Friday, June 26, 2015: Obergefell v. Hodges
June 26, 2015: Obergefell v. Hodges
Only a decade?
It seems like a lot longer.
I felt at the time, and I still do, that the Obergefell decision was an absolute disaster. It was legally deficient in its reasoning, which was pathetic. Justice Kennedy's text failed to grasp the existential nature of marriage, but perhaps that was understandable as Kennedy, currently 88 years old, was in his 20s and 30s in the 1960s. Indeed, he turned 30 in 1966, by which time Americans were well on their way to forgetting what the biological purpose of sex is, and what the nature of marriage is.
Kennedy's opinion embraced a sort of Age of Aquarius sense of "love" being the reason for marriage, at its core root. Love is an aspect of marriage, hopefully, and there's a lot to that, but sex is as well and the type that leads to children, at least frequently. Indeed, the entire institution and everything about it is oriented in that direction.
That has very little to do with homosexuality in that unions between the same gender don't result in children. I know the arguments about adoption and the like, but that's fairly far from the point as well. Indeed, in a way, that gets into the following topic about IVF that we covered recently.
IVF and a Half-Cath | June 11, 2025
Something that the generation that came of age after World War Two really brought into the culture is sort of the opposite of the Rolling Stone's skifflesque You Can't Always Get What You Want. That generation pretty much got almost all of what they wanted, and still are. That sense of entitlement resulted in cultural self centeredness in which you are entitled to be what you want to be and everyone else has to darned well accept it and the consequences.
The problem was and is, however, that Obergefell, as it strayed so far from the law, and so far from where the culture then was (it's a horrible example of the old trying to get ahead of the culture) that it was bound to spark a massive reaction. And it did.
The populist right rage that developed soon after was already burning, but Obergefell poured gasoline on the fire. The culture had lost much of the conservative wisdom on the nature of sex and marriage already, and had gone through Chesterton's fence with a bulldozer in this regard. A culture that had accepted, prior to the early 1950s that sex was properly in marriage, and properly between married men and women, had gone to pretty much accepting that sex was entertainment and marriage was a celebration of love rather than a loving (hopefully) childrearing, economic, natural unit. People basically forgot what their natures produced and men in particular figures that they were entitled to play around with Fran Geraud, and women figured they had to endure it. And that's where we remain today. A culture that basically thinks the Hawk Tuah Girl is amusing rather than a tramp.
But once that moral decay had reached the point where people who could excuse their own conduct could imagine themselves to somehow still be good Christians suddenly were confronted with homosexuals making the same intellectual arguments, and that being adopted by the Supreme Court, it was just too much.
It was also clear, in spite of what Kennedy thought, that Obergefell was going to open the floodgates of radical sexual behavior. Same sex sexual conduct, no matter what a person thinks of it, had been around for time immemorial, although it frankly even now is not really very well understood. But transgenderism had not been, or at least not in the same fashion. The groups backing the concept of transgenderism rushed into the field and gained ground enormously, which large numbers of people were not and are not willing to accept, including some homosexuals and included many feminists.
That this was going to cause massive civil disintegration was obvious. Disorganized groups on the right and middle that were already upset by the loss of industrial jobs and immigration now were faced with a massive social advance on the left which did not square with their basic understanding of themselves, and for good reason. To add to it, it was forced upon them.
None of this was necessary. Various states were moving towards various civil unions for homosexuals as it was. The slow march of legislation would have brought about a change, whether it was a good one or not, at a pace that would have been accepted. That's what happened to the disaster of no fault divorce. Instead Kennedy's opinion forced it all, and more than he had anticipated, all at once.
It destroyed respect for the Court and gave traditionalists of all types massive pause. It started the rush towards right wing populism which was already going on.
It lead directly to Donald Trump.
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