Now the Israeli government is intent on breaking up marriages it doesn’t like. A new law would prevent Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who marry Israeli Arabs from living with their spouses in Israel. This new law is a horrifying attack on a basic freedom – to marry the person you love; and it smacks of racism of the worst sort. Israel contends it is protecting itself from terrorists using the law to get into Israel to attack Israelis. There are surely better ways of doing that. One of the more brilliant insights of Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is that one sign of freedom is the ability to construct human relationships without the state intervening. With this new law, Israel’s presence in the West Bank corrupts its own democracy one little bit more.
WHY MY SUGGESTION WON’T FLY: Thanks for all your emails on the FMA question. Many of you think that a federalist state-by-state process is a fine idea. But the social right doesn’t. Here’s why. They’re worried that if a state decides, even by legislative action, to grant marriage licenses to gay couples, then those couples will sue the federal government for federal benefits. As they should. That will then conflict with the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, which the social right knew at the time and still knows is unconstitutional. So the Supreme Court, upholding states’ rights to determine marriage and wary of a federal law that obviously singles out gay people for discrimination, will strike DOMA down. Then we essentially have same-sex marriage on a state and federal level. The only way to stop states making up their own minds is to make it unconstitutional for any state to decide on gay marriage at all. Hence the current FMA which, on my reading, would also bar any state from enacting any benefits to gay couples whatever – even modest domestic partnership deals. That’s how radical an attack on federalism this amendment is. They want to gut federalist principles, end a volatile national debate before it goes against them, and write anti-gay animus into the only place the courts cannot resist: the Constitution itself. Whatever else these people are, they sure aren’t conservatives.
The Dish 