Skip to main content

The inevitability doctrine

State Rep. Mike Lawlor, the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee since 1995, a proponent of marriage for gays, has said that the movement in that direction is “inevitable.”

Lawlor and others conceive of marriage as a civil right, and Lawlor has noticed that in the past century civil rights have been expanding. The right to vote once was denied to women, but with a little persistence, women were eventually – Lawlor would say “inevitably” – enfranchised. African Americans, once treated as chattel, first won their emancipation in a brutal Civil War and later, during the Civil Rights decade of Martin Luther King, won a victory over Jim Crow. The “enfranchisement” of gays – specifically endowing them with the “right” to marry – is next on the Civil Rights docket, and it is "inevitable" that the case should be decided in favor of gays.

The Lawlor theory runs aground on the perception that in politics only death, an unfortunate by-product of the human condition and apparently the only practical means of purging the body politic of calcified incumbents, and taxes are inevitable. Lawlor, serving his eleventh term as a member of the House of Representatives, has worked diligently to assure that taxes in Connecticut continue to defy the law of gravity; they always go up and never come down.

There are some important differences between marriage and voting. Marriage is principally a religious institution and, unlike voting based on citizenship, is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. Some people think that constitutional rights are infinitely elastic, but this theory runs aground on the notion, common in constitutional interpretation, that you cannot extend a right infinitely in one direction because the right will collide with an equally valuable constitutional right.

Gay rights already have collided with religious rights; the rights, privileges and immunities of both must, when necessary, be accommodated.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Lamont Surprised at Suit Brought Against PURA

Marissa P. Gillett, the state's chief utility regulator, watches Gov. Ned Lamont field questions about a new approach to regulation in April 2023. Credit: MARK PAZNIOKAS / CTMIRROR.ORG Concerning a suit brought by Eversource and Avangrid, Connecticut’s energy delivery agents, against Connecticut’s Public Utility Regulatory Agency (PURA), Governor Ned Lamont surprised most of the state’s political watchers by affecting surprise.   “Look,” Lamont told a Hartford Courant reporter shortly after the suit was filed, “I think it is incredibly unhelpful,” Lamont said. “Everyone is getting mad at the umpires.   Eversource is not getting everything they want and they are bringing suit. It was a surprise to me. Nobody notified me. I think we have to do a better job of working together.”   Lamont’s claim is far less plausible than the legal claim made by Eversource and Avangrid. The contretemps between Connecticut’s energy distributors and Marissa Gillett , Gov. Ned Lamont’s ...

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Maureen Dowd vs Chris Murphy

  Maureen Dowd, a longtime New York Times columnist who never has been over friendly to Donald Trump, was interviewed recently by Bill Maher, and she laid down the law, so to speak, to the Democrat Party.   In the course of a discussion with Maher on the recently released movie Snow White, “New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd declared Democrats are ‘in a coma’ while giving a blunt diagnosis of the party she argued had become off-putting to voters,” Fox News reported.   The Democrats, Dowd said, stopped "paying attention" to the long term political realignment of the working class. "Also,” she added, “they just stopped being any fun. I mean, they made everyone feel that everything they said and did, and every word was wrong, and people don't want to live like that, feeling that everything they do is wrong."   "Do you think we're over that era?" Maher asked.   “No," Dowd answered. "I think Democrats are just in a coma. Th...