The reactions to the Supreme Court’s gay rights rulings were not quite as crazy as I had hoped, but Rand Paul didn’t disappoint with his own personal Man on Dog contribution. I do wonder about the Man on Dog phenomenon, because it seems to make logical sense to these folks that if two women can get married then obviously you can marry your office chair, your coffee maker, or your kid’s pet gerbil. Glenn Beck’s slippery-slope polygamy charge makes a little more sense to me, although most of what we’re talking about with gay marriage has to do with legal rights dealing with inheritance, tax policy, hospital visitation, and so on. And it doesn’t seem hard to keep those policies as limiting one person as your spouse. It just doesn’t follow that if you can marry someone of the same sex that you should then be permitted to marry two people of the opposite sex.
The rest of the reactions are more religious in nature, and while I might think those kind of religious beliefs are a little whacky, I don’t know that I’d call them insane or crazy. Insofar as marriage is a sacrament in the Catholic Church, for example, I can see how some people might think that we’re messing with an institution that God thought was extremely important. But the separation of Church and State is well established in this country, so the Court hasn’t changed anything in terms of the sacredness of marriage. I was married for nine years as far as the government was concerned, even though the mayor of New Hope presided over the secular ceremony, and no church on Earth recognized our marriage.
Anyway, congratulations to the LGBT community. It was a long struggle and today was a breakthrough day.
