Contrary to the Obama Administration's position the day before yesterday, it now believes that a federal law defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman violates the Constitution. Presumably, polygamists will be jumping in droves onto the President's joy ride leftward.
We can remotely thank Justice Anthony Kennedy for today's metamorphosis for copying-and-pasting liberal talking points into constitutional law. In the 1996 case of Roemer v. Evans, Justice Kennedy, fresh from ascending to the left's Pantheon of Useful Idiots in 1992's Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, wrote for the majority that Amendment 2 to Colorado's state constitution was a violation of the federal constitution.
Amendment 2 manifest the nefarious design of preventing any governmental entity in the state from bowing to leftist pressure to recognize gays and lesbians as a specially protected class. All kinds of neat privileges flowed from that designation.
Joseph Sobran once observed of the scam that it takes a great deal of political clout to be identified as an oppressed minority.
The "inevitable inference" drawn by Justice Kennedy was that Coloradans' overwhelmingly expressed desire to be left alone could only be "born of animosity," a "bare...desire to harm a politically unpopular group." Noman says poppycock.
In Justice Kennedy's Constitutional estimation--now law--hate is the only explanation for why Coloradans would not want its landlords forced to rent to gays and lesbians despite moral objections to gays having sex on their property, for instance.
That's the trick with specially protected classes: only they have rights; everyone else has duties despite moral objections. Noman says that's a counter-intuitive conclusion to reach from an alleged "application" of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.
The founding fathers, we are to believe, risked life, limb and property in order to assure that any-and-every American adult could indulge in whatever bacchanalia his fantasy could devise, contingent upon his securing consent from everyone at the orgy.
Justice Kennedy writing for the Court proclaimed that "Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today." Funny, that's what Julia Roberts said in 1993's "The Pelican Brief." You don't think that's where the Justice gets his constitutional philosophy from, do you?
They ascribe DOMA to an era "of stereotype-based thinking and animus" that violates the Equal Protection Clause. They offer Lawrence--that left-wing mugging of justice--as evidence that legal and social attitudes regarding gay marriage have swung gays' way. They claim that they are bound neither by precedent they don't like, nor to defend laws differentiating gays from non-gays, even those with a rational basis for their enactment.
At least we can be thankful that this is political branch "reasoning," which the people can repudiate at the next election. Unfortunately, the President's two orientationally-ambiguous appointees to the Court will undoubtedly be joining a slender majority in the near future to impose lasting damage on the American soul, with Catholic Justice Kennedy likely penning the opinion.
This entire exercise is so vast and unnecessary an over-reaching of federal power (So what else is new with this Administration?) as to make Noman cling to his guns and religion and want to join a tea party. The sympathetic case of Edith Windsor cited in the article --what would a liberal argument be without a tear-jerking story?--is disgusting, but not for the reasons proffered by the Administration.
If her and Thea Spyer's union had been federally recognized, it would have saved her $350,000 in estate taxes. Noman is irate that the federal government deigns to tax the dead after having taxed them their entire lives!
The Administration's conclusion is that federal non-recognition of their "marriage" therefore must violate the Equal Protection of the Constitution. Noman's conclusions are that (1) the federal estate tax should immediately be abolished; (2) this problem was set up by bad tax planning, not federal discrimination; and (3) even were that not the case, there are less radical ways to narrowly address the supposed defects in DOMA.
First, there would be no disparity in estate tax treatment if President Obama had made President Bush's elimination of the estate tax permanent and liberals hadn't fought tooth-and-nail to stave off total elimination until some year after Thea Spyer died. Liberals who clamor to tax people's money at death lose the moral authority to whine about unfairness when one of theirs gets hit.
It's their own fault! It is so typical of the Left to create problems, and then to propose solutions that accomplish yet more Liberal objectives, all-the-while creating more problems to "solve."
Second, it's a pity that Thea Spyer's tax advisors--any woman with an estate large enough to yield a $350,000 tax bill must have had tax advisers--hadn't heard about Joint Tenancy with Rights of Survivorship, considered a merger, or devised any of the myriad other ways that one might (and will have to in the future, thanks to the President's "compromise" with post-election Republicans last year) devise in order to avoid exactly this kind of governmental abuse.
Gays and lesbians seem to disproportionately suffer from this problem. It makes Noman wonder if Edith and Thea were lazy, stupid, or intent on setting this challenge up.
Third, if DOMA has a severability clause, which the DOJ's letter seems to presume, the defect can be more narrowly addressed than by declaring the millennia-deep understanding of marriage to violate the U.S. Constitution. Just think about the audacity of that declaration.
What's next, a declaration that private property violates the Constitution? Noman says these people's hubris knows no bounds, and won't until reality establishes some for them through The People.
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