05 September 2006
Use The Ratchet Upside Their Head, Pour Encourger Les Autres.
Instapundit points us to an editorial by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, perential Supreme Court bridesmaid, arguing against a proposed amendment to Virginia's constitution banning gay marriage. Judge Wilkinson argues that gay marriage is a proper matter for ordinary legislation and shouldn't be locked into constitutional law. I entirely agree. But Judge Wilkinson does not spend any time on what Richard Posner calls the "one-way ratchet" problem. That is, if liberals use the courts to constitutionalize their policy preferences and the conservatives don't, then even if conservatives sometimes control the courts, the law will still move in the liberal direction over time. At least when it comes to gay marriage, the conservative constitutionalize their policy preferences by holding a vote and amending the constitution. The most we can hope for is that gay marriage, like abortion, turns into an electoral debacle; that the left realizes that it has; and that they learn not to use the courts in the first place.
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6 comments:
Is not a strong dedication to not learning from experience a defining characteristic of the Modern American Left?
And shallowness.
Various behaviors and ways of being are promoted, admirable all, but with no thought whatsoever for how these things could be made to work, or what their secondary and tertiary effects might be, or whether such actions would actually accomplish what their proponents hope that they would...
Kind of a "bippity-boppety-boo" worldview, a magic wand solves all.
At least, that's been my experience.
...which I guess is just another way of making the same point that the "Small Baal" post does.
Intentions trump results so strongly that the results really don't even matter.
I still think it's actually more Logo-Realism, in which not even intentions matter so much but what is said about the intentions. You don't have to like the poor and even care a particle about them as long as you can spew out the right set of talking points. That's the magic wand.
SH: I think that there's a lot of truth in that, but I think that it is more self-deluding. "I am a good person if a help the poor. I help the poor by arguing that the government should tax people like me and spend the money on the poor. I am a good person."
This is why the left is the natural home of well-off people who don't pay attention to politics. "I'm doing something about the problem because I care about the problem."
I think you fellows have just said everything there is to say about the chattering Left.
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