Speaker Boehner Wants your Money wasted Defending DOMA
The House GOP wants to defend marriage discrimination against Gays with your tax dollars. They’ve hired an ex-Bush gunslinger to do so, and since Eric Holder won’t defend DOMA because the Obama administration thinks it’s unconstitutional (aside: whatever happened to the sentiment the GOP used to express that “elections have consequences?”) the House Republicans want to defend the poorly crafted bigoted legislation. To add social conservative insult to social conservative injury, they want to do it with your tax dollars.
When DOMA finally gets to the Supreme Court it will fall as surely as the sun rises, for it’s only justification is religious bigotry. Most defenses mounted so far have had to reach back to the bible in one way or another and all of the non biblical defenses are based on Gay Marriage somehow harming the institution of marriage itself.
David Boies and Ted Olson will win the case because nobody can clearly demonstrate how gays being able to marry somehow harms heterosexuals being able to marry. This is a futile rear guard grandstand action by and for socially conservative religious bigots.
I call them bigots because they are - Christians think they own marriage, and they think they own the word. They do not. My wife and I are atheist, we’ve been married almost 29 years, and we will be married the rest of our lives together. No religious authority was required for us to get married, and the license was issued by civil authorities.
I have friends who are Buddhists, and even though their marriage is non Christian, they are married as well. I have friends who follow Shinto, and I have friends who are Hindu, and they are all married. Indeed, they made movies and in the credits they could have truthfully said “No Christians were harmed in the filming of this Marriage.”
My wife and I went on a Cruise that stopped at Cozumel, and a Gay couple got off and got married there. They got married because they are in love, they got married because they could. They got married in a church. They got married because they wanted to. They got married because there’s no good reason to not be married when you know you want to be with someone your whole life long. They got married for the same reason my wife and I did, and both of those events were happy.
Christians don’t own marriage, they don’t own the word, they don’t own the institution. No religion owns marriage, no religion can. Before Christians, Jews, or any other stripe of Abrahamic faith even existed marriage existed.
Civil authorities, not religious, grant the license. Ship captains and judges can marry people, and some mayors can. Sumerians got married before the first verse of the Torah was written, before the first scroll of the bible was written, before the Koran was written. Greeks and Romans got married before the fish became a symbol of Christianity. Gay marriage was not explicitly outlawed until a Christian tyrant, the Holy Roman Emperor, outlawed it.
What’s driving this rant? The fact that if the bigot theocrats in charge of the GOP right now had their way they would outlaw my atheist marriage if they could. The fact that this country is free, respects rights, and doesn’t kowtow to any religious group. The fact that some homophobe bigot called into a KMBZ radio talk show a few days ago and spouted such nonsense that I had to reply somewhere.
House Republicans have hired former solicitor general Paul D. Clement to handle the legal defense of the federal government’s law banning the recognition of same-sex marriage, and they want the Justice Department to pick up the legal expenses.
Clement, a partner in the Washington office of the firm King and Spalding, served as the government’s top appellate lawyer for three years under President George W. Bush.
House leaders asked him to step in after Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced this year that the administration would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court. Several same-sex couples have sued over the law.
I used to be a minority with those views of gay marriage, but more and more Americans are beginning to realize how stupid it is to ban it.