Dahlia Lithwick is Not My Strange Bedfellow
Damn it, it's getting hard to say how dumb Dahlia Lithwick is without everyone beating you to it. Maybe this time I can at least scoop the Clerk.
OK, Volokh has already pointed out that supporters of the Federal Marriage Amendment probably don't think they're bigots, and Unlearned Hand wonders how she can expect Bush to become "the guy who first used the Constitution to codify bigotry" when the document supported slavery from the day it was founded until the Civil War. Fortunately, Lithwick is generous to her critics, and almost every paragraph she writes can be mocked without mercy. For instance:
So what is the downside of letting Massachusetts set its own rules and letting the courts chew over the whole mess for a few years? A lack of uniformity. For a while, we'd have a crazy quilt of policies across the country, with some states permitting gay marriage and others banning it. So what? A lack of uniformity is the norm where marriage law is concerned. The only other negative, to the minds of the far right, is that some Americans might be allowed to live in states that accord them the right to marry.We call that "federalism."
And we call this triumphant (almost orgasmic) moment of self-satisfaction the consummation of a "marriage of convenience." Until Roe v. Wade, a lack of uniformity in abortion was also the norm. A quick Google search shows that Lithwick isn't backing Scalia in any federalist revolution. She mentions in her own article that the Defense of Marriage Act is quite possibly (probably?) waiting to be struck down as unconstitutional. Yet she seems blind to the very idea that FMA proponents fear most: that after Massachusetts, not only the federal DOMA but all the state acts as well are struck down by the same band of federalists who gave us Lawrence v. Texas. With, it's noted, her applause.
She's called Bush a bigot... do we get to call her a fair-weather federalist?
Comments
Posted by: Avi Frisch | February 11, 2004 3:53 PM
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