Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Supreme Court Oral Argument

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…that cost Democrats the presidency:

At oral argument in the Obergefell same-sex marriage case, there was the following colloquy:

Justice Samuel Alito: Well, in the Bob Jones case, the Court held that a college was not entitled to tax-­exempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating. So would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same­-sex marriage?

Solicitor General Verrilli: You know, I­, I don’t think I can answer that question without knowing more specifics, but it’s certainly going to be an issue. I don’t deny that. I don’t deny that, Justice Alito. It is ­­it is going to be an issue.

With the mainstream media busy celebrating the Supreme Court’s ultimate recognition of a right to same-sex marriage, this didn’t get that much attention in mainstream news outlets. But in the course of researching my book, “Lawless,” I noticed that Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr.’s answer was big news in both the conservative blogosphere and in publications catering to religiously traditionalist audiences. The idea that Regent University or Brigham Young University or the local Catholic university or the many hundreds of other religious schools — and potentially other religious organizations — could be put at a severe competitive disadvantage if they refused on theological grounds to extend the same recognition to same-sex couples as to opposite-sex couples struck many as a direct and serious assault on religious liberty.

In short, many religious Christians of a traditionalist bent believed that liberals not only reduce their deeply held beliefs to bigotry, but want to run them out of their jobs, close down their stores and undermine their institutions. When I first posted about this on Facebook, I wrote that I hope liberals really enjoyed running Brendan Eich out of his job and closing down the Sweet Cakes bakery, because it cost them the Supreme Court. I’ll add now that I hope Verrilli enjoyed putting the fear of government into the God-fearing because it cost his party the election.

Yes, and it’s why evangelicals were willing to support Trump, despite his boorishness and obvious lack of religious belief. They knew that she would continue the culture war on them, and that with him, they at least had a chance.

[Update a few minutes later]

This seems related: Trump won because of the overblown reactions from the Left to actual (as opposed to nonsensical, like new gun laws) common-sense proposals from the sane.

[Update a few more minutes later]

#WhyTrumpWon

4 thoughts on “The Supreme Court Oral Argument”

  1. I love this addendum to Bernstein’s column:

    UPDATE: As co-blogger Todd Zywicki wrote to me on Facebook, “When you find yourself in the Supreme Court adverse to the Little Sisters of the Poor you might consider whether maybe you have pushed a little too far.”

  2. The loonie left made a lot of enemies when they crossed the line from wanting to live their perversions to insisting the rest of us support their perversions.

  3. After the organized violence, SCOTUS was my other motivation but not necessarily for the case cited. Add to that I don’t think that people who send bloody tampons to their political opponents as qualified to lecture me on civility, racism, or the proper role of government.

  4. The marriage issue was as botched as botched gets, and a classic example of Hegelian “logic” in action. The Judeo-Christian and the secular anthropological approaches might disagree on where and when marriage started (where in the hell have the anthropologists been?), but they agree that at some point civilization and pre-civilization (e.g. nomadic tribes) were unanimous that human mating needed checks and balances to ameliorate the destabilizing effects on childhood environment and adult-adult relationships associated with promiscuity. People were peer-pressured and/or lawfully required to make certain vows to the public before mating. Monogamy was the historic norm. Polygamy existed as a temporary emergency rationing measure in some cases when extreme gender imbalances existed, but more often as a permanent fixture that serves the elites; it is to marriage what subsidies are to capitalism.

    The whole idea behind the Sexual Revolution was to eliminate checks and balances on mating. Most people who bought into it still had an infatuation for marriage. For Hegelian synthesis to work, the definition of either A or not-A must be changed. For SSM backers marriage was reinvented as a vehicle by which the married party places obligations on society, not the other way around. Getting married meant qualifying for benefits and social acceptance and owing nothing in return except for filling out the paperwork. That’s notarized companionship, not marriage. The NOM folks failed to communicate this.

    Polygamy is coming down the pike eventually. One of the chief arguments against it is that it creates surplus males. How are you going to make that argument to a culture that supports a Sexual Revolution that creates both surplus males AND surplus females?

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