A Heartbreaking Work

The decision which was made on May 26th by the California Supreme Court was in every way a concussion to the hope that I have for my future. The decision to uphold Proposition 8, passed in November of last year by a 5% margin, was extremely divisive. I can remember the intense despair that many of my friends and I felt, not because it hampered our ability to marry, but because it spoke so poorly of the tolerance common to the meagerly rational electorate. My view of that degree of hateful discrimination was, as it is ever more, simply this: I cannot bear the thought that so many people who are so bad at thinking are given so much power.

For me, ethical decisions are almost entirely logical processes which, while frequently stressing because of their ability to produce several rationally supported answers, are at the very least justified, arguable on some basis common to opponents, and amenable to scrutiny and revision. I will revisit this point often in this blog entry, in the debates which will inevitably follow it, and indeed throughout my life, owing to the maddening insistence of a worldview that almost any pain is a better option than intellectual numbness. The first part of my criticism stems from the way that people voted on the initial ballot; it is an issue of predictability. Deplorably, the voter data speaks volumes about the way in which lifestyle, not logic, informs the way that people vote.* I thought that in the supreme court, a body whose title trumpets the gravity of its purpose, there must be a tendency to get it right. In other words, I do not have confidence that any random majority will choose the right thing most of the time, but I do hope that a trained and rigorous council of experts will do just that. Today, that sentiment is proved worthless.

Briefly, for those of you who have not had time to read the public content the 6-1 majority decision, or about any of the defenses for either side, here is an unbiased recapitulation of the reason that the appeal was denied. After Proposition 8 was passed, the opponents to the proposition alleged that the vote amounted to a revision, which necessitates that two-thirds of the legislature rule in favor of its ratification. The corollary of this argument is that the law which would be enacted as a result of passing Proposition 8 is not simply an amendment to the state constitution, and therefore not available to the public to decide based on opinion. It is inaccurate, although understandable given the intense frustration prompted by the CASC decision, to suggest that the court ruled that a ban on same-sex marriages is constitutional. In fact, they have done the opposite of this only last year, whereupon over 18,000 same-sex couples were legally married. Rather, the CASC ruled first, in 2008, that marriage should extend to same-sex couples, and has ruled now, in 2009, that the public does indeed have a right to vote that it wants an amendment to the state constitution which would disallow this sort of union. Attorney General Jerry Brown also asserted in his appeal that the proposition would violate a Californian citizen's right to privacy, and that it rescind an inalienable right. The CASC flatly denied both of these appeals, stating simply: "No authority supports the attorney general's claim."

I say categorically that if you have voted in favor of Proposition 8, if you do favor its sentiment, or if you support the efforts of anti-appeal campaigns in that vein, I have an overwhelming and unmatched disdain for your position. There are many opinion-related matters in a wide variety of fields in which I may oppose a certain view in the argument for which I can see some sort of merit. That is to say, it is absolutely the case that I have disagreements with people, but I can almost always see that my opponent has some reasoning. Gay marriage is one instance which is not governed by this general rule of understanding. In my research of the initial proposition and of the recent court decision, I have encountered dozens of criticisms of gay marriage and of the position supporting gay marriage. Every tiny word of it is nonsense, and wholly unsupportable by any mind with the slightest portion of decency, modesty, or honesty. Not only do I firmly revile the desire to ban gay marriage, but I can see absolutely no evidence to support the assertion that is it either ethically supportable or utilitarian. The anti-gay marriage position is small, it is disgusting, and it embarrasses me every last second that it is allowed to be propagated.

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*According to the raw data collected and aggregated by the Sacramento Bee following the poll results, those most keen to vote to restrict the legality of gay marriage were: Republican or conservative (82/85%), black (70%) or Hispanic (53%), Protestant (65%), Catholic (64%), a high school graduate (56%), older than 30 (55% for voters 30-44; 54% for voters 45-64; and 61% for voters 65 and older), gun owners (62%), supportive of the war in Iraq (85%), and supportive of Bush's policies and presidency (86%). According to the same data, those who voted to support the gay right to marriage were: registered Democrats, independents, or liberals (64/54/78%), white or Asian (51%), non-religious (90%), and post-graduate students (60%). Interestingly, 61% of the people who voted YES on Proposition 8 also said that race was a factor for their vote in the Presidential election.

Morality in the Modern Communitarian Archetype

The thrust of communitarianism, as I understand it, is the assessment that we are no longer a nation-wide community, but rather we identify more closely with smaller communities based on some shared human quality, such as an ethical standpoint, pop culture appetite, linguistic distinction, and so on. Although the idea for this entry finds its genesis in a plenary session given by Michael Daxner, I have heard an identical sentiment very often in the States, and in a disturbingly increasing frequency: one man has no right to judge another, at least in part because the first does not and cannot know the circumstances of the other. I assume that in order to give the argument another figment of support, there is a tangential assertion that it is not proper or suitable for one person to judge another because that is not the charge of humans within a community or between communities. Neither of these claims holds any logical weight, not least of all because the people who hold the belief are necessarily all-purpose dunces, and I will seek to dissolve both of them with stark and abrasive force. Daxner raised several brilliant points, well-measured and finely conceived, which linked the idea of communitarianism to the practice of civil disobedience, examined the nature of morality as rooted in our self-consciousness, and then constructed a framework by which we could evaluate the legitimacy of a world court. Ubiquitous in his lecture were the themes of membership, responsibility, and judgement, which will likewise be echoed throughout this reflection.

One of the vicious dangers of communitarianism is that a system of checks is rendered execrable and, in some way, an unwelcome moral imposition. If communities are allowed to establish their own versions of morality and of law, two constructs whose differences I will attempt to outline presently, then it would be difficult to moderate which system of thought prevails in a community, and to determine how efficient and fair is that mode of action which punishes infractions. Indeed this is the crux of communitarianism, which forces a clumsy respect between communities, and more, a tacit permission for each to govern itself, based on internal laws and customs. This concept seems to be grossly incomplete, in two major ways, which confound the mind for their ignorance of the inclusions requisite to complex societies. First, communitarianism fails to acknowledge, and indeed plainly rejects the possibility of objective morality, even in cases which relate to basic efficiency. Secondly, because of the difficulty inherent in defining the boundaries--and thus the constituents--of a given community, communitarianism is a riddle whose amorphism augments the grasp of the powerful and striates the necks of the meek. It seems that if a community is defined too broadly, that is, if a community is based on something so broad as racial background but then contains several different and oppositional political ideologies, it would be impossible for every group to feel as if has a stake in leadership; the opportunity for alienation and subjugation based on ideological disagreement is obviously present, and given the non-interventionism implicit in communitarianism, that subjugation would have to be addressed internally. In simpler words, for all the cultural safety and heterogeneity that communitarianism provides, it likewise confounds the effort to assure intra-communal equality. Objectivism thus destroyed and disregarded, control is also lost, and balance is become dust.