Claremont Prof. Sounds Off On Perry v. Schwarzenegger

Professor Audrey Bilger of Literature at Claremont McKenna once famously reviewed Oprah's Magazine O and discussed the queer issues in it.

Now she's celebrating the overturning of Perry v. Schwarzenegger. She writes, "History never moves at lightning speed, but some days seem even longer than others." You see, gently reader, "history" is what is on the march and we reactionaries had better get in line.

This emphasis on "history" is exhibit A on why those of us fear that homosexual marriage and the supposed "right" to it will lead to a proliferation of rights eroding the very real rights we actually have. Nobody believed a "right" to marry whatever sex you wanted existed fifteen years ago and yet here we have a judge arguing that there is a "right" to marry. I wonder, with both trepidation and curiosity, what the next "right" will be in the next fifteen years.

Rights, alas, have become politicized. To defend the creation of a new one, you have to build a coalition to defend it. The next part for Bilger et al. is to build a consensus around maintaining this artificially created right. To do that, she enlists the help of feminists by mentioning that the Walker decision is someone only possible in light of their achievements. The hope is that the sisterhood will come out for homosexual marriage and defend it. The earlier hope was that the black community, which voted overwhelmingly for Prop. 8, would countenance and accept homosexuality as a continuation of the Civil Rights legacy. Blacks, to put it mildly, were not amused.

This is absurd on its face, as the black experience goes back hundreds of years and that when it was at its most successful, it made its appeal to natural rights. There's no way anyone can plausibly make the case that homosexuality is grounded -- favorably -- on nature. Sure, there are instances of homosexuality going way back, but it was nearly always seen as something less desirable as a heterosexual relationship. How else to explain the fact that homosexuals have higher rates of STDs or higher rates of "breaking up" or divorce? It was never "gay is as good as straight," which is the mantra that characterizes our public schools today.

That is not to say that there isn't serious grounds for allowing homosexuals to have all the privileges and benefits that heterosexuals enjoy. As I have written before, I am a firm supporter of extending the child tax credit and of allowing any two people to enjoy the tax privileges of marriage, be they gay, heterosexual business partners, widowers, roommates, etc. I am even more a supporter when we consider that gays adopt children. It strikes me as one of the modern day evils of our time that we allow people to adopt children and then tax their parents as single people. Any party that seriously considers itself pro-life cannot see it as preferable to have a child be at the bottom of a Chinese well to having two dads or two moms as parents.

So now that I have made clear that my argument is not directed at homosexuals, but rather at the proliferation of new rights discovered by history, allow me to make a point about the passing scene.

Despite being resident of two states that allow or have allowed homosexuals to marry, I have never been given the opportunity to actually vote on giving my gay friends such a privilege. Rather, a judge has "discovered" it in the text of the Constitution. This worries me greatly because judges are fundamentally unaccountable and have the power of making new rulings based upon old precedents, moving further and further away from the law as understood by the people. This strikes me as a danger much larger than the question of Adam and Steve marrying. Indeed, it strikes me as a something that could imperil the whole idea of a republican form of government. If we believe that the promises of the Declaration are final, then there can be no moving forward. There can be no history revealing new rights. Either the Declaration is final or it isn't. If it isn't, I don't know how we can endure.

John-Clark Levin in The Wall Street Journal on Africa's Food Problems

John-Clark Levin CMC '12 and winner of this year's Eric Breindel award has written an op-ed about how Bono and the Live Aid's attempts to save Africa through fundraising and food have utterly failed. He writes,

Recently released CIA documents from 1985 (and a subsequent BBC investigation) suggest that so much of the money went to arms instead of food that it may have prolonged and deepened Ethiopia’s humanitarian catastrophe. Live Aid also focused the developed world on a flawed approach to charity that ignores the governmental causes of Africa’s misery.

Seven years later, the United Nations pledged to relieve the serious famine in Somalia brought on by its civil war. The U.N.’s first mission in 1992 was purely humanitarian—providing food, medicine and other vital supplies to a population in critical danger of starvation. Yet the country was so thoroughly in the grip of chaos that 80% of the food aid was stolen. Much of the remainder was unable to pass through the ruined Somali infrastructure to reach those who needed it.

It was not until a U.S.-led military mission was sent to restore order by force that the aid finally started getting through. The famine soon abated, and the conflict subsided considerably—until American forces pulled out after suffering 19 casualties in the Battle of Mogadishu the following year. Since the final withdrawal of U.N. peacekeepers in 1995, Somalia has known nothing but hunger, disease, anarchy and now piracy.

Hats off to John-Clark for what I hope is the first of many op-eds with The Wall Street Journal!

I should note something else that I found interesting. One of my very interest articles was about Bono and the failure of the Aid-Can-Save-The-World crowd. The title was, "Bono: Friend of Poverty, Not the Poor."