Would Lincoln Oppose Gay Marriage?

Was it Barney Frank who said that two vs. three people in a marriage was a quantifiable distinction for marriage, unlike the difference between a female wife and a male "wife"?   This is the logic:  Let's change slightly(?) the definition of marriage to be about two people and forget the common law roots of a marriage contract between the two distinct parties with distinct obligations.  Still two people, so not really that weird, they say.

Same-sex marriage will lead to polygamy?  Pshaw!  No, we want to keep marriage just as it is, between two people.  Completely orthodox.  The only people who want more than one spouse are weird Mormon perverts, and we don't care about them.  

Oh, so you don't care about their marriage rights.  I see. I guess they don't have all that Hollywood money (and Hollywood propaganda) to advance their cause.  You don't want them undermining society and complicating our laws with their weirdo lifestyles, eh.  "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves."

Given Lincoln's strong backing of his party's anti-polygamy platform, it seems unlikely that he would have supported same-sex marriage.  (No, I'm not going to even get into the whole "Lincoln Was Gay" theory.)  Nobody made the argument then that polygamy would lead to same-sex marriage, because same-sex marriage was still universally considered a contradiction in terms, whereas polygamy was making a matter of making more commitments than the common law stated could be made in good faith.  Well, you may say, he was a man of his times in the Victorian age.

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The National Republican Party's two moral planks:  anti-slavery and anti-polygamy.  (Both referred to as twin "relics of barbarism.")  It was all about legislating morality.  Did someone say that DOMA was the first intrusion of the federal government into marital policy?  Lincoln helped pass laws legalize confiscation of money from private bank accounts in the Utah territory as well as the anti-bigamy laws about which he purportedly told Brigham Young that these laws would not be executed on his people if they did not support the Confederacy.

Lincoln and his party very much believed in keeping marriage following its traditional common law roots.  The common law inherited from the British tradition, not the Bible, is what makes marriage law expect a limited number of marital commitments.

Given that, in superficial terms, the anti-polygamy stance was socially conservative* in the sense of preserving social values, while the anti-slavery issue was, for the South, a non-conservative* issue if conservative is , it would see that these issues have little in common other than determining the national morality through centralized federal power.  (*John J. Ray questions "the old equation of conservatism with a love of the status quo and a dislike of change and new arrangements." I avoid using "progressive" here to describe social change since this has nothing to do with the platform of the progressive movement, which would arise a few decades later, and the co-opting by liberal progressivism is incidental.)

In moderating his opinion on racial equality, Lincoln appealed to the following maxim, "A universal feeling, whether well- or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded."  This intuition is largely behind our rules against pedophilia (well-founded in my opinion).  A splendid aphorism, though it doesn't itself explain Lincoln's political philosophy; and it could be that Lincoln's anti-bigamy fervor could have been more to sell himself better as a social conservative for those who would paint him as a radical.  For Spielberg, this would merely make Lincoln a shrewd politician.

In general, I don't think it makes any sense to talk about gay rights as a "civil rights" issue.  Comparing the issue of interracial marriage (brought to a head in Loving v. Virginia) to the issue of same-sex marriage is kind of an affront to polygamists (but who cares how those "perverts" feel).  It is the polygamist community that has been (and is) in danger of being brought up on criminal charges for cohabitation — not just for entering more than on marriage contract, not just for performing a "plural marriage" ceremony, but for living with more that one person.

A man/woman can have multiple partners, even extra-marital contacts, without being a felon, but a man can't live with more than one paramour and take care of them as domestic partners.  This exists in the state of Utah because of the federal government's involvement with Utah's state charter.   Meanwhile, a gay man can live with two or three "roommates" and do whatever he likes with them.  But the gay man is considered oppressed because if he has a ceremony with one of them, while it isn't a criminal offense, the society around him doesn't have to acknowledge it on a par with the institution as it's existed for millenia, whereas the polygamist has actually committed a criminal offense by living how he/she wants to live.  The polygamists aren't asking for society to treat it on a par with monogamous marriage (yet...); they would consider it fair if their lifestyle were decriminalized on a level with gay domestic partnership.

The decision in Hernandez v. Robles makes this comment on the difference between so-called interracial marriage (in reality, there really is no interracial marriage because race isn't real) and same-sex marriage:

But the traditional definition of marriage is not merely a by-product of historical injustice. Its history is of a different kind. The idea that same-sex marriage is even possible is a relatively new one. Until a few decades ago, it was an accepted truth for almost everyone who ever lived, in any society in which marriage existed, that there could be marriages only between participants of different sex. A court should not lightly conclude that everyone who held this belief was irrational, ignorant or bigoted. We do not so conclude.* 

Now on the one hand, we have polygamy which, while not ubiquitous, has been a common variant of the universal marriage tradition.  The Occidental tradition as it is reflected in the British common law we inherited does not recognize polygamy as something in particular to uphold and celebrate as a society, though this doesn't mean that society can't tolerate it, provided that states and communities don't have to recognize it just because it has been recognized in another state.  As long as a state is free to tolerate and not uphold, there is no slippery slope, and there is a means of the society determining its own values rather than the federal government determining what its values should be.  Polygamy has social precedent in societies of many kinds and has religious precedent in the Judaeo-Christian cultural roots of Western civilization.

Same-sex marriage does not have this precedent in either social or religious cultural roots.  It's not even close to being as much a candidate as an extension of the Western tradition of marriage the way that "plural marriage" is.  The "heterosexist" tradition is arguably universal because it mirrors survival-relevant instincts in our sexual dimorphism.  (Whew!)  Yet, polygamy has been much more criminalized.

If a polygamist could obtain a kind of civil union with his subsequent wives, a sort of civil agreement that would protect states' interests vis-a-vis the Full Faith and Credit clause, he and his wives would probably be pleased as punch.  And most states would be all right with making federal a legal framework for protecting each state's self-determination — which is precisely what DOMA attempted to do.

Which would be much more "progressive" than any view Mr. Lincoln held (or claimed to hold, at least).

Hollywood Questions the Honesty of Honest Abe: Spielberg's Lincoln

Neither the Left nor the Right are very critical of Mr. Lincoln; rather they both tend to lionize and adopt him as their very own predecessor.  Although the Republican party is right to point out that they have a civil rights legacy that extends all the way back to 1860 from the present time, neither the Democrats nor the GOP are Lincoln's party and Lincoln's legacy is complicated.

Spielberg's Lincoln is a surprise in some ways.  It more or less confronts some of Pres. Lincoln's arbitrariness when it comes to the Constitution, though it doesn't much get into specifics about how Lincoln believes he's fulfilling his oath to protect the Constitution as he engages in sophistry to circumvent the restrictions of the Constitution.  The timing of this is not that surprising since we have a President that is so slippery about his Executive Powers that even Rachel Maddow has reacted with incredulity at his rationalizations ("construct[ing] a legal regime" for prolonged detention being a kind of "ad hoc legal strateg[y]")  ― and yet gets a lot of public approval after running on a ticket to reform executive licentiousness.  Well, Lincoln in the film admits to assuming powers he wasn't sure were given him by the Constitution he swore to uphold, and he explains one of his "ad hoc legal strategies."

 If there is one overriding theme to Spielberg's Lincoln, it is that when the cause is righteous enough, there is no amount of fraud and corruption that is unwarranted.  This is good news to the Left, because they've known for a long time their causes are just that good.  I'm not embellishing about the movie at all.  According to Spielberg's narrative, a movie that ironically has Abe rebuking the Confederate leaders for not having faith in the democratic process, Abe's idea of democracy in action included among other things: (1) lying to Congress and the American people about the purposes and effects of policies, (2) dealing in bad faith with a diplomatic peace mission from the Confederacy, (3) deliberately misleading Congress about diplomatic relations with the South, (4) buying votes through cronyism and cash payouts, etc.   The movie presents all of these things as noble and grand, because they were done for a noble cause.

 Lesson:

The Inherent Colonialism of the Left

Not the most thoughtful analysis but I read a blog posting in which the author takes issue with those who "promulgate and promote the notion that, because of his father's background, Obama has an anti-colonial mindset. And what is so bad about that, anyway? Colonialism is: 'the control or governing influence of a nation over a dependent country, territory, or people.' The US started out as a colony and didn't care much for it."  No.  The U.S. started off as a group of separate colonies, and people in all the colonies wanted to enjoy all the rights of British citizens.  When this seemed impossible, they took to the notion of independence and the colonies became sovereign states.   If they didn't confederate, they wouldn't be able to resist the Crown and keep their independence, so sovereign states voluntarily joined a confederacy under the Articles, and then voluntarily ratified a document constituting "a more perfect union."  This document was crafted with the express purpose of keeping the federal government from exercising imperial authority over the states.  It defined essentially a sort of corporation of the states.

The problem with the sort of anti-colonialism that Obama appears to embrace (as D'Souza argues in 2016, citing among other things Obama's quick return of the Churchill bust and his position on the Falkland Islands) is that it is the progressive class warfare trope writ large.  If one nation is doing well and another isn't, the well-off nation must be bettering itself at the others' expense.  There is no economic win-win scenario scenario for the leftist.  (As I've noted previously, D'Souza's 2016 illustrates some problems with this view.)
Notice here also that progressives have had muted (if not missing) outrage over Soviet Russian colonialism over Easter Europe.  Very little to say about that. Maybe because all that was done in the name of spreading the wealth.

But I want to get into my principal theme here, that as much as the Left condemns intervention on the foreign front (though ignoring it under some circumstances especially if the "League of Nations" is for it) and downplays the need to be strongly armed against global threats, it believes in a government force against its citizenry (and disarming the public against such) and power being consistently more centralized and nationalized.

In other words, the Left seems to support the autonomy of foreign states, often when there is reason to think there is a great potential threat, while disdaining the autonomy of our domestic states whose powers of autonomy are nominally guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.  How many left-leaning citizens continue to be bothered by federal troops incinerating children in Waco, because the militarized ATF didn't like being repelled by armed citizens (a jury found in favor of the Waco survivors exercising their 2nd Amendment rights against armed invaders) and so they gassed them with tanks.  This happened under the direction of so-called liberal peaceniks.  It makes you wonder what would happen if American states decided to secede from the federal government.  Would people that balked at intervening in the affairs of dictatorships seriously send federal troops in to force subservience on penalty of death?

The assumption that the federal government will opt for the Lincoln precedent (level the states if it will keep them "in the fold") itself demonstrates the colonial attitude. (As Kathy Bates said in Misery, "It's for the best.")  When it comes to how certain Islamist nations treat their women, we have nothing to say (it is their country after all), but Supreme Court Justices here have reveled in their power, not simply to keep government powers within their constituted limits, but to expand federal power by dictating what the states can legislate.

Whenever anyone says that conservatives are going to outlaw abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade, you should recall that there was abortion before Roe v. Wade, in the states that allowed it.  The court decision  for Roe v. Wade (based on a lie if you now ask Jane Roe) took the matter out of state autonomy based on a dubious interpretation of Constitutional privacy.   Now your federal government can be involved in almost any matter between you and your physician except when it might involve the life of a defenseless feeling creature (that thing that is referred to clinically as a fetus).  The right to privacy disappears in those cases.  And the federal government is licensed to interfere with state affairs on the basis of judicially minted "reproductive rights."  Isn't that useful?

Here's what I suspect.  In that social upheaval during which the Democrats abandoned "states rights" after they lost their fight against civil rights legislation and the progressive radicals steered the party toward identity politics and America-blaming, something happened.  Not only did progressives see a party that was disoriented and ripe for the taking.  Not only did Democrat politicians see in young protesters a chance to demagogue their way into a new clientele/constituency.  I think that the most radical progressives and socialists and Marxists licked their lips when federal troops descended on Little Rock in 1957.  I think it was at that time that they started to see in identity politics the key to breaking the 10th Amendment protection against centralized, nationalized power.  There is nothing like an expansive court decision for making federal guns descend on a locality.  And there is nothing like morality questions for making expansive court decisions.

Now there are your everyday average progressive types that think, strangely enough, really do think that progressivism is all about individual liberty and putting all the power in the one place you can trust (the federal government) to guarantee those individual liberties.  Big Daddy Fed will protect you from your state, from your community, from your employer; just hand over your guns and all information concerning your economic transactions.  And Daddy will take care of you.  Uncle Ho, Uncle Mao, Uncle Sam.  Oh my!

Let's forget about Iraq and focus on Afghanistan, since Obama said that's what we should have done all along.  All this effort in Afghanistan just to exact revenge on bin Laden.  Wouldn't it have been nobler to go into Vietnamistan with the express purpose of replacing their government with one that would respect human rights?  Will the governments in Egypt and Libya be less oppressive to women and homosexuals?  Or is just having Islamist governments that are more hostile to Israel its own reward?

You say we'd be treading on their culture, interfering wrongfully, violating the Prime Directive?  (Supposedly though, the Civil War was (retroactively?) justified precisely for imposing a set of values.)   Why don't progressives think that they are doing the same thing to states all over the Union?  Why are liberals content to push their liberal morality and their secularism and scientism (their values) on the local conservative masses that are too stupid to know what's good for them?   In that case they think the imposition is justified.  Why, it's my country and I'm going to make everyone in Texas live how I know the country should live!  What about making Saudi Arabia live up to the standards that you know are right?  Oh no! I can't do that. It's not my country.  That would be unethical! 

When we are talking about foreign states, especially Muslim states, those states are given a dignity that domestic states here are not — that even though there may be large segments of their society that seem prone to oppression in the eyes of liberals or even in the eyes of most Americans, especially compared to any of the states of the U.S.!  Why?  How can liberals be so silent (or supportive!) about so many nations that have little or no commitment to liberty, and at the same time decry the U.S. (and its conservatives in particular) as theocratic, radical, ultra-religious, hateful, destructive, extremist, etc.  Comparing the Tea Party movement to Salafis?  Really?  ... But sharia as national civil code?  Oh that's just people keeping their culture!  Don't knock it if you haven't bothered to understand it!  Ah, the selective multi-culturalism of the Left!

And their selective colonialism!  An approach that, instead of following Reagan's successful peace through strength example,  tries to level the playing field where America is one of many world powers (like Israel is one of our closest allies in the Middle East) but the people can be coerced with overwhelming federal might into anything that is forced on the entire population (whether through judicial fiat or through populist demagoguery). Don't want the federal government to take your guns?  From your cold dead hands?  Judging by the rubble at Waco, from your incinerated dead hands!  Lying next to your incinerated children.  You citizens can't be trusted with weapons so we're going to Tiananmen Square your asses with these tanks.  ATF?  That's another name for an armed force and in Waco it was an armed force of berserkers turned loose on citizens without due process.

With the 10th Amendment being gutted, the states are once again becoming colonies, no longer self-determined, paying ever-growing tributes to an Empire in a tiny country known as the District of Columbia.  The only thing that makes us a true large Republic of smaller republics is respecting the 10th Amendment.  The only thing that warrants federal intrusion of armed forces is a threat to national security or a threat to "Republican Form of Government" (Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution) in a particular state.  Liberals here vote for Empire as long as the imperial actions are limited to the 50 states currently under its jurisdiction.

One of the criticisms of the modern revolt against this imperial imposition, was that, unlike the modern Tea Party movement, the Boston Tea Party was a revolt against an evil corporation, ergo it was more like Occupy Wall Street than the modern Tea Party.  This is the first time I've heard that the Boston Tea Party had little to do with the 1773 Tea Act and with the Revolutionary War in general.  The "Destruction of the Tea" as it was known then was a political protest against a policies in which the British government was "picking the winners and losers" in colonial commerce in order to fill its coffers after a war in which many colonials had fought and died.  At the time, a little commercial terrorism (by local capitalists) was a safer political statement than confronting redcoats.  The East India Co. was practically a GSE of the British Empire, and the colonials were sending a message to Parliament that they recognized it as a way of funding the Empire.  So it may be a more complicated situation to analyze, but reducing the destruction of the tea to the same nebulous anti-capitalist outrage of people that envy the salaries of executives is an extremely superficial analysis.

This reminds me of the quick retraction (well, not a retraction, more like a sudden stunned silence) of the criticism over Sarah Palin's 1773 non-gaffe.  Don't party yet like it's 1773, people.  And yes, not everything significant that happened in the 1770s happened in 1776.