My first mistake was going online and Corner posting on a Sunday!
An e-mail on the North Korea analogy:
When the Athenians voted to execute Socrates, was he or was he not the victim of tyranny? Can tyranny take any form other than dictatorship? 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. Too much Team America and not enough Aristotle in these dismissals of the N. Korea analogy.
It is a cautionary note. And then some.
As George Weigel writes today:
Marriage, as both religious and secular thinkers have acknowledged for millennia, is a social institution that is older than the state and that precedes the state. The task of a just state is to recognize and support this older, prior social institution; it is not to attempt its redefinition. To do the latter involves indulging the totalitarian temptation that lurks within all modern states: the temptation to remanufacture reality. The American civil-rights movement was a call to recognize moral reality; the call for gay marriage is a call to reinvent reality to fit an agenda of personal willfulness. 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.
If there's anything I don't care about, it's this debate. But I think everybody would be served by dropping the North Korea analogy. It's unnecessarily inflammatory, and attempts to justify it by "tyranny of the majority" arguments just make the situation worse.
For better or worse, democratically elected representatives have passed a law. Agree or disagree all you want. But let's not indulge in a compeletely false analogy with a cruel, vicious dictatorship. Nobody gains by that sort of argument.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTo all those objecting to the North Korea analogy: North Korea wasn't always North Korea. It all had to start somewhere, and the road to dictatorship is often incremental. And anyone who thinks it can't happen here is dangerously naive.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOkay, I think laws against jaywalking are taking us to North Korea.
Please. Stop digging. It's a bad, incredibly far-fetched analogy. Just debate the law and forget the slippery slope to Kim Il Sung.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHow about you debate the law, or something. A sneer is not an argument and it has no place in debate. If you think the North Korean argument is a bad one, take the trouble to explain why. It isn't self-evident. If you haven't got an argument to support your reaction, why waste the bandwidth on repetetive, content free posts.
Nobody is making a slippery slope argument. The argument is that governments which presume to reshape society are inherently violent and represive. Is a law against jaywalking the same sort of utopian nonsense as the attempt to redefine marriage? Just because something pops into your head is no reason to humiliate yourself publicly by putting it in writing.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"The argument is that governments which presume to reshape society are inherently violent and represive."
No, the argument is that the fair, free and legal action of a democratically elected legislature is somehow analogous to the brutal dictatorship of an unhinged meglomaniac.
Hey, if you want to disagree with the law, fine with me. When Texas put a referendum on the ballot a few years ago supporting marriage as between a man and a woman, I voted for it. Just leave North Korea out of the argument.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAnd as we all know, North Korea broke away from South Korea so gays could marry.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe dictatorship in North Korea didn't supplant some vibrant Jeffersonian democracy that was unfortunately extinguished. Nope. As far back as we know there has always existed a dictatorship in all of Korea in one form or another, whether indigineous or imposed by a foreign power occupying the land. Even South Korea wasn't much of a republic as we know it until the 1990s. The comparison of North Korea to this is a joke and doesn't fit at all.
Can a dictatorship happen here? That's always a dangerous possibility. Yet it's not just a threat from the left but one also from the right. Whether it happens in the name of Mothe Gaia backed by her PC Enforcement Squad, or in the name of God backed by an even more rigorous Moral Majority, the loss of freedom is still the same. I prefer neither.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAnd yet you're coming down firmly on the side of P.C. Enforcement, which gay "marriage" and the accompanying governmental endorsement of gay culture inevitably leads to.
Trust me, I'm from Canada and I know what it's done here. Ever heard of Guy Earle? If not, Google him.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNope, not at all. I have no desire at all for Canadian-style "Human Rights Commissions", which Mark Steyn rightly calls modern-day star chambers. This is the United States, not Canada or Europe. We have a very different attitude towards freedom of speech and religion with the First Amendment to our Constitution being nearly sacrosanct. I have no problem skewering folks on the left who deserve to be mocked, ridiculed and driven out of town for their PC fascism which is every bit as noxious as that coming from some on the right.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWell, if that is the best defense you got, you should drop the North Korean analogy, it does not fit.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI thought you on the Right loved the Constitution and the 10th Amendment?
So...what does the Constitution say about marriage?...nothing. Ergo, it falls under the purview of the 10th Amendment which states-
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe Archbishop's analogy was entirely appropriate. He did not equate the "gay rights" cause of the libertines with the "people's rights" causes of the Communists, he drew a comparison in one particular respect--the violence done to language. The Communists mocked the bourgeois ideals of "democracy" and "liberty." At the same time, they were happy to appropriate these very words at the service of their revolutionary enterprise, such that their constitutions protect "freedom of speech" (the new and improved version!!) and their regimes are called "democracies" and "republics" (again the new and improved versions).
So too, the sexual revolutionnaries, with the "gay rights" cause as their most recent vanguard, have for decades now attacked and ridiculed marriage, now seek to appropriate, by redefinition, the even more ancient and fundamental word "marriage."
This allegedly "conservative" move of the gay-rights movement is no more encouraging to the true friends of marriage than the use of "freedom of speech" in the Soviet Constitution was to the genuine friends of free speech.
The violence done by the COmmunist regimes cannot, in its extent, be compared to the violence that they sexual revolutionnaries have done or will do. Still, violence has been, and will be resorted to, including the violence of compelling children to be educated in the new "morality."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseCasey and Richard: I merely note that your appeal to drop the N. Korea analogy involves no argument whatsoever beyond inflammation of someone or something unspecified.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOkay, I'll specify 'em...NRO commenters, and at least one NRO contributor.
As I said, I have no dog in this hunt. But when anybody starts with the North Korea analogy, my b.s. detector sounds off.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNo, I mean your reasons for claiming inflammation at all. If the shoe fits, then it fits. Saying that it doesn't fit because it inflames me to think about whether it does is not an argument.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"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."
This is just a fancy way of saying:
Laws I agree with = democracy
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseLaws I disagree with = tyranny
>"Laws I agree with = democracy
Laws I disagree with = tyranny"
Isn't that exactly what the gay marriage movement DOES say?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt's funny that we always see such sensitivity about analogies only from one side of this argument: specious and presumptuous comparisons to the civil rights movement are just hunky-dory.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHow exactly is "coercive state power" being applied here? Is anybody being required to gay marry? Is any church being required to perform gay marriage ceremonies? No?
It's a weird world where folks believe they're being "tyrannized" because other people are allowed to do something. The Orwellian inversion of language is nearly complete.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe whole point of establishing "gay marriage" is to create the predicate for using the power of the state to bully people into abandoning the conviction that homosexual conduct is wrong. Gay "rights", like abortion "rights", don't make anyone freer. They just inject the state more deeply into private matters as it seeks to stand in for each citizen's conscience.
Are you truly clueless on this point or are you merely indulging in rhetorical cluelessnes?
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