple go-rounds on why the alleged value outside material benefits was scarce enough for this to apply, what the mysterious essence of this value was. After multiple challenges to other means of 'dilution' by the actions of married heterosexual couples, domestic abuse, divorce, green card scams, polygamy (it came up), etc, what we ended up with was that the value of the contract came from its exclusive nature (he ducked the social reproduction-value question, IIRC), which had to be preserved for there to remain any value in it. Begging the question, in other words, in ten days or less.
-
Derbig
You keep trotting out the same old sarcasm without any substance. You stated in a recent post:
"And of course, if something is simply the product of "ideology" well, then, we can just drop it when the ideology changes can't we?"
Uh... the Court does, all the time, I made that pretty clear in my earlier posts. For example, in Plessy v. Ferguson, SCOTUS considered seperate but equal a-okay under the equal protection clause. 50 years later, in Brown v. Board, not so much. What changed? I am pretty sure the language of the equal protection clause didn't, unless there was some mysterious amendment I missed. Furthermore, I am relatively sure that seperate but equal programs of the late 19th century were just as discriminatory as the segregated schools in the 1950's. Soooooooooooo, if the law didn't change and the facts didn't change... what could have changed? Obviously, the interpretation of the law changed and that interpretation is atleast in part affected by the ideology/principles of the judges rendering the decision.
I asked you in an earlier post what you considered strict constructionism/textualism... are they not ideologies/principles? And if a judge subscribes to those principles, is his interpretation of precedent not guided by those principles? Same thing with the 10th amendment and states rights v. expanded role of central government. Isn't it almost axiomatic to say that state's righters are going to interpret and apply precedent in a manner more favorable to protecting state's rights?
And just to be clear, I am happy that we are progressing. I am not arguing that this opinion was wrong or that activist judges were involved. I was only arguing that while precedent is surely important, the ideology of the judges on the bench effects their review and application of that precedent and, by extention, the constitution.