Justice Kennedy Spars With Michigan’s Special Assistant Attorney General

Justice Kennedy

Fellow transplanted northerner blogger Bob Felton has an even lower opinion of Christofascists and their view of marriage as merely "a cosmic license for sexual intercourse" in order to procreate than I do.  But he sums up the Christofascist view of marriage all too accurately and today quoted batshitery for Bill Donohue of the always deranged Catholic League as yet further proof.  Donohue in a rant against same sex marriage stated:

Not only is love as a basis for marriage a relatively recent phenomenon — most marriages throughout history were arranged or based on duty — it is profoundly detached from the historical purpose of marriage, which is procreation. Once love is given primary status as a condition for marriage, the institution itself is no longer recognizable.

That's right, per Donohue and a host of lunatics on the Christian Right, marriage is really all about treating women as brood mares and regulating the offspring.  Love has nothing to do with it. Sounds crazy?  You bet, but that is in essence part of the argument John Bursch, Michigan’s special assistant attorney general, made to the U.S. Supreme Court today to justify Michigan's gay marriage ban.  The argument did not seem to sit well with Justice Kennedy.  A piece in Slate looks at the exchange:

Kennedy finds himself in an argument with John Bursch, Michigan’s special assistant attorney general, about whether marriage is a dignity-conferring enterprise, or not. Bursch, defending his state’s ban on same-sex marriage, is explaining that the purpose of marriage is not to confer dignity but to keep parents bonded to their biological children.

Justice Kennedy—who opened argument Tuesday morning with the observation that this whole case is about an institution whose definition has gone unchanged for millennia—looks rather shocked. The author of the majority decision outlawing sodomy bans in Lawrence v. Texas (“Adults may choose to enter upon this relationship in the confines of their homes and their own private lives and still retain their dignity as free persons”) and the decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act in United States v. Windsor (“It seems fair to conclude that, until recent years, many citizens had not even considered the possibility that two persons of the same sex might aspire to occupy the same status and dignity as that of a man and woman in lawful marriage”) did not want to hear this. Indeed, it seems like Kennedy wanted it to be perfectly clear that he is the guy who gets to say that if marriage is nothing else, it is a dignity-stamper.

Bursch explains that if marriage is expanded to include same-sex couples, the whole purpose of the institution will change. According to him, that view of marriage is “keeping the couple bound to that child forever,” whereas the new purpose (once gay couples are allowed to wed) will be about “their emotional commitment to each other.” This presumably less noble view of marriage will then proliferate, and result in illegitimacy, which the state seeks to avoid. Kennedy looks stunned. “That assumes that same-sex couples could not have a more noble purpose, and that’s the whole point. Same-sex couples say, of course we understand the nobility and the sacredness of marriage,” says Kennedy, the presumed swing vote.

Later in the argument, Bursch circles back to say, again, “marriage was never intended to be dignity bestowing.” At which point Kennedy almost bursts a pipe: “I don’t understand that [marriage] is not dignity bestowing. I thought that was the whole purpose of marriage. It bestows dignity on both man and woman in a traditional marriage. … It’s dignity bestowing, and these parties say they want to have that same ennoblement.”

Bursch replies that the “state is trying to figure out how do we link together these kids with their biological moms and dads when possible, the glue are benefits and burdens, but not necessarily dignity.” Anthony “Dignity” Kennedy can’t even believe it: “Well, I think many states would be surprised, with reference to traditional marriages, they are not enhancing the dignity of both the parties.”
But the other problem with the procreation-only argument is: What about old people? As Ginsburg ponders, “What if a 70-year-old couple wants to get married?” People cheer and applaud. Kennedy notes that Bursch’s premise “that only opposite-sex couples can have a bonding with the child” was “just a wrong premise,” adding “under your view it would be difficult for same-sex couples to adopt some of these children. … I think the argument cuts quite against you.”

There's more, but one can see why Christofascists - at least the far right Catholic  element - are anti-divorce.    Love, happy, supportive relationships are irrelevant to the equation.  It's only about legalizing sex for the purpose of breeding and raising children.  No wonder Christofascists are such miserable people.

Why The Idea Of "Traditional Marriage" Is Total Fiction

To listen to the Christofascist, one man and one woman marriage has been the ideal since the beginning of time.  Like pretty much everything else that comes from the lips of the Christofascist, the claim is a lie.  First, one need only read the Old Testament to see that polygamy, not monogamy, was the true form of "Biblical marriage."   This inconvenient truth is, of course, utterly ignored by the self-proclaimed "godly folk."  But there are many other reasons why the form of marriage lauded by the self-congratulatory pious ones is not consistent with the manner in which marriage has been redefined through the centuries.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at some of the history of marriage.  Here are some excerpts:

As state after state -- most recently Utah and Oklahoma -- battles to legalize gay marriage, opponents of the push for equality continue to argue that marriage itself has remained a static institution that would be destroyed if redefined. But there's a big flaw in that logic. Because while marriage has existed as a central element of life in nearly every global culture in recorded history, its definition has already been changed. Repeatedly.

Before legal systems and international economies, noble and ruling classes used marriages instead of treaties to create diplomatic and commercial ties. "You established peaceful relationships, trading relationships, mutual obligations with others by marrying them," writes Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage: A History.
So for anyone who claims that gay marriage will defile "traditional" marriage's supposed long-standing and unchanged legacy, have a look at just a few of the ways marriage has already been redefined over the years.

Ancient Greece: Marriage is for making babies.
Like most ancient governing bodies, Athens didn't legally define marriage for its citizens. Producing offspring was pretty much the only reason to get hitched -- as one man put it, "We keep hetaerae (courtesans) for pleasure, concubines for the daily care of our body, and wives for the bearing of legitimate children and to keep watch over our house" -- because the state did control movement of wealth through inheritance. It was so important to keep property within the family, Coontz writes, that a girl whose father died without leaving another male heir could be forced to marry her nearest male relative, even if she had to divorce her current husband.

Marriage wasn't even considered the most ideal union, at least according to the elite members of society. That honor went to -- drumroll, please -- homosexual partnerships, since married men and women weren't expected to provide emotional fulfillment for one another.

Indigenous peoples: Life is hard, so marry whomever you need to.
In some cultures, men took several wives so they could help each other with all the work needed to sustain the family. Women in Botswana had a saying: "Without cowives, a woman's work is never done," Coontz writes.

Some Native American tribes highly respected "two-spirit" individuals, or those who could do the work of men and women. Two-spirit people could be married to someone of the same sex, since all the tasks needed to maintain the household could be performed easily, making marriage more of a labor concern than a gender concern.

Ancient Egypt: Marriage in pursuit of super-legit bloodlines.
Rulers of Alexander the Great's splintered empire used marriage as a political tool, Coontz writes, taking more than one wife in order to establish alliances with other kings. Unlike Botswana's co-wives, though, Hellenistic co-wives typically hated one another, since each was seen as a threat to the others' ascension to power. Children schemed with their mothers against step-mothers. Siblings schemed against siblings. To produce heirs that could remove all doubt of legitimacy, some brother-and-sister marriages also occurred.

Early Christians: Marital sex is a necessary evil.
"Many early Christians," Coontz writes, "believed that marriage undermined the rigorous self-control needed to achieve spiritual salvation." Celibacy was therefore preferable over marriage, but sex was tolerated for purposes of procreation -- so long as you weren't marrying your cousin, second cousin, stepmother, stepdaughter, widow of your uncle or brother, or anyone within seven degrees of separation from yourself.

Medieval Europe: Life is still hard, and marriage makes business sense.
For the rich, marriage was again a political arrangement between two families who wished to cement their ties and merge assets. Queens arranged marriages for siblings, relatives and ladies-in-waiting in order to create international support networks for themselves. In the 12th and 13th centuries, people believed that "love cannot exert its powers between two people who are married to each other," as the Countess of Champagne once wrote. Adulterous relationships, on the other hand, were the pinnacle of romance.

16th Century: Marriage is now a sacrament.
In 1563, the Catholic Church decreed that marriage was a sacred ritual to be performed in a church. They talked about doing this a few centuries earlier, Coontz says, but it would have rendered a lot of marriages invalid, because no one got married in a church. 

Meanwhile, Protestants declared clergymen's right to marriage while warning not to love one's spouse too much. A lot of people were still weirded out by the concept of affection in marriage -- one Virginia colonist wrote that a female friend was "more fond of her husband perhaps than the Politeness of the day allows."

Late 20th Century: Marriage is a human right.
Feminist groups fought to ease pressure on women to find a man and settle down, helping to cement the idea of marriage as a partnership between equals. Marital rape was outlawed. States began repealing laws preventing some marriages -- interracial marriages were legalized in 1967 and marriage of prison inmates in 1987 -- as the idea of a perfect wedding became more and more of a billion-dollar commercial enterprise.  In 2001, the Netherlands became the first in a growing number of nations to grant same-sex couples the right to marry.

There's quite a bit more in the article that shows the lie of the Christofascist claims.   Civil Commotion has perhaps the most realistic assessment of Christofascists' version of "traditional marriage":

The relationship that conservative Christians call ‘marriage’ consists of cosmic permission for sexual intercourse in order to make babies and perpetuate the cult — and that’s all; it is clergy-supervised animal husbandry. They specifically, and relentlessly, condemn the mutual loyalty and shared ambitions that make a relationship a marriage.

 Oh, and let us not forget that the evangelical Christian crowd has the highest divorce rate - even though the Gospels have Jesus condemning divorce.  The hypocrisy is, as said before, complete.