BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Thursday, December 18, 2003
The judge sure is funky.
Federal appeals-court judge Richard Posner has a problem. It is the
same problem experienced by such great minds as the Reverend Pat
Robertson and Nixon-era born-again Chuck Colson: he cannot conceive
of two men or two women having sex with each other without animals
somehow being involved.
To be fair, Posner's concern is
also shared by US Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, who really
does possess a first-class legal mind, even though the other parts of
Scalia's brain are apparently still mired somewhere in the eighth
grade.
But Posner, though a conservative,
has never previously revealed himself to be a raving nutcase. So I
was stunned to read his barnyard epithets in the latest issue of the
New Republic.
Posner - who is himself a
major-league
cat fancier -
reviews
(sub. req.) a pro-gay-marriage book called Same-Sex Marriage and
the Constitution, by Evan Gerstmann. Whether deliberately or not,
he ends up telling us far more about himself than he does about
Gerstmann's book.
To wit:
And I have not even tasked
him with explaining what the state's compelling interest is in
forbidding a man to marry his beloved dachshund.
...
But I suspect that more object
for the same reason they would object to incestuous or polygamous
marriages, or allowing people to marry their pets or their SUVs -
that it would impair the sanctity, degrade the institution, of
marriage (their marriage) to associate marriage with
homosexuality.
Posner also appears to accept
Scalia's dissenting argument in Lawrence v. Texas that, by
overturning state anti-sodomy laws, "the majority had written
finis to any law based on moral disapproval with no
accompanying proof of tangible harm, such as laws forbidding sex with
animals." (I'm quoting Posner, not Scalia.)
What is going on here? Earlier this
year I quoted
12 years' worth of bizarre outbursts equating homosexuality with
bestiality. Now a respected federal judge writing for a liberal,
pro-gay-rights magazine is getting into the act.
Are the critters really that much
at risk?
And by the way, for a magazine that
has generally been supportive of same-sex marriage, TNR's
cover package this week is heavily tilted the other way.
Jeffrey
Rosen is against it, and
purports to show flaws in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's
reasoning in the Goodridge decision. Cass
Sunstein is for it, but
only because he thinks it's a good idea that states such as
Massachusetts experiment with it before trying to impose it at the
federal level.
I actually found myself pining for
Andrew
Sullivan.
posted at 8:40 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
