Well, it's been a bit of day here at the wire, between the movement asshats discussing how to repeal the 14th Amendment to the 14th Amendment's revenge in today's ass kicking... errr... ruling on Proposition 8 and the future of pluralistic American society.
Time to step back and just take in the events of the past couple of days and maybe get some perspective.
And part of doing that is breaking out that plastic baggy with the black tarry lump of incongruity, loading it into the irony bong and sparking that bitch up...
One of the major push backs against today's Perry v. Schwarzenegger ruling from the usual suspects has been the expected chorus of "black robed tyrants disregarding the will of the people...judges aren't supposed to make law, they have to respect the voters..."
Seriously, do I even have to provide the links?
Oddly enough, it is often those folks who are first to go to the "original intent of the framers" card in debates like this. In fact, that was part of the defendants' argument in Perry; that our nation's legal traditions relative to marriage going back to the founders have only included notions of heterosexual relationships.
Well, forget the fact that those assertions were destroyed during the trial... let's talk for a moment about the original intent of the founders relative to the will of the people. Because the principal framer of the Constitution, James Madison, had a few choice things to say about the voters and vox populi in general.
Federalist No. 10 explains why direct democracy is not such a great thing, given the whims of the mob, namely the "dangerous vice" of factions:
Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence, of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true.
[...]
By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
[...]
From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.
It was this kind of fractiousness and mob rule that Lincoln was addressing in his famous Lyceum speech of 1838 where he almost presciently seems to predict the coming Civil War, and exactly that kind of mob mentality that Madison was warning against and trying to empower the newly formed republic to resist.
And it was in this spirit that the 14th Amendment was passed; a post bellum clarification of the relationship of citizens to the state and vice versa and a clear statement of the protections afforded by the state to the rights of individuals.
In many ways, it really is the "evil" that many movement conservatives claim it is: a recognition of the moral equivalency of all Americans regardless of the birth, station, religious belief or lack thereof, skin color, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, etc... The short hand is that no American is inherently better or worse than any other in the eyes of the law, period.
Like, John Rawls veil of ignorance, we Americans theoretically exist as a tabula rasa, with no bias for or against us in civil society, as long as we follow some pretty basic rules, e.g. don't take shit that doesn't belong to you, don't make everyday life more dangerous or complicated for your neighbors than is already necessary, etc...
Today's Perry decision was a reaffirmation of that principle in no uncertain terms. It was Madison's desire for a moderating influence on the winds of popular opinion and the operation of the 14th Amendment as the graphite rod in the populist reactor that pulled California back from the brink of gross stupidity today.
So no, Red State, just because you voted for it doesn't necessarily make it so. The framers of the Constitution managed to see to that explicitly.
Not that the "will of the people" has ever been all that important to the movement conservatives. What we see in the reactions from the right are simply the political expediency of bumper sticker politics. The real issue is more subtle, and at the same time more audacious.
The modern American conservative movement, as previously noted by Dr. Strych9 is simply incompatible with American democracy. The unremitting hatred of pluralistic society and the intellectual freedom and personal opportunity that it represents is the real enemy of the conservative movement.
Judicial rulings like Perry, based on laws like the 14th Amendment represent a direct insult to everything the current conservative movement believe. It is an affirmation of the moral equivalency of all Americans, regardless of your background, belief or genetic makeup.
Yeah, that just makes them pea-soup-spitting, head-spinning crazy... they just go nuts...
mojo sends
