cognitive dissident

As expected, the wingnut whining has been especially annoying ever since the California Supreme Court's pro-marriage decision yesterday. Pam Spaulding writes about "Freeper, fundie heads exploding over CA marriage decision" over at Pandagon, and here are a few other examples of right-wing rhetoric:

Janet LaRue breathlessly exclaims at ClownHall that the court has "ordered" same-sex marriages, and asks "Will Citizens Submit?" (The decision, of course, does no such thing...but why should facts get in the way of a sensationalistic headline?)

National Review's William Duncan claims "Supreme Overreach," but his terminology is so confused that he calls his anti-marriage allies "pro-marriage."

At Human Events, Ernest Istook refers to equal marriage rights supporters as "the Neville Chamberlains of the cultural wars." Istook is confused as well: California's pro-equality ruling may become the Brown v. Board of Education or Loving v. Virginia of our era; it is nothing like Chamberlain's Munich Agreement (which gave part of Czechoslovakia--Sudetenland, for those who paid attention in history class--to Hitler).

On the other (sensible) side of the aisle, Glenn Greenwald has pre-debunked most of the conservative "arguments" already. At Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum looks at the polling trends and foresees "a very tough campaign" to defeat the anti-marriage ballot initiative. Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick asks "Who You Calling Activist?" and thoroughly demolishes that anti-marriage (and anti-factual) "activist judges" trope:

When it comes to gay marriage, California is a hotbed of activism. Their activist Legislature has twice passed bills that would legalize gay marriage, and their activist governor has twice vetoed those bills. That same activist Legislature also enacted a ban on same-sex marriage in 1977, and its activist citizenry passed a statewide ballot initiative in 2000 doing the same thing. While polls show that Californians are increasingly supportive of gay marriage, other activist citizens have been collecting what now amounts to 1.1 million signatures to amend their constitution in November to say that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." But then today the state's activist Supreme Court got in on the activist action, finding in a 4-3 decision that the California ban on same-sex marriage violates the "fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship." That makes everybody an activist in California, just by virtue of the fact that they are acting. (Let it be noted that it's particularly activist of the state Legislature and its citizens to be banning and legalizing gay marriage all at the same time.) [emphasis added]

Andrew Sullivan thinks through the situation, and comes to a principled--although still conservative--conclusion:

People can talk about activist liberal judges all they want. But the simple truth is that what has changed these past twenty years is not the nature of judges, but our collective understanding of what sexual orientation is. [...] It is simply that the next generation has grown up with a different definition of who gay people are. They see gay people as interchangeable with straight people. They don't think we're inferior to them. Because they know us.

Once you alter that basic understanding, then re-fitting the law to account for it may, at first blush, look liberal or activist, but in fact, it's just removing what now appears a massive anachronism and anomaly. Yes: this means that the court is dong something the first Californians would have regarded as outrageous. But that goes for so many other issues as well, especially race and gender, where our core definitions have shifted with time and knowledge.

Is this shift an ideological one? I don't believe so. It's an empirical one, based on increased knowledge of who gay people are.