I’d like to suggest a different historical parallel—the battles of Midway and Stalingrad. The fighting didn’t end but after those battles the conclusion was foregone.
Actually, Taney’s reasoning was strained and the case as a whole was part and parcel of the pro-slavery extremist activism that had taken hold in the South. In his Cooper Union speech, Lincoln revealed what was, for the time, a tour de force of legal research by which he showed that the original intent of at least the majority of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention was that the federal government was to have, and did have, the right to exclude slavery from the territories.
In his earlier “House Divided” speech, he gave voice to a growing, but up to that point largely inchoate, sense in the North that Southerners in the federal government were conspiring to nationalize slavery. He asserted that Dred Scott and Douglas’s popular sovereignty" doctrine, embodied in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, were two parts of an active conspiracy. By means of Dred Scot, Congress was forbidden to exclude slavery from the territories and by means of Popular Sovereignty, it refrained from making its exclusion a condition of statehood. All that remained, he said, was a Supreme Court decision requiring Northern states to give “full faith and credit” to property rights in slaves created under the state law of Southern states and, presto, slavery was legal everywhere.
There’s tendency among modern historians to pooh-pooh that theory as overheated election rhetoric, but it was consistent with the known facts, with the avowed ideological views and stated intent of what we would today call “pro-slavery activists,” and, most importantly, with the obvious predilections of the Supreme Court.
Not ignorance. There’s an actual internally consistent alternate universe history they’ve concocted and believe with all the wattage overheated, feverish little noggins can generate that they consider to be the “real” history of the U.S. All part of the self-imposed reality control they practice.
Reed is the perfect example of this…its his bread and butter play. Pick an issue that has no chance of going anywhere but drives the fundies nuts, and fund raise, fund raise, fund raise!
He has been milking the fundies for decades now, and has it down to a…(pun intended)…science.
Ralph Reed doesn’t have an honest bone in his nasty body.
He’s a grifter and a charlatan whose sole claim to fame is his skill in bilking right-wing rubes, as he shoeed in his long and larcenous relationship with Jack Abramoff.
If there is a God, little Ralphie should be struck by lightning and incinerated on the spot.
I get his point…that even in the face of adverse court decisions, activists should not give up trying to promote their cause. The problem with his analogy is that in the case of slavery, public opinion was moving away from it already so overturning the court opinion was inevitable. In the case of gay marriage though, public opinion is turning towards it. It will not get repealed.
He believes that the country as a whole is against gay marriage. The latest polling casts doubt on that assertion, but even if it were true now, it won’t be in 5 years.
This argument fails to account for the swell in public opinion in favor of gay marriage rights. It also is blind to the exponential growth in support once gay marriages actually happen in a state and people realize it’s not quite as demonic as people like Reed would have us believe.
Basically, Reed and his ilk have been called bullshit on and just haven’t realized they’ve already lost.
It’s really the play book of the GOP and right wing leadership. Abortion is the chief of example. I’m betting most establishment, moderate, and big business/Wall St Republicans either don’t really care about abortion one way or the other, or aren’t particularly thrilled with the idea of banning the procedure. But they know the rabid base cares deeply. The GOP fat cats can get their base to vote against their own economic interests, to sellout their children, to vote for their own destruction over abortion. And they know if abortion was outlawed, it’s not really going to affect them and their’s. They have the means to send their daughters, wives, mistresses, etc to Canada to get one if need be. So, it behooves them for abortion to stay legal and for gay marriage to become the law of the land. It gives them something to keep their angry base angry.
