[Charlie Southerland]

The very ruling on the issue is the issue here. The ruling itself is unconstitutional, or should I say, extraconstitutional. The repercussions of this ruling will be a disaster for the country. What the Court has done is Make a law (legislate) where no federal law has existed on the matter heretofore. In its grossly egotistical way, it has afforded protection to one group of people to the exclusion of another group of people. It has alienated and stripped the Church of protections guaranteed since the founding. There has always been separation of Church and State. Until now.
Now the State(the Feds) are saying that the Church must recognize and afford protections and rights to a class of people ( based purely on sexual relations, not orientation) who may or may not be religious, may or may not be in step with Church doctrine or norms, at the Church's peril.

Loss of tax exempt status.
Loss of accreditation for religious schools.
Loss of free speech by the Church.

This ruling affects and demeans and makes lawbreakers out of 270 to 300 million people for the benefit of perhaps, 10 million people.

What the law has now done is say that the Church is an illegitimate institution in the Constitution.

The ruling is inherently insane. And illegal.

I saw this day coming way back in 1998, when the far left radical gay agenda began to ramp up. Regardless of your position on Gay marriage, this ruling will make life worse for everyone, including Gays. It hasn't been thought through, neither has it been given a chance to settle differences between opposing parties.

[Julie Steiner]

Wait...what?

Nothing about this decision changes anything about the religious aspect of marriages conducted within a church.

Civil marriage and religious marriage are two different things. If a couple wants both, they have to meet the religious criteria AND fill out the proper paperwork and filing fees, etc., to register with the state. The SCOTUS ruling only applies to how marriages are recognized by the State, not the Church.

Churches can continue to refuse to recognize the validity of marriages (and divorces), for any reason.

Churches can continue to bar couples from marrying within their church, for any reason.

Churches can continue to conduct marriage ceremonies so that couples are not "living in sin" while declining to notify the state, so that widows and widowers can continue to receive survivor benefits that would otherwise end upon remarriage. (Personally, I think such a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too arrangement is fraud, pure and simple...but if the couple's own consciences don't bother them about it, and if they are prepared to surrender all the benefits of civilly-recognized marriage, whatever.)

Nothing about this ruling is forcing churches to do anything differently, except perhaps offer spousal benefits to some gay employees. But churches that find homosexual acts sinful tend to make openly gay people feel very unwelcome in their employ, anyway.

[Don Jones]

Thank you, Julie!

[Bill Carpenter]

Hi Charlie,
You're coming in loud and clear on behalf of some of our traditions. The outrages you cite have traditions behind them, too. Remember the Defense of Marriage Act? That was a major incursion of federal legislation into the traditional state province of domestic relations. It spawned many new federalists who thought such matters should be left to the state legislatures. As a federal judicial ruling that preempts state legislative enactments that are already trending in the "progressive" direction, as Julie noted, Obergefell is like Roe v. Wade. For substantial portions of the population, Roe v. Wade diminished the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and increased their alienation from governmental institutions. A traditional liberal theory is that a fair and agreed process legitimizes outcomes however undesirable to the losing party in the debate. Removing decisions from the legislative to the judicial sphere appears, to some traditions, to violate such procedural expectations, while to others it really makes no difference because both arenas permit some level of advocacy and public input. If illegitimacy and alienation increase to a sufficient level, the current compromises may become unworkable and adjustments may occur. That's the story of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart--a society's rules and rulers alienated so many of the people that the society could not defend itself. The intent of the majority and its advocates is to reduce alienation by expanding participation in the institution of marriage, but the dissenters are saying, we're not buying it, we're alienated, because our views of politics, culture, and constitutional interpretation have been violated yet again.

[Mary Meriam]

Here's a great article in Irish Times by Fintan O'Toole. Quote:

It looks extraordinary – little Ireland becoming the first country in the world to support same sex marriage by direct popular vote. ...The resounding Yes is a statement that Ireland has left tolerance far behind. It’s saying that there’s no “them” anymore. LGBT people are us — our sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, neighbours and friends. We were given the chance to say that. We were asked to replace tolerance with the equality of citizenship. And we took it in both arms and hugged it close.

[Julie Steiner]

Yes, that's the way to do it. Not with judicial decisions that can be overruled the next time the composition of the court changes. The constitutional argument behind the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling is downright flimsy, and therefore very vulnerable to being reversed.

[epigone]

Tough to imagine how the U.S. could follow the Irish example given our federal system. Federal legislation would not do the trick without a constitutional basis, flimsy or otherwise. Our problem is that the best solution (if we don't like rule by the "radicals in robes") is painstaking progress, state by state, until all the states come on board.

There is some poignancy to the dissenters' lament that that process has now been shut down.

Unfortunately, as Julie pointed out above, if SCOTUS had kicked the can down the road, it would have ignored "significant harm to a large number of people."

[Steve Mangan]

Originally Posted by Steve Mangan

Great News -- celebrations taking steps back here in Turkey today as Pride March in Istanbul being dispersed by water cannon...


marching
beneath the rainbow:
water cannons

http://imgur.com/gallery/ybJrDA0

[Michael Cantor]

Wonderful, Steve!

[Roger Slater]

Originally Posted by Julie Steiner

The constitutional argument behind the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling is downright flimsy, and therefore very vulnerable to being reversed.

I strongly disagree. I think the constitutional arguments are extremely compelling and almost impossible to answer or refute. That's one of the most remarkable things about the issue. I think the simple and logical arguments were just waiting around all these years for the Court to sense that history and society had moved to the point that a decision on the subject would be credible or palatable to the country as a whole. You don't just need the logic, you also need the right moment. It's like with Brown v Board. It shouldn't have taken a legal scholar to figure out that segregation was not equal protection, and the arguments in favor of it were the opposite of flimsy, but the Supreme Court must guage the climate in which it operates if it has any hope of maintaining the credibility it needs to do its job.

I doubt very much that a future Supreme Court could change the rule, or that it would matter very much a few generations from now if it did. Within ten years or less, gay marriage will be so ordinary, so ingrained in our lives, so uncontroversial, that it will be impossible to unravel, and the constitutional arguments in favor of it will be all the more compelling since it will be a fact on the ground rather than an aspiration in all 50 states. Opponents will no longer be able to make the "it's always been that way so it should stay that way" argument, since inertia will favor proponents. Indeed, off the top of my head, I can't think of a single civil right that's ever been entirely reversed by the Supreme Court (though some have been eroded at the edges).