Texas GOP officials agree: Legal same-sex marriage will cause incest and pedophilia

[DonViejo]

Texas Republicans — including lieutenant governor candidate Dan Patrick and Ken Paxton, who is running for attorney general — have signed on to a “friend of the court” brief claiming that the state’s desire to ban same-sex marriage is in line with similar bans on bigamy, incest, pedophilia, and polygamy, The Dallas Morning News reports.

Patrick and Paxton are just two of the 61 Republican lawmakers who signed on to the Texas Conservative Coalition’s brief in support of the state’s ban, which is currently being argued in the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. State Attorney General Greg Abbott argued that marriage is an issue best handled by the states, which is the only argument he can make before the higher court — as of now, no circuit court has upheld a state ban on same-sex marriage.

The “friend of the court” brief argued that “restrictions on marriage relating to these moral considerations remain valid. Thus, the goal of actively trying to prevent those practices from becoming valid is entirely rational public policy.”

But Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa sees it as pandering to an increasingly vocal minority within the Republican Party. “This brief makes their intentions clear: rather than working towards equality and fairness, Patrick and Paxton want to marginalize, discriminate and spread antiquated ideas,” he told The Morning News. “Texans deserves leaders who know that love is love, and that it’s time to end the Republican culture of discrimination across our state.”

more
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/07/texas-gop-officials-agree-legal-same-sex-marriage-will-cause-incest-and-pedophilia/

[hifiguy]

1. Vocal minority? Are you kidding?

The Texas 'pukes have been the largest open-air lunatic asylum in all of politics for years now.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. What an incredibly lame argument!

Whichever law school gave a law degree to the maroon that wrote that brief ought to revoke that degree.

The brief argued that supporting the same-sex marriage ban does not amount to discrimination, because the laws behind the ban “apply equally to everyone. They were not enacted to ‘disparage and injure,’ anyone. Nor were they enacted out of ‘animosity against homosexuals.’ To the contrary, the laws were enacted with a desire to elevate the state’s legal recognition of marriage to a level that society has celebrated throughout history.”

Talk about clutching at straws... Marriage, "throughout history," was nothing like it is today, at least in most western countries. Marriages were often arranged, either to control or exchange property or to assure the transfer of property to the next generation. The wife was simply another piece of property. In the Bible, which is so enthusiastically cited as authority for the "sanctity" of marriage, many men, at least those of the ruling class, were polygamists, and apparently this was just fine with God. So, if we want to "elevate the state’s legal recognition of marriage to a level that society has celebrated throughout history,” shouldn't we start arranging marriages as a form of property transfer and estate planning, and shouldn't we permit polygamy? After all, that's what they did in the Bible...

[hifiguy]

3. That is a grand slam home run, TVO.

You know your history extremely well indeed!

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

4. I know the law AND the Bible.

But I'm not sure I believe in either one any more...

You are probably familiar with the Critical Legal Studies movement. I used to think they were off the wall; now I think they were right.

[hifiguy]

5. The CLS wars were at their height

when I was at Harvard Law between '85 and '88. Some of what they said was pure nonsense on stilts and steroids. More than not, actually, like when my contacts professor (Duncan Kennedy) said that the Pound Hall janitor should take his place every other week. He was deathly serious about it BTW. But there were some good things to take away from it.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

6. I was in law school (not Harvard!) between '77 and '81.

We were introduced to the Crits in a legal history class; they were mostly kind of unintelligible (I couldn't make any sense out of Roberto Unger at all, and it must have been weird to have learned contracts from the equally baffling Duncan Kennedy), but what I did eventually figure out was that what they were trying to say, in a painfully academic and recondite fashion, was that (surprise!) The Law is not comprised of immutable principles of justice applicable equally to everyone. You might have also encountered Morton Horwitz. The Transformation of American Law was required reading, and it was a whole lot less opaque and tendentious than the Crits' stuff. In any event, I found practicing law (which I don't do any more) to be very disillusioning because there really are no principles - there's only the question of how much justice you can afford.

[hifiguy]

7. Kennedy was actually a first-rate teacher.

I enjoyed him enough to take American Legal History from him as a 2L and enjoyed that as well. He didn't do anything weird to us, like he did a class a few years previously when one of his exam questions was "Compare the first syllabus to the final syllabus." HLS thinks sufficiently highly of itself to preserve books of all the exams administered in prior years. Which is useful as deep background material for particular professors.

Read a fair amount of Unger's stuff and IMO the man is quite brilliant. His exceedingly dense verbiage takes rather a long while to become familiar with and acclimated to. There is a lot of Jefferson in Unger, at least there was in the things I read. The reasonably straightforward (for the larger part) ideas are somewhat camouflaged by his very thorny prose style.