So you’d attempt to trump my Lamas with your Spassky?
Chessmaster indeed. If you watched Renegade you would know that it’s a partial rip off of Maguyver. Maguyver you’ll recall makes hand grenades out of pine cones. He’s that smart. Lorenzo on the other hand usually appears outnumbered and beaten when we find out in the end that was his plan all along.
Spassky also lost. If you think you will win, then you’re just a wisher. You’ll lose to me like Spassky lost to Fisher.
Where was I. Ahh Yes. Chessmaster.
First off, you may be right. If I go for the whole tamale I may end up with nothing. Yet, being a chess game, it’s more about this particular exchange.
Why not fight for the whole Tamale and use the Bricker Plan as a fallback position. This has several advantages.
Publically exposes the bigots, and makes them fight. The more their fought in the public sector the more clear the bullshit becomes. Each battle leaves them weaker since their viewpoint is founded on irrational fear and bigotry.
Makes Senator Scylla look like a crusader for justice. Which gives me credibility on the issue, especially if I later have to come down on the negative side of a civil rights issue like affirmative action or something.
It’s the right thing to do, and that’s usually worth a fight.
Scylla, I’ve always had a fair amount of respect for you as a thoughtful and non-knee-jerk person with a wicked wit and respect for your debating opponents.
But your series of posts in this thread, only partially for the content but even more so for the principled stand underlying it, deserve recgnition, and I want to say that I for one am proud to know you and be arguing on the same side as you (for once! ;))
You make a compelling case, and I find it hard to dismiss your approach out of hand.
I hope, by the same token, that even though we disagree, you see some semblance of rationality in my approach, timid though it may be.
There is a time for everything. President Truman was able to integrate the US Armed Forces by executive order. I assure you that President Harding could not have done so - not because Harding was an ineffectual leader, but because the time for integration was not at hand.
Truman’s effort didn’t come out of the blue. The Gillem Board, a 1945 group convened to study “efficient use of the Negro in the Army” started the ball rolling. So did the Navy’s integration efforts, begun in 1944. And so did the work of countless integrationists in 1930, 1920, 1910, and so on. But believe me when I say that even under the most generous reading of the public mood, we’re not yet at the time we need to be.
I say the Bricker Plan would get us there faster than insistence on the whole enchilada. I understand and respect your reasons for feeling differently.
My approach carries a lot more risk. There is no guarrantee that having started a fight, I would be able to end it. Pushing to hard may create a backlash and we will lose the very decent compromise possibility you offer within that backlash.
Push too hard and it is likely that the Bricker Plan is no longer viable. Then we have nothing but a grandstanding crusader of a Senator who has to consider the fact that while he may be regarded as a friend or a hero of civil rights, he has actually lost a huge step forward and also set the position backwards.
Perhaps a wiser head, world chose to consolidate a reasonable gain, and forgo the laudations and grandstanding crusades.
But the fact is I would push, I don’t know how hard. I wouldn’t want to lose, but I’d have to push.
My father has words to live by for dealing with assholes, bigots, or people that rip you off.
Personally, I think that if I were President, I’d probably go with Bricker. I’m very glad that the SCOTUS legalized sodomy, but I’m already worried about the backlash from the homophobes. If someone somehow legalized gay marriage by fiat, I shudder to think what might happen. At the very least, I imagine that I would get voted out of office and the next President would undo everything I had done.
However, I’m not the President, so I’m with Scylla. No President would ever be willing to endorse the Bricker plan, except to present himself as being more moderate than hotheads like Scylla and myself.
Just as the courts never declared prayer in schools or the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional, though soundbite news reporting says they did, so too the Supreme Court never “legalized sodomy.” Rather, what it did is to declare an unconstitutional interference with life and liberty, without due process of law, any sodomy law or any enforcement of a sodomy law that does not respect the right of adult individuals to form intimate relationships with whom they will and to express such relationships how they mutually will in private. Justice Kennedy was careful to identify four categories of behavior which were not present in the act for which Texas prosecuted Lawrence and Taylor:
[ol][li]Sex acts with minors[/li][li]Coercion or the danger of injury, or other circumstances in which consent is at question[/li][li]Public conduct or prostitution[/li][li]Expectation of formal government recognition of such relationships[/ol][/li]
Texas is under no obligation to turn a blind eye to child molestation, coercive sex, prostitution, doing it in the street and scaring the horses, nor is it expectded to give its approbation as a government to Lawrence and Taylor’s relationship. What it is forbidden to do is to corporately arrogate to itself the role of keeper of their consciences as to whether in private they choose to play at 500 Rummy or 69.
I’m not sure what you consider to be a fiat. This is going to come down to a court ruling, to be certain. Would the opinion of SCOTUS be a fiat?
Even if it didn’t come down to SCOTUS but an Executive Order, what on earth could happen to make things worse than they are? The majority of Americans support some sort of legalized civil union for gay couples. The vast majority of Americans do not condone any special legal status for gays vis-a-vis punitive legal measures against them. Do you really believe that the narrow minority of Americans who are vehementy opposed to any equality status for gays would be able to muster up enough public sympathy for their outmoded, outdated ideas to elect a president on the basis that he’d sign a reversing order as a priority aspect of his new administration?
Or are you expecting violence in the streets or something? I’m just curious.
The “I’m afraid of what will happen” school of thought has never appealed to me. There is a word for people who are fearful of doing what is right because of the possibility of consequences. It’s not a word I’d ever want to have applied to me, not in a case like this.
I personally wouldn’t consider it to be such, but I think others would. I said “fiat” because it’s hard for me to imagine Congress actually passing such a bill.
**
From what I understand, that’s what Bush is planning.
Anyway, why are so many politicians on the “marriage by another name” bandwagon? If gay marriage were instituted by that name, people might try to have it revoked (perhaps by Constitutional amendment,) whereas gay marriage by another name would ultimately turn into marriage.
Let’s suppose you’re President during the time of LBJ. Your plan is to either execute via executive order or push through Congress the following projects:
“Great Society” reforms.
Immediately get “In God We Trust” off the money, and “under God” out of the pledge.
Admit open homosexuals into the military.
Legalize sodomy.
Legalize gay marriage.
Put an end to Jim Crow.
etc., etc.
How many of these will you be able to implement? Which ones should you implement first? The fact is that you have to choose the ones you can actually accomplish. If you try to put gays into the military first, you’ll never be able to fix Jim Crow later.
I don’t believe I ever said that A is not relevant to C. Not being quite sure what you mean by A, B, and C, I can’t say for sure.
“Several pertinent points” and “syllogism” are quite different things. A syllogism is an explicit statement of what your assumptions are, what your conslusion is, and how the latter is a logical consequence of the former.
The decision to allow or deny someone the option to formalize the union is not based on the sexual orientation. A correlation existing between sexual orientation and permission is different from permission being given on the basis of sexual orientation. If we were to adopt your implied criterion, then every option which one group is inclined to take advantage of, and another not, is discriminatory.
When you get right down to it, your statement boils down to “Whether one is allowed or denied the option to formalize a union with the person that they want to form a union with is based on whether the person is inclined to want to form a union with a person with whom they are allowed to formalize a union.” Rather tautological.
I would like to understand what you consider discrimination to be. If I were to host a dinner, and to include meat in all of my dishes, would that be discriminatory towards vegetarians? If I serve chicken as a main course, is that discriminatory towards people that don’t like chicken? Is disparate impact, in and of itself, enough to constitute discrimination in your mind? Are skating competitions which require doubles to be of opposite sex discrimination?
You said that who someone is allowed to marry (A) is based on the sex of the person they want to marry (B), and the sex of the person that someone wants to marry (B again) is related to their sexual orientation (C). You then said that C doesn’t really matter.
I suggest that marriage, being normally thought of as a Big Deal – to the point that a great many people feel that marriage is one of their few Life Goals (along the same lines as having children) – makes it somewhat more important than something like, say buying a car and having to pick a color you don’t like.
I’m of a split mind in regards to the skating competition. As for all the others, I do not view them as discriminatory mainly because they’re so trivial. Although, if you were hosting a dinner, and you knew ahead of time that ~10% of your guests were vegetarians, then it would be quite rude of you to have only meat dishes for your guests.
Marriage, however, is a Big Deal, as I previously mentioned. Also, it is something that is governmentally sanctioned. So for the government to deny gays the right to marry is, in my mind, discriminatory. It is, in my mind, just as bad as if the government were to disallow interracial marriages.