February 26, 2004 by lonbud

Mr. Big Stuff

The hubris of George W. Bush knows no bounds. In the face of innumerable instances of his own overwhelming personal and professional defects, he knows no shame. Now he is proposing to codify the elements of marriage in the Constitution of the United States of America.

Who does the man think he is? I mean, what was all that blather about his being a “uniter, not a divider?”

And what is marriage, anyway? Where did it come from and what are its purposes?

The institution of marriage grew from men’s desire to protect, consolidate, and expand their property, wealth, power, and influence. Initially something of concern only to the elites of society, marriage naturally became the province of religious authority, which was also often the seat of property, wealth, power, and influence in the many varied civilizations of humankind. Eventually, religion and state alike promoted marriage among common people as a means of ordering and controlling social interaction among the populace.

Here in the United States, the founders of the nation took great pains to address the Big Questions of how to establish, order, promote, and protect a peaceable society, yet, they had nothing to say on the subject of marriage. They did add that confoundingly vague language prohibiting the enactment of laws “respecting an establishment of religion, or restricting the free exercise thereof” to the Bill of Rights in 1791, but we’ve generally interpreted that over the past couple of hundred years to mean government ought to stay out of the business of religion and that religion should not form the basis for public policy.

Comes now the President, a man who claims his favorite book is The Bible, though he cannot tell you anything he’s read in it and refuses to answer journalists’ questions about any of its tales or parables. He says he wants to protect the sanctity of “one of our most basic social institutions” by restricting its availability to couples comprised of one man and one woman. His proposal that the country accept and adopt his codicil to the Constitution comes in reaction to the recent granting of marriage licenses to homosexual couples in the states of Massachusetts, California, and New Mexico.

What is really going on here? Why is it all-of-a-sudden so hell-fired important to use the Constitution to “protect” the institution of marriage from an extension to homosexual members of the citizenry?

We might also ask why the President is all-of-a-sudden so enamored of the protective value of the Constitution, but that’s another story.

The President’s choice to create a constitutional crisis around the question of whose two lives may be enjoined in the bounds of matrimony is wrongheaded and ignoble on so many fronts, one wonders whether Mr. Bush has forged beyond the counsel of his advisors and is calling his own shots on this one.

Long under pressure from intolerant, albeit wealthy, religious fanatics on the far right to reserve the incidents of marriage to heterosexual couples, the President has chosen an interesting moment for proposing his constitutional amendment. Are there not enough issues of real import, such as the all-time-record-high federal deficit, the viability of our mission to impose democracy on the peoples of the Middle East, the ever-shrinking availability and ever-escalating costs of healthcare in the U.S., the so-called jobless “recovery” of the U.S. economy, and the sustainability of our energy policy –among others– to get us through the long, hot, election-year summer ahead?

Aside from the questionable intelligence of putting such a divisive, emotional question before the American people at this time, Mr. Bush also shows himself to be completely lacking in any understanding of the principles of government according to the U.S. model.

A quick read of the U.S. Constitution and its several amendments shows the document is a vehicle for enumerating the rights and protections we as a society demand to be accorded all of our citizens. In the almost two hundred thirty years of its existence, the Constitution has been amended only to extend and secure those rights and protections to groups of people who have been historically subject to discrimination and unequal treatment. Never has it been used to exclude or deny any segment of our society the freedoms and protections enjoyed by the rest of the population.

Say what you will about the President, the man is a maverick.

And what of the “crisis” whereby the very “social fabric” of our nation faces imminent rending? Mr. Bush laments our immediate need to thwart the designs of “activist judges” and public officials who have lately granted marriage licenses to gay couples in Massachusetts, San Francisco, and New Mexico. He neglects, however, to admit that state courts in California and New Mexico have before them cases promising to settle the question of “gay marriage” under the laws of those states, or that the legislature of Massachusetts is considering legislation to do the same in its jurisdiction.

For a Republican official normally apt to champion the principle of “states rights” on most issues in our federal republic, the President’s reach for immediate federal preemption on the subject of marriage is puzzling.

There are a couple of patterns worth observing here. His father gave the American people the specter of Willie Horton when he needed a bogeyman to divert our attention from doubts about his substantive ability to govern. Now George W. gives us the specter of people whose lifestyle has been called an “abomination” moving in next door, trying to raise families!

About a year ago, in a more telling parallel, the President declared an “imminent crisis” in Saddam Hussein’s “massive stockpiles” of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. He called it a threat so imminent to the stability of the entire world and to the safety of Americans at home, there was no time to permit United Nations weapons inspectors to fulfill their mandated task of making sure Hussein and Iraq were in compliance with U.N. resolutions on weapons of mass destruction.

A year later, having spent over 100 billion dollars from the U.S. treasury, having wasted the lives of more than 500 U.S. military personnel and uncounted thousands of Iraqis, the President has been forced to admit the weapons were not stockpiled quite so massively, and that, whatever threat Saddam Hussein may have represented to America or the world, it was not quite so imminent as he made it out to be.

A little over three years ago, the American people stood (mostly) silently by as an “activist” Supreme Court foisted upon us a President who received half a million fewer votes than his opponent. During the ensuing term of his administration we have continued in relatively silent acquiescence as he has run roughshod over the Treasury, turned the largest federal surplus in modern times into the greatest deficit in the history of the nation, handed favor and privilege and outright cash payments to his wealthy corporate benefactors, permitted and encouraged the destruction of the environment and the depletion of our natural resources, and through unilateral, secret, executive fiat has begun the process of eviscerating the basic principles of freedom and privacy our nation’s founders deemed essential to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.

George W. Bush is a loose cannon. He is a man with no sense of personal humility or historical responsibility. He divides the world into those with him and those against him, into those who have (and are entitled to more) and those who do not (and are entitled to scorn and contempt). He is a huge mistake for which the American people ought to take immediate, humble, responsibility and send him back to his ranch in Texas, or better yet, to a prison somewhere equally godforsaken.