Marriage News Watch: June 22, 2015

We're down to the last few days before the Supreme Court rules on marriage. In the mean time, the National Organization for Marriage is asking all of the GOP presidential candidates to sign an anti-equality pledge. Let's take a look at just how crazy this pledge gets.

Here's the text of NOM's "marriage pledge," courtesy of Good As You:

Of course, most of the Republican candidates are vowing to fight on, no matter what the Court rules. Here's Jeb! on the subject:

Many in the Republican Party have hinted that they would rather the issue simply went away. And while they might prefer that the court not invalidate state laws limiting marriage to heterosexual couples, they would welcome a decision that settled the question once and for all.

But with the court expected to rule before the end of the month on whether gay and lesbian couples have a constitutional right to marry, one of the looming questions for Mr. Bush and the other Republicans running for president is how aggressively they should respond to that ruling.

In his comments to the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference, Mr. Bush, the former governor of Florida, said he was not content to let the defense of traditional marriage fade away.

“It’s got to be important over the long haul, irrespective of what the courts say,” he said.

Of course, the basic question is, "What are they defending 'traditional marriage' from?" If the Court rules in favor of gay couples' right to equal protection, "traditional marriage" isn't going to disappear.

There's a deeper question here, and this comment by Bush throws it, I think, into some relief:

“In a country like ours we should recognize the power of a man and a woman loving their children with all their heart and soul as a good thing, as something that is positive and helpful for those children to live a successful life,” he said.

According to Pink News, he went on to say:

“And while there are people who disagree with this, we should not push aside those who do believe in traditional marriage.”

My first reaction was to wonder "Who, specifically, disagrees with this?" But there's some subtext here that falls into what I call "The 'Christian' Fallacy": the idea that there is only one option, and that is the one approved by whoever is speaking. It's the logical endpoint of a worldview that admits of only one possibility, itself an idea erroneous on its face: anyone who stops to think about it will realize that there are any number of pathways to a given place.

This also comes into play in regard to those poor, persecuted "Christians" who are only trying to bake "Christian" cakes or arrange "Christian" flowers. Aside from the fact that they're trying to set themselves above the law based on their cherry-picked "religious beliefs," they're not being persecuted. Their just being told to mind their own business.

Of course, if you've gotten to be as cynical as I am about politicians and why they say what they say (and never forget, the various avatars of Anti-Gay, Inc., are politicians one and all), a war always makes it easier to raise money.