Friday, March 29, 2013

You Gotta Have Fringeship

Dr. Benjamin Carson has been touted as a rising star in the Republican party ever since he raised eyebrows at the National Prayer Breakfast by being snarky to President Obama.  (Of course, if a liberal had been rude to President Bush, he would have been targeted — literally — by the orcosphere.)  But it seems as if the good doctor is already fringing out.  On Sean Hannity’s show he laid out his views on marriage equality:

Well, my thoughts are that marriage is between a man and a woman. It’s a well-established, fundamental pillar of society and no group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality. It doesn’t matter what they are. They don’t get to change the definition. So he [sic], it’s not something that is against gays, it’s against anybody who wants to come along and change the fundamental definitions of pillars of society. It has significant ramifications.

So with the GOP’s awkward attempts to get on the good side of marriage equality, this is probably one of those moments that they’d just as soon not have publicized.  And I wonder whether Dr. Carson, who is African-American, holds the same view that “changing the definition” of marriage applied to the Supreme Court ruling that banned interracial marriage.

Maybe he and Rep. Don Young should put together a road show for National Brotherhood Week.

One bark on “You Gotta Have Fringeship

  1. We’ve changed the definition of citizen and eligible voter in the last 150 years, and we’ve recognized separate but equal is a fallacy and an unworkable proposition. We’ve changed marriagable age frequently over the same period, and adult v. child correspondingly as understanding of how child is construed. And while all of those things have resulted in some societal changes, the complete dissolution of society the doomsayers predicted for each of these things still hasn’t happened. Carson should do some reading on public opinions on Dred Scott, Jim Crow and the Suffrage movement, just to get an idea how similar his complaints about LGBT people sound to those from those times about treating African Americans as free equals, or accepting that women have the capacity to cast a meaningful ballot the same as men.

    And if the “definition of marriage” is immutable (as Carson insists), and that definition translates in any way to a loving, committed arrangement for mutual support (as much as for procreation, since leaving it at the latter requirement would invalidated a lot of hetero marriages for lack of offspring), then Carson et al can STFU about how LGBT folk can still get married under the law – provided it’s to a cisgendered spouse – since there’s no “loving commitment” or “mutual support” in a contract entered into solely for appearance and where infidelity is understood rather than inhibited. I’m sure he wouldn’t want to be 3/5 person for the census and elections, or have his wife prevented from participating in elections just because she has Teh Ladybits: the current Reichwing argument against SSM is no different, and defended with the same resources.

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