McCain: Same-sex marriage ban is un-Republican
Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona broke forcefully with President Bush and the Senate GOP leadership Tuesday evening over the issue of same-sex marriage, taking to the Senate floor to call a constitutional amendment to prohibit the practice unnecessary — and un-Republican.
“The constitutional amendment we’re debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans,” McCain said. “It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them.”
He’s right. I’d say it’s not only un-Republican, it’s un-American. Amending the constitution to ban something has been tried once before. It’s the only amendment that has been repealed.
[update] It only got 48 votes in the Senate (a procedural vote, not a vote on the bill, if I understand correctly). Good. More at Outside the Beltway.
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Actually, the Constitution has been amended TWICE to prohibit things. One of which has not be repealed.
I phrased that badly. I should have said ‘removing rights’ although I suppose one could say that the thirteenth removed the “rights” of slave-owners.
The problem is that I don’t really see marriage as a ‘right’. I see it as a ‘rite’ and don’t think the government should be involved at all.
McCain’s standing to pronounce on what is in accordance with the core philosophy of Republicans, not to mention what is appropriate for the Constitution to say, would be better supported were it not for his major role in shredding the First Amendment with his cheesy Campaign Finance Reform law. In sponsoring that bill he bowed to the trendy fad of the shallow zeitgeist, and assured that while pr0n is completely free, political speech is tightly controlled by an agency of the Federal Government. Now that is really taking care of constitutional rights!
Marriage and the families that result from it are institutions that preexisted our political institutions. Now a few judges and activists would smash to pieces the rock upon which we stand, unless prevented from doing so. This is being done in the spirit of radical autonomy for self-gratification, forgetting the centuries of experience that tell us “this is the best way we have found to ensure that our culture and society continue into the future.” The unarticulated rationality of tradition will be ignored, on the assumption that a few arrogant judges and lawyers know better than untold generations. Sorry, smashing up things of value like that is not the core value of conservatism, whatever points it may make for McCain with his pals in the media.
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McCain is Right
Thanks to Kathy Kinsley for pointing me to this bit on John McCain. Since CNN is not a site I visit often I’d have missed it. Aside from just being wrong in its essense, it’s wrong to be amending the…