In an excellent essay on Public Discourse today, David Azerrad draws from Justice Kennedy’s reasoning in Obergefell v. Hodges “keen insights into the liberal worldview.” The title of this post is Azerrad’s assessment not of Kennedy himself, but rather of Kennedy’s sovereign individual:
For all his purported god-like powers of self-creation, liberal promethean man is actually a weak, insecure, and isolated individual. It is not enough that he define and express his identity. He needs others to recognize it, embrace it, and celebrate it. He needs the state to confer dignity upon it.
Otherwise, he may find himself marginalized by his peers, crippled by their disapproving looks, and insecure in his choice of an identity.…
Contemporary liberalism … views man as a weak and fragile creature. Adversity doesn’t forge character. It stigmatizes and demeans. Unless others affirm our choices, they are worthless. We have no unshakable inner convictions or faith. We are all insecure.
Promethean man, it turns out, is a pathetic creature. He thinks himself the measure of all things, but must in fact have his solipsistic existence be publicly affirmed and dignified by the state. He is simultaneously everything and nothing.
Azerrad also highlights how Kennedy’s celebration of the autonomous individual’s “limitless possibilities” to (in Kennedy’s infamous phrase) “define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” is inconsistent with Kennedy’s assertion (unsupported by the scientific evidence) that sexual orientation is immutable. As he puts it facetiously:
The essence of liberty is the freedom to define and express one’s identity, just not when it comes to sexual orientation, which is innate and immutable. We can choose our gender—that is not fixed at birth—but our sexual orientation is handed down to us by the gods and must be accepted with passive resignation.
Azerrad observes that, in another “exception to the realm of autonomy,” Kennedy’s claim that marriage is “essential to our most profound hopes and aspirations” means that those who remain single are, in Kennedy’s words, “condemned to live in loneliness.”
Pathetic, indeed.