Mao III

Beginning in Hawaii more than a decade ago, queer activists have sought access to civil marriage through legal actions challenging what they believed to be discriminatory practices and statutes. Where they have been successful, cultural opponents have decried "judicial activism" and declared that any expansion of equal protection jurisprudence is in effect "legislating from the bench," i.e. creating new rights while bypassing the proper legislative or constitutional channels. The expansion of social and economic rights and privileges, goes the argument, is solely within the purview of the people's representatives in their state houses, senates, etc.

So. The Vermont legislature legalizes gay marriage and then overrides a gubernatorial veto (an attempt to "legislate from the executive office"?) to make marriage in the state gender neutral. Semifamous eschatologist and Norelco spokesmodel Rod Dreher avers that although it is better to burn than to gaymarry, this was the "right way" to get gaymarried. He's smart enough to recognize that with the practice now legal in several states and soon-to-be-legal in several others, the US Supreme Court is sooner rather than later going to be forced to take up the issue, and assuming Baby Jesus doesn't send His High Priggishness Paul on an errand from heaven to go all Baghdad on their asses, the queers will triumph, as the Supremes senza Il Nino will likely conclude that Bill Clinton's Defense of Marriage Act and its baby-DOMA offspring are unconstitutional violations of full faith and credit, and that dykes married in Boston are likewise married in Boise.

Dreher's hope, at once hilarious and uncomfortable and terrifying, like the Fischli-Weiss Rube Goldberg device, is that the Supreme Court will act swiftly enough that the remaindered cultural ressentiment luxuriating in semiretirement among the foreclosures and abandoned vehicles of pre-Apocalyptic America will rise up, rise up!, to pass a Constitutional Amendment "erecting a high barrier or protection around religious institutions." I have been contemplating this notion for fifty or sixty long seconds now, and if I were to try my hand at the text of such and amendment, I'd probably go with something like: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." It lacks my habitual flourish, but it is direct.

I understand the fearful burden Dreher imagines will soon be imposed, that Rick Warren may yet have to break off from his Proustian ambition to document the full-spectrum sensate experience of memory-temptation against the grim, gray tides of ever-effacing memory in order to officiate some gaymarriage, but as Rick Warren is not a county clerk I imgine he will find it within himself to escape from that pit and pendulum. About Dreher, meanwhile, I'm less sure. A man in a constant state of hysterical suggestive hypnosis, as if plugged into a slow-drip IV of Ketamine and cough syrup, I suspect his own black future holds endless Moonie stadiums of matching-tux fag couples staring in nuptial awe as Dreher self-flagellates himself bloody for the sin of officiating their multitudinous wedding.