[Pedro Poitevin]

Charlie: You are still not answering my question. I understand that you think it doesn't matter what your views are, and that there is a deeper constitutional issue. What I am asking is whether you believe those SCOTUS decisions on interracial marriage were wrong. It's a simple question, Charlie.

[Pedro Poitevin]

Charlie: I think you are a Christian (a Southern American conservative Christian, to be more precise) and that this marks your identity more than any philosophical principle on constitutional interpretation. (I know many Christians who are for marriage equality, among them some relatives of mine.) On the other hand, when you say you are a constitutionalist, I think you mean that you sympathize with originalism, which is a particular approach to constitutional interpretation.

I am a consequentialist. If a particular set of interpretive principles of a constitution leads to especially unjust outcomes, I'm rather inclined to conclude there is something wrong with the set of principles involved. There is something egregiously unjust in a society that allows its religious majority to prohibit interracial marriage (you may or may not agree with this, but to me this is morally obvious), so if the Perez and Loving rulings had gone the other way, I would have concluded that either the rulings were wrong or (if the rulings were right) the Constitution was wrong.

Finally, I don't think it was the Founders intent to constrain the social, moral, and cultural evolution of the polity to such an extent that hundreds of years after the foundation, people would be deciding deeply important matters of justice by dismissing all other considerations except the pervasive "what was it the Founders would have approved of?"

[Janice D. Soderling]

Finally, I don't think it was the Founders intent to constrain the social, moral, and cultural evolution of the polity to such an extent that hundreds of years after the foundation, people would be deciding deeply important matters of justice by dismissing all other considerations except the pervasive "what was it the Founders would have approved of?"

No, that is elevating a text to dogma. And whenever dogma rules as the law of the land freedom diminishes. Well said, Pedro.

Dogma is a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. It serves as part of the primary basis of an ideology or belief system, and it cannot be changed or discarded without affecting the very system's paradigm, or the ideology itself.

[Charlie Southerland]

Pedro, you can try all day and tonight too to get me to answer questions about my conscience and how my beliefs affect what or how I interpret the US Constitution. It ain't gonna' happen. You deem me a conservative, a Southern conservative. You don't know me so I'll let you have your conjecture. I am apolitical most of the time. I am libertarian some of the time. I don't vote a straight party ticket, ever. I have the advantage of being a practicing Calvinist believer, so God's will is supreme in my life, as well as ordained. Since I believe He is Sovereign, my musings are inconsequential to his will. Am I proud of my country? Yep. Every damn day I live in it. Regardless.

[Pedro Poitevin]

Charlie: Your opinion on whether the Perez and Loving decisions were correct or not should either go hand in hand with your opinion on the current SCOTUS decision (in which case some interesting political questions arise) or not (in which other interesting philosophical questions on constitutional interpretation arise). If you could only focus on the issue of Perez and Loving, and take a stance, that would be wonderful. I'm sure I would learn something. And I suspect you would, too. But since you refuse, I will desist, not without first saying that I frankly don't understand your reluctance to answer the simple question I asked. You've not been shy about expressing your views on the current SCOTUS ruling, so why demure on these other two prior, somewhat related rulings? I've treated you respectfully (though I may have labeled you Southern or conservative incorrectly), and my questions stem from an earnest attempt at understanding how you see some deeply important matters of justice that I see strikingly differently.

Pedro

[Charlie Southerland]

Pedro, It is important that freedom prevails in our society. The Framers of the Constitution were well aware of this and made provision for correcting their oversight to slavery, women's suffrage, prohibition(twice) and other ills which they may not have thought of. You seem to keep overlooking those facts.

Bill Carpenter and Don Jones are both correct in their dialogue with each other over what should have been done or not done. I cannot add to that except that I agree with both. Neither of them have an ideological axe to grind or a religious axe to wield.

In my opinion, it is best to obey the speed limit. Say the limit is 70 MPH. You may differ and say that 5 miles over the limit is OK right up until you run over the guy doing the minimum of 40mph. You'll say he shouldn't have been going so slow. He'll say you shouldn't have been speeding and broken the Law. There will be consequences for breaking the law. Consequences for the guy you just ran over, and consequences for you who ran over the guy. If you don't like the law, you can petition your neighbors on your behalf, to vote to change the law so that the consequences you are suffering will be negated when it happens to you again or someone else. But the other guy you hurt by breaking the law has a say too. He is in the right at all times under the law on the books, whether or not you like it.

You can petition a judge for leniency or redress or dismissal, but the judge has no latitude to change the law. He can defer or lesson punishment but he can't overrule the law. It is out of his scope of jurisdiction. Don't you see?

[Pedro Poitevin]

Charlie: Thank you for answering. Don Jones' position seems to be that the Court's decision to take the Loving case was wrong, and yet he approves of the outcome on consequentialist grounds, which isn't quite what I thought your position would be.

Since I'm a consequentialist, my views on the basic goodness or badness of a ruling depends more on considerations of what consequences there might be than on something like the intent of the Founders. For the sake of illustration, take Loving. If the Court had decided not take on Loving (or had gone the other way), I fear that some of the negative consequences would have been: (1) a slower march towards racial equality—ergo, increased racial suffering in this country for a hard-to-estimate number of years; (2) the profound social cost of an opportunity loss: it's very likely that the vast majority of the moral progress of the last century was the cultural result of these top-down decisions by the Court in the protection of minorities in this country, and that without these decisions, the moral progress we have experienced would not have come to pass; (3) the weakening of states' rights when it comes to certain kinds of issues: this may be something you do not like, and it may be a "bad" consequence to take into account if you sympathize—as you have every right to—with a certain conception of the Union. To me, it seems, (1) and (2) are more significant than (3). I would hate to look back on the History of the U.S. and not see Brown v. Board, etc., landmark decisions that not just marked but directly and strongly influenced the cultural evolution of this country, and instead see a very slow increase in rights for minorities, all of it due to the "magnanimity" of some increasingly less prejudiced majority population. I might be living today in a country in which my marriage would not be recognized in Alabama, I might not be able to vote if I move to some state, my most admired public intellectual would be confined to the back of the bus, and my wife might not be able to vote anywhere. I do realize that this (my being a consequentialist) makes me care less than you about some matters of principle, and I acknowledge this criticism, but matters of principle can be included in a consequentialist framework (as in "but what is the effect of this event on our commitment to these basic principles?"—sometimes, I submit, the answer is "not much, provided you read the Constitution intelligently enough"), whereas a person entirely concerned with the narrow considerations of constitutional principle is not very likely to incorporate consequentialist concerns, as a matter of principle.

Thanks.

[Don Jones]

Don Jones' position seems to be that the Court's decision to take the Loving case was wrong, and yet he approves of the outcome on consequentialist grounds, which isn't quite what I thought your position would be.

Pedro, this is what I quite clearly wrote:

True, the elites don't always get it right. They can get it terrible wrong but in Loving v. Virginia they were correct even as the American people were not disposed to accept "inter-racial" marriages. The people lagged behind but caught up. In this case the judges did know better. Emphasis added.

Maybe you meant Obergefell? If so, that would be correct.

Thank you.

[James Brancheau]

To you Charlie, this is an edict that you and probably those around you grew up with. To others (not all of course), it's about growing up being constantly bullied and suicidal, and then if you were lucky enough to accept yourself, rejected by family and government. I don't give a sh#t how it happened. It's some modicum of justice.

(I know, Charlie, it's hard and we all have crazy ideas. I thought by now that many in the Bush administration would have been brought to trial for war crimes.)

JB

[Pedro Poitevin]

Don: Thank you for clarifying. I didn't read all your posts. I read the one containing this quote:

Of course, they remained on the books for decades afterwards but that didn’t stop “inter-racial” marriages in those states. This decision did have to weigh one consideration against the other. Similar to Obergefell. In any case, as I made clear, I would have preferred a legislative solution state by state but the Court took the case. It should not have but since it did, I’m happy about the outcome.