The cardinal mocked a secular culture that “seems to discover new rights every day.”
“I don’t recall a right to marriage,” he said, describing marriage, instead, as a “call.”
—Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, 2012
Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.”
—Loving v. Virginia, 1967
See also Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, Article 16.
The right to marry was particularly important to former slaves, who had been denied it. Loving was a racial discrimination case. Can anybody shed light on the question whether marriage was explicitly discussed by the Re-Founders of the 14th Amendment?
Zablocki v. Redhail:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=434&invol=374
Reaffirming holding in Loving and citing numerous other precedents regarding the rights attendant to private life, including the right to marry free of state laws that unfairly circumscribe that right. (The interest, requiring the payment of child support, was compelling — refusing to grant a marriage license was not narrowly tailored and not necessary to effectuate that interest, when the state had other, more targeted and less restrictive means at its disposal).
This is one of the things that opponents of gay marriage fail to understand. Even if the state has a compelling interest in protecting heterosexual marriage, it has so many more direct and less restrictive means to promote that interest than disallowing marriage among gays and depriving them of their civil liberties (if depriving someone of civil liberties could ever be used as a permissible means to promote the welfare of wholly independent third parties).
As a 55 year old, it sure seems to me like we’re going crazy creating rights and stuff - just more and more every time I look around. In the short time I’ve been alive, we discovered a right for black folks to attend public schools with whites, marry whites and work anywhere they’re qualified. But wait, there’s more - women now have a “right” to work anywhere they’re qualified, to make decisions about pregnancy and birth control, and to sign contracts in their own name! My damn head’s spinning and I haven’t even got to the new rights of gays to work anywhere they’re qualified - even the Army! - and in some states, the right to marry. My God, when will it stop? I mean, a little evolution is fine, but all these changes in a mere half a century is just too fast! And what’s even worse, as all these new rights have been created, my rights have stayed the same. How is that fair? What kind of world will it be when a middle-class white male has no greater rights than anyone else?
Yeah, life is unfair like that.
Very funny.
The Catholic Hierarchy seems to be possessed of a death wish. There seems to be no public issue that they won’t push their way into, displaying at all times their unique combination of ignorance, dishonesty, and overwhelming self-regard. A half-century of catastrophic pastoral failure, and the revelation that several Cardinals and Bishops seem to have committed multiple felonies in order to protect pedophiles and sexual predators doesn’t seem to have dented their serene faith in their own moral superiority. They also don’t seem to have noticed that the vast majority of American Catholics simply ignore the Bishop’s commands, regarding them as irrelevant at best. And in most of Europe, of course, people have just quit going to their churches altogether
They are able to remain in a state of denial because flunkeys like E.J. Dionne are willing to let them off the hook.
There’s also a selection-bias thing going on here, much as there is for CEOs and members of the financial industry. Catholic priests (and lay brothers and sisters) who aren’t serenely or even combatively OK with comforting the powerful and treading on the afflicted haven’t been moving up the ranks much in the past 30 years. The ones for whom these things were difficult moral issues are mostly long gone.
Which is why people like Garry Wills are important if there will ever be any change. E.J. Dionne’s (and others, it must be said) willingness to humour bishops in their most destructive delusions to the point that they would actually endorse trying to require the government to impose those delusions on unwilling citizens through tax and employment laws is noxious and intolerable.
Someone please remind me again, which branch of government includes Bishops? I must have been absent from class that day.
I think that would be “we the people”.
Apparently the U.S. House of Representatives. Although my copy of the Constitution says sweet F.A. about clergy being a branch of gummint.