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February 14, 2004
Excellent email from a reader
I don't usually put email from readers in my blog, but this was such a good one it seemed appropriate. The writer (who wants to remain anonymous) sent me this in response to an email exchange I had with a commenter named "Chuck" at Bill Quick's excellent blog, Daily Pundit. Here's the entire reply: Chuck,My posts on the Federal Marriage Initiative (which I think should be renamed the "Federal Incidents of Marriage Initiative") can be read here and here. posted by Eric on 02.14.04 at 03:51 PM |
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I really should read William Quick (a quick man!) more often than I do. Your friend is excellent, makes excellent points. I notice that, for all their supposed concern for the unborn, they don't seem to be too interested in the abortion issue, except as it can be used to score cheap points against "activist judges".
That last point is something I've been thinking about a great deal. As in the President's State of the Union speech, they love to attack judges and courts while really attacking homosexual men and women. Everything is painted as a power struggle between state legislatures representing The Will Of The People vs. evil black-robed oligarchs.
John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner truly won the right to privacy even more than they realized, for, even though theirs is the very name of that historic decision, and though they are pictured in full-page full-color in the cover article in "Newsweek" (June 7, 2003) right after the decision (my copy is the one with the two delicious Lesbians on the cover!) -- even with all that, those two men now seem to be more private, more obscure, than ever.
Everybody knows about Norma McCorvey, the "Jane Roe" of the abortion decision (now, ironically, she is anti-abortion). But, in every discussion I get into about the Lawrence decision, the discussion is always shifted to "the homosexual agenda" and "those activist courts". Every opponent of the decision wants to frame it in big abstract terms of "the homosexual movement" "going to court" instead of "through the democratic process" to "advance their agenda".
I always seem to be the only one who ever mentions the two men by name, John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner, who were ARRESTED in the middle of the night, hauled away in their underwear, and TAKEN TO court AGAINST THEIR WILL, and fined $200 each for making love in the privacy of their own home. It was ONLY THEN that they appealed and, after over a year, finally went to the Supreme Court for the purpose, NOT of "advancing" any "agenda" but simply of GETTING THE GOVERNMENT OFF THEIR BACKS. They didn't want any subsidies or favors. All they wanted was to be left alone, "the right most valued by civilized men", as Justice Brandeis put it so eloquently long ago. Apparently, that is too much to ask.
I'm still mad about this because we're still debating this and I'm still having to refute the same old lies. All this talk about a "homosexual lobby" is exactly like all the old talk about a "Jewish lobby".
I'm very glad that those two beautiful women Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, after 51 years together (longer than I've been alive!), are now openly marrying in defiance of the law against them, just as Rosa Parks had defied Jim Crow in 1955. Let Bush explain to us why their marriage is somehow less sacred than Britney Spears's 55-minute fling. Let the debate center on concrete individual men and women and their loves.
Just as the Holocaust deniers hate and try to discredit Anne Frank's Diary because it focuses our attention on the life and death of one concrete individual, a teenage girl, rather than an abstract "Zionist Conspiracy", so do their counterparts fear to let individual men and women like John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner or Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon be named and known rather than an abstract "Homosexual Agenda" and "Judicial Activism".