Today, a US district court judge in Massachusetts ruled that DOMA [Defense of Marriage Act] interferes with the states' rights to define marriage, marking a serious victory for gay marriage supporters.
To quote the article:
Conservative groups predicted the ruling would be overturned.
"This activist decision must be appealed, and when appealed, I am confident it will be reversed," said Mathew Staver, founder of the legal group Liberty Counsel, based in Orlando, Florida.
"History and common sense show that marriage between a man and a woman has a procreative component absent from same-sex unions," Staver said.
I feel the need to say something.
Forget the part about 'common sense' - a phrase thrown about by conservatives, particularly Glenn Beck, who championed Thomas Paine and his book until one of his producers probably decided to tell him that Thomas Paine was a radical liberal in his own time.
Forget the part about marriage having a 'procreative component' - an argument that completely overlooks the fact that we allow sterile couples, senior citizens, and those deciding not to have children to marry.
My problem lies with something entirely beyond the arguments for and against gay marriage. My problem lies with the conservatives and their 'values'.
Champions of 'civil liberties', 'small government', and 'state sovereignty', modern conservatives are known for their vehement (and occasionally violent) opposition to the expansion of federal powers over the rights of states and their individual citizens. The Tea Party movement, otherwise known as a group of white people who are angry but don't know why, can often be heard yelling, crying, shooting, and otherwise bitching about the government being too big, or something. Yeah, what he said.
And yet with the Massachusetts court ruling that DOMA "encroaches upon the firmly entrenched province of the state, and in doing so, offends the Tenth Amendment", conservatives - in all their "province of state" glory - will look to appeal this decision and have it overturned.
Conservatives.
The people who hold such events as the "Tenth Amendment Town Hall".
The people whose senators attempted to file suit against health care reform because it "violates the 10th amendment".
The people who founded the "10th Amendment Task Force" to investigate violations through drug and gun control laws.
This isn't just about the 10th amendment, though. It's about the growing yet always visible trend present in conservative American 'values'. It's about the party that bleeds civil liberties trying to tell homosexual citizens that the federal government has the right to circumvent the 14th amendment and deny them the "equal protection of the laws".
And more than anything, it's about finally acknowledging the fact that both the Republican Party and the conservative Americans who support it operate as the political voice of radical Christian establishments in this country. It's about acknowledging that civil liberties and small government come second to any political issue that supports the views of the religious right, be it the encroachment on women's rights, religious freedom, or as demonstrated beyond question in the above article - the subjugation of gay Americans.
I find myself typing this as if it should actually be taken as 'news' to people, but anyone mildly familiar with politics has known this far too long.
What needs to happen, however, is that these people need to be challenged on this hypocrisy. The religious right needs to be exposed as the American Taliban that it has come to represent - a group of religious fundamentalists who believe that Christian prayer and doctrine belong in our public schools and that the equal rights of American citizens should be denied by the federal government when they do not fall in line with the teachings of the Bible. Someone needs to ask these conservatives what really matters to them: stopping the encroachment of federal power onto the rights of states and their citizens, or turning the United States into a theocracy.
As the Bush administration and the conservatives in this case have shown us, the regulation of federal power is not an actual conservative value, but merely a piece of political propaganda to be thrown about when they are no longer in control.
If these 'small government' conservatives actually stand by their political values, they'll acknowledge that the constitution implicitly prohibits the establishment of their religious values into our legal system.
And they'll acknowledge that 'civil liberties' are not privileges just for the straight white men of this country, but rights that should be afforded to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States".