Sunday, January 24, 2010

Lock, stock and barrel

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4 comments:

  1. The Court's ruling - so widely appreciated, thank goodness, for the sheer and crass and wholly sui generis ideological adventurism that it is - carries us back to the magic of the infamous "3/5 Clause," in which slaves were counted as persons when it was to the South's advantage for this concession, and as non-persons when it was to the South's advantage to exempt them from protection or liberty. Now, the gross, putrefied fiction of the 19th Century, that Corporations have the legal standing of persons, reaches its repulsive nadir, in the convenience of human shelter under the 1st and 5th Amendments and the profanely inhuman endowments of Limited Liability, unconscionable tax breaks, and deregulation as non-persons when it suits them. If you had ensconced Jay Gould in the Executive and simply outlawed free elections explicitly, you could not have achieved a starker, more brutish redefinition of American society than by this one judicial gesture. And its author, Justice Kennedy, is the vote we are counting on to extend equal protection in matrimony to all.

    There is no life long enough to measure the infinite infamy of this ruling, by the invisible hand of intimidation alone.

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  2. And its author, Justice Kennedy, is the vote we are counting on to extend equal protection in matrimony to all.

    That is true, but as odd as it may be Justice Kennedy has already penned two eloquent opinions supporting the rights of gay Americans.

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  3. Yes, he has done, including Lawrence v. Texas, in which Scalia aggressively rebuked him for opening the logic of matrimonial equal protection, thus sucker-punching him against doing the right thing in the case now in District Court in San Francisco. The man is erratic and incoherent, so we shall have to hope that he can get Equal Protection right once more.

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