It’s continuing at Volokh with Dale Carpenter’s patient dismemberment of Maggie Gallagher’s previous arguments. Cathy Young weighs in here as well. This passage from Dale’s latest post struck a chord with me:
when couples get married it improves the lives of the people who love them by reassuring them that their loved one is being cared for, and are less likely to live, as Anna put it, “lonely and depressed” lives.
My mother, who is 61, recently married a man who is 77 and with whom she’d lived for 18 years. Their sex will not make babies, yet everyone in both families was thick with happiness for them. Why did she marry? Did it change anything in a relationship that was already a marriage in just about every way except the name and the license? When I asked her this, she responded, “Now we’re more one.” I don’t fully understand the magic of that moment, but I didn’t have to understand it in order to know that I was more at peace about her future.
This is undoubtedly one critical piece in the meaning of marriage: the way in which the civil institution assigns one individual to take care of another. We all have an interest in this: people uncared for will have to rely on the government for help. Couples are more able to help themselves. Whether they have children or not does not affect this profound social good from marriage. The question we are debating is: why shouldn’t everyone be able to have that support? Why is it in society’s interests to keep gay women and men from such stability and security?
MY ‘OVERSTATEMENT’: Jonah takes me to task for writing that Roberts, Miers and Alito all hold the judiciary essentially toothless in tackling executive power in wartime (which now means for ever). He takes exception to my words “completely craven” and “unrestricted executive power.” My point here is a simple one: the current executive believes it has the right to detain an American citizen without charges indefinitely. It also believes it has the legal right to torture or abuse people it has detained. More to the point, it has detained a U.S. citizen indefinitely without charge, and it has, on numerous occasions, sanctioned the abuse and torture, even to death, of those in its custody. Roberts, Miers and Alito, from all I have read, would not interfere with that power. Andy McCarthy’s counter-point is that a Democrat-appointed judge upheld the Padilla case (indefinite detention without charge). That doesn’t rebut my point. Maybe I should have been clearer: I was referring to Bush’s SCOTUS nominees above all. If someone at NRO could reassure me that any of the three I mention believe that the judiciary can and should restrict the commander-in-chief in these matters, I’d be grateful. Meanwhile, I think an executive with the power to detain citizens indefinitely without charge and to apply cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment to them is, well, “unrestricted.” By the way, what does NRO believe about the McCain Amendment? I have no idea.
The Dish 