Marriage Equality - Today it's a shout of "polygamy". Yesterday it was shouts of "male prostitution".

Cartoon of Peter Robinson, Ian Paisley and other members of the DUP. Originally published on Slugger O'Toole.

Debating marriage equality is debating the inevitable. The history of the West tells us that you cannot deny a minority community rights that a majority enjoy. The history of the West tells us that laws that stigmatise and marginalise a minority cannot stand.

Law after discriminatory law have been broken. Rights after rights have been spread. And at each stage the religious community are there to defend discrimination and oppose tolerance and pluralism. That is the lesson that needs to be shared as we face this challenge of bringing marriage equality to Northern Ireland. Namely: at each stage the religious will have you forget their previous failures in order to mask their present failure.

La verite est en marche et rien ne l'arretera , Ctd

Fintan O’Toole wrote in The Irish Times here:

"Over time mainstream opinion comes to recognise that honest beliefs once held by decent people were reprehensible, not because the people were bad, but because the beliefs were shaped by prejudice. This will happen, probably quite soon, with beliefs about sexual orientation."

He continued:

"Sincerity is as irrelevant here as malevolence – it simply doesn’t matter why people uphold structures of discrimination. Throughout history, decent, moral people have believed with complete sincerity that slavery is a moral good, that women are lesser beings who must be protected from their weakness by being obedient to men, that Jews should be confined to ghettoes, that the Irish are incapable of rational thought, that Catholics are unfit to live in democracies and so on."

He continued:

"This is true even of very great men. Aristotle thought slavery entirely natural. Abraham Lincoln thought for most of his career that when slavery was abolished blacks should be shipped out to Africa because they couldn’t possibly live side by side with free whites. Does this make Aristotle and Lincoln bad men? No. It just makes them examples of highly moral and intelligent people who cannot escape inherited structures of discriminatory thought."

He concluded:

"The whole point of the law is that it’s not about giving people equal status because you like them. It’s about freeing people from subjection to the arbitrariness of other people’s benevolence. Gay men and lesbians shouldn’t have to care one way or the other whether the members of the Iona Institute love them or not. Just as the rest of us shouldn’t measure the rights of our fellow citizens by what they get up to in bed."

In full here.

The Influence of Andrew Sullivan, Ctd

Ross Douthat wrote of Andrew Sullivan in The New York Times here:

"The day the gay marriage rulings were handed down I raised the possibility, on Twitter, that Andrew Sullivan might deserve to be remembered as the most influential political writer of his generation, and I was happy to see Tyler Cowen flesh that argument out:                           

Doesn’t... Sullivan have a reasonably strong claim to that title, especially after the recent Supreme Court decisions on gay marriage? Sullivan was the dominant intellectual influence on this issue, from the late 1980s on, and that is from a time where other major civil liberties figures didn’t give gay marriage much of a second thought, one way or the other, or they wished to run away from the issue. Here is his classic 1989 New Republic essay. Here is a current map of where gay marriage is legal and very likely there is more to come.

Ross Douthat continued his analysis of Andrew Sullivan:

"No writer of comparable gifts was on the issue earlier, pushed harder against what seemed at the time like an unassailable consensus, engaged as many critics (left and right, gay and straight) and addressed himself to as many audiences as Sullivan. No intellectual did as much to weave together the mix of arguments and intuitions that defines today’s emerging consensus on the issue — in which gay marriage is simultaneously an expression of bourgeois conservatism and the fulfillment of the 1960s’ liberative promise, the civil rights revolution of our time and a natural, Burkean outgrowth of the way that straights already live. And no intellectual that I can think of, writing on a fraught and controversial topic, has seen their once-crankish, outlandish-seeming idea becomes the conventional wisdom so quickly, and be instantantiated so rapidly in law and custom."

I wrote an earlier post on the influence of Andrew Sullivan here. New York Times post in full here.

Evolution of Marriage Equality in the United States

If you are against gay marriage you are ignorant to the path of history. Time after time, those who oppose the sharing rights and legal protections are overturned.

You can read my essay for eamonnmallie.com on how marriage equality will in the end come to Northern Ireland here. You can also read my blog post that followed the Supreme Court ruling from the United States that smacked down the DOMA legislation here.

The above map comes from Andrew Sullivan, thanks for that.

SCOTUS ruling against DOMA moves the world a step closer to marriage equality

Andrew Sullivan has said that marriage equality is the civil rights issue of our age. As have many others, including Mayor Bloomberg. I agree. 

The recent decision by the Supreme Court of the United States did not actually find a fundamental right in the constitution to same-sex marriage. Therefore the highest court in America did not impose gay marriage by fiat on every state. Rather, the court led by Chief Justice John Roberts made it that federal law upholds and recognizes all gay marriages. 

There are 30 states that still ban marriage equality an they can continue to do so; but the federal government cannot stop marriage equality. As Andrew Sullivan said, the democratic debate will go on at state level, even as the momentum for equality has been increased. Andrew said:

"I find these incremental nudges and concessions to be the best kind of jurisprudence."

Andrew Sullivan then commented on the global import of America's new constitutional arrangement:

"Last week the court saw the mountaintop ahead and nudged America - and the world - towards it."