Another Straw Man Bites the Dust

Well, whaddaya know? Charges that the judge who ruled California’s ban on same sex marriage unconstitutional is just another one of those gosh-dern liberal activist judges might have trouble sticking. As it turns out, Judge Richard Kramer is:

a Catholic Republican appointed to the bench by a former GOP governor.

Yowza. Too bad for you, homobigots. Your straw man of the liberal activist judge who cares more about promoting gay marriage than a fair interpretation of the law just came tumbling down. Judge Kramer, possibly one of the last reasonable conservatives in the country, just kicked your prejudiced, whiny, hollering asses to the curb—and your “liberal activist judge” mantra, too.

As an aside, Judge Kramer also just seems like a generally interesting guy:

While he said he sought out a judgeship so that he could spend more time with his wife and daughter, he said he spent his first months as a criminal court judge reading the Penal Code cover to cover and driving through crime-ridden neighborhoods in San Francisco to get a sense of what was happening in the community.

"It's all fascinating to me," he told the Daily Journal. "What you have to do is figure out what the person did and what to do about it. And most of these cases require common sense and humanity."

Huh. What a concept.

And as an aside, of which I was reminded by Judge Kramer’s wise reference to the humanity of law, you’ll recall the Freepers who are worried that all hell will break loose because of this ruling, that it will open the door for “cats to marry chairs” and “ferrets to marry toilet bowls.” The leap from two men or two women who love one another to marriage with non-sentient things is indicative of a very real and very ugly contempt for even the most basic humanity of gays and lesbians.

I find all kinds of reasons to be disgusted by such an attitude, but the one thing I find most repellent about it is that you find this view most frequently among those who also revile Darwinism because they believe the concept of having evolved from apes devalues human existence. So make no mistake—when a Freeper compares a homosexual to a chair or a toilet bowl, it’s not just mindless hyperbole. It’s a calculated attempt to reinforce the dehumanization of lesbians and gays in the eyes of other like-minded human superiorists.

And that, my friends, is why sexuality- and gender-politics will never be considered “secondary” political issues on this blog.