Two staggering pieces from Kathryn Jean Lopez and George Weigel. K-Lo quotes a reader:
Are the fears of our founding fathers mere fantasy, or is care for legal protection against the tyranny of the majority an actual real-world concern? Is the vote of a democratically elected body necessarily not tyranny? To dismiss the N. Korea analogy as beyond the pale is to deny the rational of the founding fathers, to deny any appeals to right and wrong that extend beyond positive law. Tyranny is capricious law, based upon the will of one, few, or many in a way that gravely contradicts the common good and the traditional laws for securing that good.
But laws which kept 3 percent of the population from having basic civil rights because 97 percent found them icky … there was never any question of a tyranny of a majority then. And look: this was not even a court decision; it was a legislative decision after years of debate and back-and-forth. That is like North Korea? And, yes, I realize she was quoting the Archbishop of New York. But he too has lost his marbles if that is his analogy. As Mike Potemra Kevin D. Williamson rightly puts it:
A church with more confidence in its own doctrine would not need to lean upon the law.
Imagine a church that reacted by saying that it disagreed, but that Christianity was the real counter-cultural force and it would rededicate itself to encouraging, nurturing and helping opposite sex married couples in its own pews as role models for the rest. Since gay marriage is obviously a sham, it will surely die out and we are confident enough in our own doctrines to be indifferent to, if saddened by, it. Instead, the Church hierarchcy actually called a conscientious decision by elected law-makers in both chambers and by the governor, after years of debate, an act analogous to the vilest, cruelest human rights abusers in the world. Now from another planet in the same distant galaxy, George Weigel:
The gay-marriage movement is thus not the heir of the civil-rights movement; it is the heir of Bull Connor and others who tried to impose their false idea of moral reality on others by coercive state power.
A humane society will find ample room in the law for accommodating a variety of human relationships in matters of custodial care, hospital visiting rights, and inheritance. But there is nothing humane about the long march toward the dictatorship of relativism, nor will there be anything humane about the destination of that march, should it be reached. The viciousness visited upon Archbishop Dolan and other defenders of marriage rightly understood during the weeks before the vote in Albany is yet another testimony to the totalitarian impulse that lurks beneath the gay marriage movement.
Yes, I am Bull Connor, unleashing violence against a people long held down by slavery and segregation: my own family, and every heterosexual married couple I know. The equation comes from a mindset so circular, so rigidly set, so incapable of political discourse on this subject it doesn't even come as a surprise.
The Dish 