Friday, May 11, 2012

Obama & States' Rights

In an interview on ABC News (where else?) on 09 May, President Obama said, “I've just concluded that for me, personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” Grammar students might cringe at the redundancies but Obama probably was not using a teleprompter.

One shakes his head in wonder at the statement since it indicates that the president may be unaware of the primary definition of “marriage,” which is, “the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law.” (Merriam-Webster Collegiate, 11th edition)

The secondary definition is, “the state of being united to a person of the same sex in a relationship like that of a traditional marriage.” In this instance, obviously, the relationship is not “recognized by law,” but is just traditional, i.e., mostly with some sort of ceremony. This (traditional) is already done in some states, with whatever is thought to be legal not applying in any other state, so the participants are not “married” anywhere but in the state where their ceremony took place.

So…how does the president figure that same-sex couples become “able to get married,” at least legally, with respect to the accepted definition? There’s only one solution, to wit, one partner must have a sex-change operation, becoming a member of the opposite sex. This, of course, may lead to problems since upon becoming the other gender the changed partner may not find marriage to remain attractive…may even start chasing “skirts” or “hunks,” depending on whoever made the change.

Silly, you say? Well…maybe. The element that’s always a possibility (most of the time a probability) in a marriage is the making of babies, something that cannot happen in a sex-act between members of the same sex, though there’s no such thing as a “sex act” between homosexuals anyway. Their erotic behavior is merely some sort of unnatural use of their bodies. Neither oral nor anal “sex,” for instance, can produce a pregnancy, i.e., the perpetuation of the race.

Indeed, homosexuals may like mutual hook-ups for the very fact that they can engage their sex organs ecstatically without the worry of possible offspring. The same is true with heterosexuals who engage in oral or anal sex…plenty of huffing and puffing and sucking without the worry of needing an abortion.

This brings up an important issue. In the same interview with ABC News (where else?), the president said he supports the concept of states deciding the homosexual-marriage issue on their own. Whoa!!! What, then, does the president think about abortion vis-à-vis states’ rights? Does he think the SCOTUS should encourage an invitation to revisit Roe-Wade or an individual should sue over the matter? Isn’t abortion the same type of “privacy” issue that homosexual marriage is? Well, of course!

To carry out his contention, the president himself should undertake the effort to either make the Defense of Marriage Act, now as settled law, into a Constitutional amendment, as 30 states have done and nine others have otherwise done legally, or engage action to have Roe-Wade overturned as a federal matter, with the states again being responsible for deciding about abortion.

Since Roe-Wade in 1973, there have been better than 54.5 million abortions covering two generations. If the first generation had not been aborted and had 1.5 children per marriage, there would have been about 92 million more citizens by now, making the total population at near 400 million. This is a matter of huge importance regardless of how people view abortion.

Perhaps the president had not thought out his statement before making it or perhaps his “handlers” hadn’t given it a thought before telling him what he thinks. Actually, he has no position on marriage because he’s been all over the map on the subject but it’s a leadpipe cinch he will make no statement regarding Roe-Wade since to try to return abortion matters to the states would lose his biggest cadre of voters – women. The abortion rate has leveled off to “only” 1.2 million per year, possibly disappointing the feminists, but those silent murders represent success or failure for Obama at the ballot box.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

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