By juxtaposing the renewed calls from the Left for stricter gun control (it should be noted: President Obama’s policies would not, in point of fact, have prevented the Charleston killing spree) with their unbridled elation at the Supreme Court’s recent act of judicial supremacy par excellence this past Friday, June 26th—a day that will live in infamy as surely as March 6, 1857 has: the day Dred Scott was decided—their moral hypocrisy and deficient understanding of liberty is exposed.
Now that the high court has done the impossible, divining a fundamental right to same-sex marriage within the confines of the Constitution, via a throwback to the heady days of Lochner and the much maligned (at least per originalists) doctrine of Substantive Due Process—through which the Court teases out fundamental rights wholly extra-textually—those who adhere to the conjugal view of marriage will now completely warrant the label “bigot” that those on the Left are fond of throwing around willy-nilly. After all, marriage between couples of the same sex is now a “fundamental right.”
E.J. Dionne, speaking to the Left’s gun control fetish, recently wrote a Real Clear Politics column pushing for a “revolution in popular attitudes” regarding guns and gun ownership, all to defend “one of our most sacred rights: The right not to bear arms.”
Never mind where Dionne stumbled upon this right to be free from guns (it surely isn’t in the Constitution): At a purely intellectual level, I am all for Dionne’s call for organic, societally grounded surges to effect change in the political and cultural fabric of the country. I believe that this is the single best way for such shifts in attitudes and policies to take place. And yet, Dionne has very little sympathy for Christians and other believers in conjugal marriage who try to do the very same thing: Change hearts and minds with authentic witness to the truth about marriage, employing (among other methods) scholarly studies and rigorous, philosophical argumentation.
But when we stand fast against the cultural, political onslaught that is the same-sex marriage movement, just as Dionne calls for anti-gun advocates to do in the wake of Charleston, we are likened to Jim Crow-era supporters of miscegenation, spreaders of pure hate.
Dionne also makes an exceedingly strange claim in light of the Supreme Court’s activist foist of their own perception of what marriage is upon a nation still very much in the process of debating and engaging the issue through the democratic process. Quoting a progressive pollster, he writes that the NRA “is the enemy of freedom, by seeking to impose its values on everyone else.”
This contortion of logic is embarrassing, and it exposes Dionne’s unyielding ideological stance on guns. The NRA, in defending citizens’ right to “keep and bear Arms”—a right clearly enumerated in the Second Amendment—is imposing its values on everyone else … by merely safeguarding the environment in which citizens can have access to guns if they so choose?
But when social conservatives make the case that gay activists and left-wing academics in Obergefell have forced their own moral views upon the rest of the nation by redefining marriage to make into a genderless institution more focused on the romantic desires of adults at the expense of the needs and rights of children, we are laughed out of the room. How will this ruling possibly affect you? They taunt, If you don’t want a gay marriage, then don’t get one!
So to recap: The NRA is forcing its (repugnant) views on guns on the rest of the nation by protecting people’s Second Amendment rights (which are explicitly in the Constitution) … but the plaintiffs in Obergefell, as a result of a raw act of political will by the Court (which subsequently imposed a “fundamental right” to same-sex marriage upon the entire country—a right merely implicit in the Fourteenth Amendment), have simply “expanded the franchise” of those eligible to participate in the institution of marriage.
And this train of thought passes muster, how, exactly? Simple answer: It doesn’t.
I have never had to use a gun, and I suspect that I will not be in the market for one anytime soon. This is my right. But I will not trample on the clear right of my fellow Americans to purchase a gun should they feel the need to possess one. Who am I to prevent, perhaps, my own neighbor from arming himself against danger? In some places, a gun is the only defense a family has against those who do them harm because the police are simply too far away to be of any real assistance in a time of crisis.
So don’t be angry, same-sex marriage advocates, when we on the Right bring grassroots and institutional pressure to bear against the movement; that is our right as participants in a constitutional republic with a First Amendment. In turn, we won’t be angry when you try to “shame” us out of our “barbaric” and backward desire to own guns.
We aren’t bigots for opposing a wholly invented right imposed upon the entire nation by a bare majority of unelected judges—not legislators—totally unaccountable to the people. If you all aren’t bigots for opposing peoples’ clear Second Amendment right to own a gun, then we cannot be.
