12.09.2012

Why can't Rod Dreher just address it?

Rod Dreher has a habit of deleting my best comments just when people take notice and seem interested. He is pretty upfront about not wanting to discuss the topic of same-sex conception rights, apparently he doesn't want to resolve the issue just yet. He leaves some comments up, but always seems to delete the best ones, like my response to Nate deep in this thread. In case he deletes these ones, I'll post them here:
John Howard says:
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December 8, 2012 at 11:26 pm
Specifically I say that the question of allowing a type of relationship to marry should be the same and always has been the same as whether we allow that type of couple to reproduce offspring together. If we want to allow same-sex couples to join their genes to make offspring together, we should allow them to marry, and vice versa.
What’s Rod got against my solution? What do you think you gain from suppressing it and not agreeing to it? What am I missing?

John Howard says:
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December 8, 2012 at 11:29 pm
“Apparently, someone needs to tell all these unmarried couples that they don’t have the right to procreate.”
Huh? Every religion already says that, most countries and states already say that, the supreme court says that…what are you talking about?

1 comment:

John Howard said...

John Howard says:
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December 9, 2012 at 10:25 am
“regarding what SCOTUS is likely to find,” I think it’s likely that Kennedy will expound on his mention in Lawrence v Texas that marriage is “about the right to have sexual intercourse.”

To say that the issue in Bowers was simply the right to engage in certain sexual conduct demeans the claim the individual put forward, just as it would demean a married couple were it said that marriage is just about the right to have sexual intercourse.

Yes, he says it is not “just” about the right to have sexual intercourse, but this sentence would make no sense if he didn’t believe that it was at its most essential simplistic core, about nothing but that. Kennedy identified the core of marriage for us, and not just in the opinion but also prominently in the syllabus, presumably because he wanted people to notice it, even though Lawrence had nothing to do with marriage.

Now, what does it mean to have a right to have sexual intercourse? Well, other cases (Loving and Skinner and Zablocki and probably others) have made it clear that the right at issue is procreation, making offspring together. Loving v Virginia was clearly about procreating offspring.

I think that they are very likely to bring that up again, and probably ask, exasperatedly, why lower courts never brought up the question of same-sex couples procreating offspring, and bring it up himself, just as he brought up marriage rights in Lawrence unprovoked by earlier arguments.