DOMA Decision Spells Doom for Old Time Religion

[cbayer]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/clay-naff/the-doma-decision-spells-_b_3509649.html

Clay Farris Naff
Science and religion writer; Journalist; Author

Posted: 06/27/2013 12:06 pm

Defenders of Old Time Religion, take heed. Justice Antonin Scalia gives you fair warning. In a DOMA dissent steeped in wormwood and gall, he makes this prediction:

As far as this Court is concerned, no one should be fooled; it is just a matter of listening and waiting for the other shoe. By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition. Henceforth those challengers will lead with this Court's declaration that there is "no legitimate purpose" served by such a law, and will claim that the traditional definition has "the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure" the "personhood and dignity" of same-sex couples.

Those scare quotes are meant to remind the reader that so far as Hizonner is concerned, same-sex couples are altogether unfit to associate with the straight race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they have no rights a straight man is bound to respect.

Scalia is right -- not about the inferiority of same-sex couples, of course, but about the inevitability of equal rights. The other shoe will drop, and it will squash Old Time Religion.

Having bound themselves so tightly to rightwing politics, fundamentalists, evangelicals, and the Catholic hierarchy are doomed to lose and lose big.

more at link

[trotsky]

1. One can assume that at one's own risk.

Defeat after defeat (interracial marriage, suffrage, slavery) doesn't seem to have brought "old time religion" much closer to extinction. It's religious belief - facts won't change many minds.

[okasha]

2. I live in an overwhelmingly majority-

minority, majority Catholic community.

A theater group I volunteer with will meet tomorrow to pick up scripts and do some preliminary tech assignments for The Laramie Project. Hispanic kids, like the youth in other ethnic groups, know other kids who are LGBT, go to school with those LGBT kids, socialize with those LGBT kids, offer sympathy and support when those LGBT kids break up with their significant others--in other words, respond to LGBT persons no differently than the youth of other ethnicities.

The bigots have 20 years at most, probably not even that, before the other shoe falls.

[cbayer]

3. That's great to hear.

My kids were raised around lots GLBT adults and went to school with kids who were out of the closet and in their closest social circles.

It was amazing to see how fast things changed during that generation and how it has continued to change since then.

Those who hold on to their bigotry and becoming more and more marginalized, and that's a very good thing.

[okasha]

4. I'm an "overage" art student,

and most of my classmates are Hispanic, Native or a combination of both. When one of them broke up with his boyfriend, the whole department, students and teachers, LGBT and straight, rallied around him. It was lovely.

[cbayer]

5. I am rarely exposed to GLBT bigotry these days.

I know it's out there and heard quite a bit of it on the radio during my recent road trip.

But I rarely heard anyone say anything out loud, even in the deepest parts of the bible belt.

I can also sense the increasingly level of comfort when out with my GLBT friends. They are more able to act like they usually do without anxiety or fear.

It's been a long time coming, but there is definitely a sea change.