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News from the Future, O-boy-did-we-fall-for-it Edition

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"Remember these? Words. They have meaning."
Reuters, June 26, 2023 -- Eight years ago to the day, Obergefell v. Hodges made same-sex marriage legal nationwide, setting up legal precedents that ensured a vast expansion of marriage rights in the United States. Six years ago, Conservative Footsoldiers of Doom v. Tolerance Against Haters overturned the controversial Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, enabling Congress and the states to establish campaign fundraising and spending rules with an eye toward preventing billionaires and corporations from buying elections.

Today, the Supreme Court handed down a 7-2 decision in Burgermeister v. Hodgepodge that relied on those precedents to eliminate political donations on behalf of families.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the majority, highlighting the corporate nature of family and the powerful necessity to keep corporations from interfering with elections.

The centrality of the late Justice Anthony Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell became clear as Roberts quoted it:

Especially against a long history of disapproval of their relationships, the denial to same-sex couples of the right to marry works a grave and continuing harm. The imposition of this disability on gays and lesbians serves to disrespect and subordinate them.

After a brief poetic ode to the late Justice and a non-denominational curse on the runaway harvester that caused the bizarre reaping accident in which he died, Chief Justice Roberts went on:

Though I originally dissented from this opinion, written by a jurist of seriousness and only mild turgidity, I have come to appreciate its wisdom. Families change. The definition of family changes. The Constitution changes, not literally, of course, but through the interpretations of this Court, which coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and meaningful comprehension. Our rulings, to scale to the pinnacle of freedom that America promises through its founding documents, or at least our interpretations of them, must change as well to make sure that nobody's feelings get hurt.

A history of the development of the family followed, detailing the Supreme Court cases that enabled polygamy, same-sex adult incest marriage, marriage of two or more personalities in a person with multiple personality disorder, single-person marriage, adult incest, and ultimately, in The Krogsberg Forty v. Connecticut, the extension of marriage rights to any number of any people or personalities who "think it would be pretty cool to get married".

"This was the summit of human freedom," Chief Justice Roberts wrote,

and it led to an offshoot case, Buncha Dudes v. Alabama, in which the 23 (or 24, it was hard to tell sometimes, but it wasn't really our place to question) members of the Buncha Dudes family demanded, and won, the rights of an incorporated body that have been so enjoyed by corporations. The freedom to marry literally became the freedom to incorporate. They are now identical, in that there is no possible logical test that could differentiate between the adult members of a family and a corporation. And as such, groups of individuals who incorporate into a marriage fall under Conservative Footsoldiers of Doom, and are ineligible to donate money to political campaigns.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote a lengthy dissent, but crumpled it up and threw it away just before turning it in. Justice Clarence Thomas concurred with it anyway, stating, "That's still better than what they have."

Justice Antonin Scalia -- the octagenarian hater recently called "the (in)justice who just. wont. die." by influential news magazine #GQ -- startled court observers by filing a separate concurrence and reading it from the bench. In its entirety, it read, "As screwed up as this is, you idiots deserve it."

Comments (11)

Like a vision of a future hell that will never be. This country will have collapsed into oblivion long before we reach this point.

I don't know, Mark. I've underestimated the tenacity of stupidity before and been proved wrong.

Like many diseases, liberalism is dangerous partly because it doesn't kill its host quickly enough.

What, no mention of the landmark case, Zombie Hordes v. State of Florida?

You're getting your cases confused, DmL. That was the voting rights case that gave the Walking Dead the right to vote in jurisdictions outside of Chicago.

This is called on the run jurisprudence, you make it up as you go along, nervous twitches, bad dreams, constipation, and an overbearing lust to be both liked, thoughtful and flexible, actually spineless and unprincipled, are a few of the characteristics of the modern progressive legal scholar.

The Federalist (which really is turning into some kind of weird libertarian rag) just ran a pro-polyamory piece that sounds like it was written by a selfish, overgrown child bent on walking her soul deliberately to hell and ruining her body, her family, and her life. Her husband seems quite willing to cooperate and do his part in the ruination. And they have a little child.

I admit to having difficulty imagining what "rights" an open marriage advocate wants. It's not like they are (in some cases) even pretending to have a stable relationship with most of the people they want to sleep with. Indeed, this disgrace to the name of woman refers to the joys of "falling in love over and over and over again." So what special rights does she want? Does she really want all her one-night-stands to have the right to squabble over her medical care with her husband if she is in an auto accident and in a coma? If she dies, does she want her property to be divided between her husband and child and the last, I dunno, five men she recently slept with? And vice versa if her husband dies? Or is the goal to have all zoning ordinances overturned that require that not more than three unrelated people live together in a house in a certain neighborhood? I almost think people who talk about this stuff have no clue what they even want.

I saw that article this morning, Lydia, and it's every bit as appalling as you say. There's more than a hint of exhibitionism in it, and one can only contemplate with horror what lies ahead for her small child.

As for what rights she's demanding, it's not exactly clear, except to say that she wants some official sanction for her behavior, some legal regime which attempts to codify sexual and familial anarchy. It really doesn't matter at this point what it might be. The fact that the web of governing statutes, jurisprudence, and regulations would have to be infinitely complex (and made more so by differences from one jurisdiction to the next), means that enforcement will be impossible to predict, and mostly arbitrary. The substantive outcomes will often be incomprehensible or just bizarre in any given context.

Such a regime will ultimately be found to be intolerable, but not before many, many lives are destroyed. And this terrible cruelty goes under the names of "love" and "freedom"

"The Federalist (which really is turning into some kind of weird libertarian rag) just ran a pro-polyamory piece..."

This should be no surprise. As David Mills writes, and as many trad-cons have long understood, libertarians are not our friends:

http://www.aleteia.org/en/religion/article/libertarians-are-not-our-friends-5260549650644992

Not when they are radical ones as opposed to...well...my kind of moderates, NM. :-) But we won't argue about that now. My point was that the Federalist used to have more of an actual conservative bent to it (or such was my perception), but this thing might have appeared in Salon.

"liberalism is dangerous partly because it doesn't kill its host quickly enough."

That's because in its early stages it hides and disguises itself as this form or the other of common sense progressivism, and goes into various stages of (apparent) regression whenever treated with powerful antidotes. Meanwhile everything continues apace moving ever-leftward, as we've all witnessed from the time we became aware enough to recognize the general direction in which we were perpetually moving. Ultimately, though, it will 'come out' full bore, attacking and killing every remaining viable (yet weakened) organ in the body. Which is very close to where we are now, I should think. That "tiny box" of conseratism of which Mark speaks in one of his posts is about to disappear.

I'm not sure how much worse it can possibly get than the late SCOTUS decision to force homosexual "marriage" down all our throats. Everything that follows, it seems to me, is just the natural progression of things when a nation is determined to self-annihilation. This is "chioice devouring itself" on a grand scale (forgive me if I misapply the term, Lydia). Homeschoolers: you've been moved to the top of the hit list!

"Ultimately, though, it will 'come out' full bore..."

What Terry Morris described is precisely the Warning from Stalinist Russia that I blogged about previously, in which Dmitri Shostakovich covertly told us in music what they were forbidden from saying with words. We're midway or more through that progression right now.

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