RUSH: There wouldn’t be social issues if there weren’t angst and misery and unhappiness. And make no mistake: That’s what’s driving all this, folks. You may think this is all political, but it’s angst and misery. It’s unhappiness. It’s people seeking a mysterious… You can read it in Kennedy Supreme Court ruling. You know that Supreme Court decision that Kennedy wrote is basically all about self-esteem and dignity.
That’s why Scalia openly wrote he would be embarrassed to sign his name to a majority opinion such as that written by Anthony Kennedy on the gay marriage business. Esteem and dignity and freedom-of-intimacy and all this stuff. Make no mistake, this… I mean, you can say it was political and is, but this is a quest for happiness that has eluded people. It’s a quest for normalcy that’s eluded people. It’s a quest… And this is not gonna provide that. See, that’s the thing.
This is not… In fact, there’s already… There was a story yesterday in the New York Times: “Historic Day for Gays, but Twinge of Loss for an Outsider Culture.” There are already gay activists who are saying (paraphrased), “Gee, I don’t like it, not being a member of the oppressed.” I’ll share with you the details. I got a couple audio sound bites. But the social issues are political footballs, not because of us.
And, by the way, I think you fiscal conservatives out there (I should say “you fiscal Republicans”) who say, “You know what? Social issues? To hell with them! They’re killing us. It’s all economics for me now. I don’t want to hear about social issues.” You are… If that’s your attitude, if you don’t want to hear about the social issues — if you don’t want social issues being debated/discussed — then you may as well just turn the culture over to the left, because that’s what the social issues are all about.
What do you think this is about? Where do you think this cultural depravity and rot, perversion, whatever you want to call it is coming from? It’s not because we stand for life. (laughs) It’s not because we’re anti-abortion. That’s not why this is happening! It’s not because people are for marriage as explained and defined in Genesis. That’s not why all this is happening. We’re minding our own business and all of a sudden it’s okay to kill babies in the womb, and people say, “No, we say it’s not!”
We stand up, and then all of a sudden we’re the ones who are the bad guys? Take any social issue you want that’s in the public realm, and it’s been converted to political issues by the left attempting to advance their agenda, not us. And for every Republican that in frustration says, “To heck with it! These social issues are killing us. We’ve gotta stop,” you can’t stop, because the left owns authorship of all this, and the left is not gonna stop.
You know what’s next, don’t you? It’s hard to predict which of these are going to happen next. One of them may already have. A church is going to be sued for refusing to perform a gay wedding. The church and the pastor, whoever, are gonna be sued both as an institution and individually, ’cause that’s the design. There’s an-all-out effort here to water down, dilute — and if they could, just eliminate — Christianity as a dominant cultural, religious, and dare I say political force. That’s the target.
And then you may have heard people speculating about polygamy and you may say, “Ah, come on! This is just panic talk.” It isn’t panic talk because the way Kennedy wrote his opinion, there’s no legal way now for anybody to oppose it. Gay marriage… You look at Kennedy’s ruling, and you listen to how people talk about it, and gay marriage… Marriage. Forget “gay.” Marriage itself was portrayed as a thing that some people get to do and others don’t, and that made it unfair, and that made it civil rights violation, and that made it unequal.
And then the Millennials said, “Oh, if it’s unequal, then it’s bad. We gotta be for it! Well, marriage is just the latest thing that some people get to do and some people don’t, and guess who doesn’t get to do it? The people these crazy Christians don’t like! Well, that makes it unacceptable.” But marriage isn’t a thing. It’s not just… It’s not something that some slave owner 200 years ago invented specifically to discriminate against people. The first references to marriage anybody knows of are in Genesis. So you can say God.
But that’s even offensive to some people, by design. Now, the other thing that marriage is portrayed as in addition to a thing was a benefit, and wasn’t fair that some people got the benefits of it and other people didn’t. Marriage has never been a thing as described there, never been a benefit as characterized here. But it is. As far as Justice Kennedy and those who agreed with his majority opinion in Supreme Court are concerned, there’s nothing special about it.
It’s just a thing over there that some people get to do, and a minority of people don’t get to do. Therefore it’s a civil rights discrimination. The actual undeniable, truthful characteristics and definition of marriage long ago vanished from any debate on this. So this is written that all is okay. Polygamy, as a following thing… I’m not trying to scare anybody here, and I’m not trying to jolt anybody. The natural progression. I’ll somehow… In fact, the left is already writing for it.
You’ve already got people demanding it on the left.
It was as predictably as the rain, except in California where there isn’t any. Let me take a brief time-out and get a little bit more detailed about all of this and explain why those of us who vigorously disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision Friday did so. And it’s not to deny some people a thing, and it’s not because we want to deny benefits to some people who don’t get them. It’s not because we are selfish and want marriage as an institution only to us. As is the usual case when discussing the leftist agenda, you cannot discuss the leftist agenda without also discussing the constitutional destruction that takes place as the leftist agenda marches forward.
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RUSH: Now, what must happen constitutionally for the Supreme Court to decide that gay marriage is — that marriage, period — is under the purview of the federal government? There has to be some constitutional connection. And, of course, there isn’t. Marriage already existed when the Constitution was written. Marriage existed thousands of years before America did. So the government has no role in it whatsoever.
It has taken it, it has assumed it, but what had to happen? This is where learned people are really concerned. What has to happen in order for Anthony Kennedy and his four cronies of the Supreme Court to claim that there is a constitutional right to marriage or gay marriage, it means that existing actual constitutional rights have to somehow vanish, or be changed or altered. Look at it this way. The right own guns, the right to bear arms, the right to free speech.
That’s amendments two and amendment one. The right to religious liberty is amendment one. They are explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, and they are explicitly protected. Government shall make no law abridging the right to keep and bear arms, free speech, religious liberty. Except it just did. And you see, that’s the rub. The erosion of real constitutional rights. Now, the effort to erode those rights… No, gun laws haven’t been affected here, but religious liberty has, and so has free speech.
Free speech and religious liberty, folks, are out the window, for something that’s not mentioned in the Constitution. There was no law. If there were law in Kennedy’s decision, this could not have happened. There was no law here. There was the creation of law at the expense of other things explicitly mentioned in the Constitution. This was about “dignity.” This was about self-esteem. This was about…
What did he call it? I can’t remember. It’s embarrassing, the route taken to justify this. But forget religious liberty, which is now gone. Just hang on a day or two if you want to see that. In fact, you’ve already seen it. Free speech gone. See how quickly those can erode. What else? What else can activist liberal judges erase from the Constitution? ‘Cause once that starts to happen — and it has, and it has been — that’s the troubling aspect, one of many.
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RUSH: Now, I want to continue on this for a couple minutes here and we’ll move on to other things, but I need to express this specifically. And, by the way, in terms of giving up when “it’s the law of the land,” the pro-life movement didn’t look at Roe v. Wade that way, and the left clearly doesn’t look at their political defeats that way. It’s, “Well, that’s not the law of the land! I guess we’ll have to move on.” The problem here is that — and I heard other analysts say this last week, that it could eventually backfired.
Although I don’t know what “backfiring” would ultimately mean other than public opinion shifting, but I think something’s gonna happen even before that does, which I will get to here in just a moment. But the fact is that the American people were in the process of having a democratic debate about this, state by state by state by state, and it was trending positive. It looked like in not too long a time, maybe five years or 10 (who knows, maybe less), that the people of this country would vote state by state by state to legalize homosexual marriage.
Now, that debate’s been shut down because Anthony Kennedy and his four renegades rode in, shut off the debate, and determined, “Right here it is! It’s right there in the 14th Amendment, see? See? It’s right there, that people in this country who are not happy ’cause they’re left out of things have a right to be included in those things, and it says it right there in the 14th Amendment.” It does? “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! It’s right there.” I don’t see it. “Well, you have to be a lawyer and be thinking like we do to see it. But it’s there.”
A-ha. The same thing that happened with abortion. See, there’s gonna… The culture has now, society has now been roiled and the debate is gonna rage on. It’s not over. It isn’t gonna be over, because never forget this. No matter what victories the left, the socialists, the liberals, the Democrats, whatever you want to call ’em — no matter how many victories they have — it is never enough. No matter how much money they get to spend, no matter how much money they get in benefit, no matter what it is that they demand, it is never enough.
Do you know why? Because when Justice Kennedy and the rest of these people talk about dignity and self-esteem. That’s exactly what’s on the table here. I don’t care if it goes gay marriage to Obamacare. I don’t care what the issue is. The Confederate flag? You’ve got people over there who are miserably unhappy about something, and they believe that getting something — taking something away — from other people will make them happy. And it never does. It’s never enough.
And it’s going to be the case with gay marriage. It is not going to make them feel the way they want to feel. It’s not going to erase whatever baggage they have. It never is. This is not specific to gay marriage. It’s specific to liberals, because their targets, their quests or what have you, are rooted in a void, if you will. I think they’re absent God in many cases in their lives. Not just gays. I’m talking about the global warming crowd. Everybody who denies the existence of God in favor of a different god somewhere over here, it’s not enough.
It never is enough, never will be enough, and so the quest is going to continue, and it almost can be reduced to a grass-is-greener kind of thing. “The majority has these things; we don’t have ’em. It’s not fair! We want those things, too.” Political pressure is mounted, and they get those things. But they keep coming back for more. It’s just never enough. There just isn’t any satisfaction. I can’t get no satisfaction no matter what happens.
In fact you could almost say, if you study leftists — the welfare state, the benefits state, whatever you want to call it — the more they get, the angrier they become. The more they get, the more unhappy they become. This is something that I have noticed, particularly these past six years. Black America’s angrier than it’s ever been. Various special interest groups on the left are angrier, more unhappy than they’ve ever been, while at the same time we are hearing it’s the greatest week for Obama in his presidency last week.
“It’s the greatest week ever! It’s a historic! It’s the greatest week the country’s ever had.” But it doesn’t translate to happiness somehow, for some reason. Because you know, the decision was not rooted in… I mean, these justices on the winning side last week did not look at the Constitution and say, “Can we find somewhere in here a right to homosexual marriage?” They didn’t even look. That’s the point: They didn’t even look. They didn’t even ask, “Does the Constitution allow states to define marriage?”
They just said, “Do you favor gay marriage or not?” and that became the whole legal proposition, in favor of it on or not. “It’s a thing some people have and some people don’t. It’s unfair, a civil rights violation. It’s a benefit some people have and some people don’t. We’ve gotta fix this! It’s a gross error, it’s unhuman, it is unfair, it’s bigotry,” all of that. Because marriage was cast as some sort of institution created by a bunch of bigots, elites, for themselves and denied to others. “And by God we’re gonna fix that!”
So as I was saying, to “fix” that, you have to take other parts of the Constitution that do exist and deemphasize them or ignore them. Freedom of speech and religious liberty. And I’m telling you, it’s a toss-up which is gonna come first. No, it’s not. Religious liberty. The attack on religion is next, on organized religion. There’s already… I got a couple stories in the Stack about leftists making an immediate concerted move to remove the tax exempt status from all churches if they will not perform homosexual marriages.
It’s not enough for you out there to say, “Okay, well, the court said gay marriage is legal, fine.” That’s not enough. You must actively embrace it. You must actively support it. You may not oppose it. You may not even dis it. In fact, folks, in Kennedy’s opinion… Get this. In Kennedy’s majority opinion, when talking about religious liberty (this is just so big of him), he grants that people of religious disagreement will continue to have the right of dissent.
But he didn’t say anything about the right to practice religious liberty. Not in this decision. They made all kinds of references — a couple/three — that if you are a deeply religious person, a priest or a pastor of a church, you’re free to dissent, meaning you’re free to tell people you disagree. But you are not free to act on it. In other words, “You can’t deny the constitutional right we just ordained. You can argue against it, you can say you don’t like it, and you’ll be okay. But you cannot practice that. You can not!”
That’s practically stated in the Supreme Court opinion. So my guess is it’s already happened. You know, a gay couple has walked into a church somewhere and tried to reserve it for a wedding and been told, “Sorry.” So now that gay couple is meeting with their lawyers and we’ll find out about it soon enough. And it’s not just one. It’s gonna be in a bunch of places, you watch. And then the next push is gonna be, “Hey, I want to marry two women.”
“No, no, you can’t.”
Well, if you go to Anthony Kennedy’s opinion, there’s nothing… The way marriage was defined — the way homosexual marriage, gay marriage was permitted and defined — it said nothing about two. The opinion doesn’t mention the word “two.” It talks about self-esteem and dignity and happiness and all that. So if your happiness… Say you’re a woman, and you want to marry two guys. I mean, the court cannot say “no” to it if it ever gets there. It can’t say “no” to it because of the way they said “yes” to homosexual marriage.
So there’s gonna be a push for that.
That’s not a prediction. That’s fait accompli. So religious liberty and freedom of speech have to be diluted, have to be watered down, have to be — might you even say — eliminated in order for there to be homosexual marriage. That’s the real reason so many people who really think about this, oppose it. It’s not because they want to deny anybody a thing, and it’s not because they want to deny anybody benefits, and it’s not because anybody wants to say, “Well, you can’t! You’re only 1.6% of the population.”
It’s not that at all. Believe it or not, there are people who care about things larger than themselves. I’m one of them. The Constitution is one of those things. The country’s one of those things that I care about more than I care about myself. I don’t look at the political system as a self-interested, say, way to get rich. A lot of people do; I don’t. A lot of people look at the political system as a thing to game and angle.
I have a deep reverence for the Constitution and how it happened. I think it’s a miracle. But it isn’t taught that way anymore, except in the Rush Revere books and a few obscure universities. Other than that, the Constitution is nothing spectacular. The Constitution is being taught as this giant document of bigotry and discrimination, and pretty soon those are gonna be the only people teaching it because the students in college today learning to become teachers, that’s all they’re learning about the Constitution.
They’re not being taught this reverence for it. They’re not being taught the miracle that happened for it to occur. When it was a miracle in Philadelphia, the writing of the Constitution. Now it’s just some racist screed now, so forth. That’s why so many people want to hold on to it. But look at two subjects: Abortion and marriage. You know, neither are even mentioned in the Constitution. They’re not once mentioned. Marriage, abortion, they’re not once talked about.
However, these lawyers in black robes, why, they certainly feel like they’ve got the power to regulate these things. Where do they get that power? From where do they derive it? Where do they see in the Constitution that they get to see things that are not there? And, you know, what falls by the wayside here is state sovereignty. States have always had purview over marriage. That’s one of the bases on which the states ratified the Constitution. So the ease with which things in the Constitution can be written out of it here or ignored in favor of something not even mentioned is kind of scary, folks, regardless what you think.
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RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I make a verbal dyslexic error. The Anthony Kennedy opinion on gay marriage does say “two.” I said, “It doesn’t say ‘two,'” and I conflated my own attempted meaning here. The point is this: There is no intellectually honest way to distinguish the reasoning on gay marriage from, say, reasoning used to support polygamy. The decision does say “two,” in terms of determining homosexual/gay marriage.
The point is, in getting there by relying on dignity and self-esteem, narrows no specific limit here in the pursuit of self-esteem and dignity that the court has now sanctioned. In fact, think of polygamy. Think of the arguments for polygamy. “Hey, three sets of parents. Why, you’d have another set of parents to take care of the babies in case one set of parents couldn’t.” I mean, I’m sure you can come up with equally advantageous examples or reasons for polygamy.
The point is it’s going to happen precisely because the Supreme Court’s decision on homosexuality cannot say it can’t.
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