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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25247 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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I mean, I had a whole paragraph immediately before that one:

at the time that interracial marriage rose to prominence, the question was relatively simple (in comparison), and one that was reasonably easily cabined as a purely legal question. Everyone more or less agreed that race was basically a thing. Everyone more or less agreed on what marriage was. They just had to figure out what to do with these things.

I even said later:

I recall predicting (from my experience taking a queer theory class at the time) that, if anything, we were going to see that the decisions made in the past concerning things like interracial marriage were, not wrong, but woefully shallow, as the philosophical eye would no longer take things like "race" to be more-or-less agreed upon as mostly existing as a thing, and that it might become messier in the future.

So sure, nowadays, people are trying to ask more deep philosophical questions about race, along the lines of what you're talking about. But I don't think this was so apparent at the time.

I’m not sure how many of those questions were being asked at the time. My instinct is that there were enough people in the conversation for it to include those topics, if only as a status differentiator.

What I’m trying to say is that the gay marriage debate is more similar to that one. The correct response to a white supremacist trying to lifeguard the gene pool was “no, everyone gets equal protection under the law.” Likewise, the response to a fundamentalist trying to defend marriage was “nope, still equal protection.” This was true whether the opposition was making a practical or philosophical argument.

The trans debate hinges more on definitions than either of those cases.

Likewise, the response to a fundamentalist trying to defend marriage was “nope, still equal protection.”

That could have possibly been a response. Again, impossible to find my old comments from legal blogs back at that time, but I have a clear memory of writing a comment where I considered various possible grounds on which the Court could have ruled in favor of Obergefell. I concluded that the one that would have made the least hash out of the law would have been to just drop EPC and be done with it (this would have required a little bit of effort, because of the societal context, but could have been done relatively simply). But that's not what we got. We got a hash. And it's not surprising that we got a hash, because that's where the state of the discourse was at the time. It wasn't just a simple, clear-cut question without any deep philosophical import. It was absolutely considered to be deeply intertwined with these issues of sex, the nature of sexual behavior/orientation, identity, nature/nurture, and the purpose of marriage. I think the easiest and best evidence of this, if you simply disbelieve my recollection, is to read both the majority and dissenting opinions in Obergefell. In contrast, Loving was simple, to the point, and unanimous. The sole concurrence makes the reasoning even more simple and concrete - racial classifications are just bad, mkay.

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