Constitutional Amendments
252 words.
Crowhill is back in my reader after some down time, and via. The phony baloney moral rules of liberalism I saw this post: On the gay marriage amendment.
Rationally Speaking suggests that the Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition) was the only Constitutional amendment that restricted rather than expanded the civil liberties of Americans, and it was later repealed. He offers this as evidence that there should not be a marriage amendment which would restrict the rights of gay citizens. (Personally, I’m not quite sure that getting drunk should be considered a “civil liberty,” but I’ll go along with the premise for the moment.)
Crowhill counters by suggesting that the Thirteenth Amendment (Abolition of Slavery) also restricted civil liberties — the right of slave-owners to own slaves. While technically that’s true, it relies on the dubious premise that enslavement of minorities, aka. discrimination, is a “civil liberty.” I’ll admit discrimination against minorities is popular, but it doesn’t quite fit my own definition of a civil liberty (even less so than “getting drunk” does :).
For myself, I’ve had a wacky (and consistently unpopular) position on marriage since my bachelor days: I don’t think there should be any legal “privileges” for being married (eg. tax breaks). So in my opinion, if there’s going to be an amendment regarding marriage, it should be an amendment that says something like, “Congress shall make no federal law which discriminates against an individual based on their marital status.” (Realistically, I know that isn’t going to happen, but I can dream.)
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