Can She Do That? New Mexico Governor Suspends Gun Carry Laws
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico shocked the nation last week when she announced an Executive Order that would temporarily suspend the state’s right-to-carry laws. The Order, along with a separate Executive Order addressing the fentanyl crisis, implements a public health order where the meat of the new regulations can be found.
Per the public health order, “No person, other than a law enforcement officer or licensed security officer, shall possess a firearm… either open or concealed” on public property in high crime areas for 30 days. Limited exceptions include firearms dealers, ranges, and transporting guns within a locked container or with a trigger lock. The restrictions on the order mean that the carry ban is limited to Albuquerque and surrounding Bernalillo County.
Some other facets of the order include:
- Monthly inspections of firearm dealers
- A ban on guns on state property and public parks
- Mandating a report on the demographics of gunshot victims
- Suspension of the Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative, a program that focuses on reform rather than incarceration
- A program to test school wastewater for “illicit substances, such as fentanyl”
Gov. Grisham’s orders raise many questions and concerns from both sides of the aisle. The most obvious question is, “Why is she doing this now?”
The answer to that question is in the Executive Order itself. While Gov. Grisham cites a number of reasons, there are three that seem central to her decision to act:
- New Mexico experienced a 43 percent increase in gun deaths from 2009 through 2018, while the nation at large increased by 18 percent
- Guns are the leading cause of death for New Mexico children and teens, including the deaths of a 13-year-old girl on July 28, a five-year-old girl on August 14, and an 11-year-old boy on September 6
- Two mass shootings in the state this year at Farmington and Red River
A second question is whether Gov. Grisham’s actions will reduce violence. My guess is that these band-aid solutions won’t have much effect.
First, the governor’s statistics seem to be questionable. New Mexico’s own data published online puts the most common cause of death for all age groups from one to 54 as “unintentional injuries.” For ages five to 34, the second most common cause of death is suicide while homicide runs third. The data doesn’t break down the cause of fatal injuries, but I’d be very surprised if gun-related injuries outpaced those from auto accidents.
Along the same line, I went back and found the details of the gun killings that Gov. Grisham cited in her Executive Order. With a single exception, I cannot see where the actions ordered would have prevented any of the deaths.
The 13-year-old girl killed on July 28 was killed by a 14-year-old boy. Measures to restrict access to the gun might have prevented this killing. A Department of Public Safety press release, notes that the boy’s father, who owned the gun, was charged with Negligent Making a Firearm Accessible to a Minor Resulting in Death.
The other cases seem to be related to criminal behavior. The five-year-old was killed as she slept in someone else’s house, apparently the unintended victim of bullets meant for someone else. The 11-year-old boy was killed in an apparent road rage incident that left another woman injured.
In Farmington, an 18-year-old boy killed three women and injured six people including two responding officers. The shooter was armed with an “AR-15-style rifle” and two pistols. He legally purchased the rifle, but New Mexico law prohibits the possession of pistols by anyone under 19. As with many other mass shooters, the Farmington killer struggled with mental health issues including strained personal relationships, problems in school, and the trauma of his parents’ divorce.
The Red River shootout was entirely different. This incident, which left three dead and five injured, occurred at a motorcycle rally between rival members of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang.
The common denominator between all of these incidents is that there is no evidence that prohibiting the legal carriage of guns by law-abiding citizens would have prevented any of them. While at least some of the guns involved were lawfully purchased and possessed, others were likely to be illegal in the first place and/or carried by people who had no intention of obeying the law.
Going further, of the incidents cited by the governor, only two occurred in Albuquerque or Bernalillo County where the strictest measures will be in place. Neither of the mass shootings were in areas covered by the carry ban.
Finally, the $64,000 question is whether Grisham has the authority to suspend portions of the law with her Executive Order. On this point, you might be surprised at how the battle lines are forming. Some on the right, such as Fox Business contributor Jay Caruso, claim that Grisham has the authority because of overbroad emergency health statutes. On the other side, anti-gun activist David Hogg questioned the legality of the order saying, “There is no such thing as a state public health emergency exception to the U.S. Constitution.”
I’ll qualify this discussion by saying that I’m not a lawyer, but I think that the legality of the order depends on exactly which provision we are looking at. Some provisions, such as increased frequency of firearms dealer inspections, fall within the governor’s executive authority and are probably legal.
On the other hand, the suspension of carry laws has the highest legal bar to clear. New Mexico has a slate of gun laws passed by the legislature. The two questions in my mind are 1) Does the law allow the governor to suspend state gun laws in a crisis? and 2) Does the current situation in New Mexico meet the legal requirements to invoke these emergency powers?
The public health order cites New Mexico’s Public Health Act of 1978, the Public Health Emergency Response Act of 1978, and the Department of Health Act of 1978, along with the “inherent constitutional police powers of the New Mexico state government” as the statutory authority behind the governor’s move. This constitutes quite a bit of legalese and to date, the internet’s legal eagles have not weighed in on the legality of the order, so here’s my unexpert opinion for all it’s worth.
I think New Mexico, like America, does have a gun problem. A problem, however, is not always an emergency. That seems to be the case here.
New Mexico law defines “public health emergency” as “the occurrence or imminent threat of exposure to an extremely dangerous condition or a highly infectious or toxic agent, including a threatening communicable disease, that poses an imminent threat of substantial harm to the population of New Mexico or any portion thereof.”
On the one hand, the law cites legitimate health problems such as infectious agents or communicable diseases that pose an imminent threat of substantial harm. That would seem to eliminate gun violence from consideration as a public health threat.
On the other hand, the law also includes vague terms such as “extremely dangerous condition” and “any portion” of the New Mexico population. Those vague terms greatly expand the scope of the law and Gov. Grisham is probably relying on this larger reading of the law.
In fact, the reading of the law is now so expansive that it is probably unconstitutionally vague. If any “extremely dangerous condition” that affects “any portion” of New Mexico’s population, can be the subject of an emergency order, then the possibility of such orders is endless. Gov. Grisham could issue orders against traffic, unsafe ladders, rattlesnakes, dihydrogen monoxide, the sun, you name it. Any imminent danger to a single person could be the subject of an emergency order.
While such shenanigans might have passed muster under other Supreme Courts, I seriously doubt that the current Court will be amused if and when the case reaches them. And there will be a legal challenge. In fact, there already is. A gun-rights group is suing to block implementation of the order.
Gov. Grisham’s move is particularly poorly timed coming just over a year after the Supreme Court expanded Second Amendment rights when it struck down a New York law requiring concealed carry permit applicants to show a special need to defend themselves. More recently, the Court struck down President Biden’s expansive reading of the student finance law in an attempt to justify his student loan forgiveness program.
As I said earlier, we have a gun problem (and one that isn’t going to be solved by more guns), but the way to address the problem is to form a compromise faction and pass laws that target the illegal use of guns.
The situation is very similar to President Trump’s use of emergency powers as the solution to the immigration problem. I think most Americans agree that we have an immigration problem, but Congress’s failure to act does not transform the problem into an emergency. The same can be said of student loans.
Instead, when government executives attempt to bypass the legislature and impose top-down, one-sided solutions, they poison the well and make it less likely that anything will get down. Gov. Grisham just lent credence to those on the right who believe that authoritarian leaders are just waiting for the opportunity to swoop in and take their guns. That’s a very bad thing for the majority of Americans who want to enact targeted and meaningful gun reforms.
Indeed, Gov. Grisham’s order seems to be opposed by both of Albuquerque’s top law enforcement officials. Bernalillo County Sheriff said in a statement, “I have reservations regarding this order. While I understand and appreciate the urgency, the temporary ban challenges the foundation of our Constitution, which I swore an oath to uphold.”
Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina told his officers, “The governor made it clear that state law enforcement, and not APD, will be responsible for enforcement of civil violations of the order.”
Medina added, “Our officers at APD will continue to focus on the enforcement of criminal laws and arresting criminals who are driving the violent crime in the city.”
To me, that’s the right strategy. Focus on the people who are committing the crimes and avoid adding to public mistrust of police and government. And make sure that criminals stay behind bars rather than being released back to the streets.
“I don’t need more federal resources,” Medina said at a press conference. “I need more federal prosecutors.”
If that’s true, and the restrictions are limited to public property – i.e. property held in public trust by a state or county entity – then she’s likely on firmer ground then you would expect legally. States already have the authority to restrict gun carry in a myriad of public facilities – like libraries, court buildings, even hospitals – so I don’t see why these restrictions on other public properties are any different.
Prosecutors cost money. Fully staffed courts cost money. If you want more of both someone has to pay for them, and with the anti-tax sentiments in many quarters these days the police chief may need to rethink his approach to interacting with other levels of government.Report
Appropriations for the judiciary typically comprise approximately 0.2% of total federal budget authority. (Google).
Claiming we need massive tax increases to pay for this sort of thing is like saying I need a massive raise to buy an ice cream cone for my kid.Report
I didn’t say massive tax increases. I simply pointed out that we have a certain level of taxation and a certain level of expenditure. And if this chief or any other law enforcement professional feels its not enough, they have to deal with that fact. ow they could deal with it through more revenue. They could deal with it through reallocating current revenue. But they – and you – can’t say I want more without addressing the revenue and allocation questions.Report
Yeah, there seem to be a couple areas where she’s blending ‘legal’ with ‘questionable’.
1. As David notes, the entirety of ‘Public Health’ laws and their applicability.
2. She likely can restrict guns in Publicly Owned spaces — like Schools and Govt. Buildings — I’m less sure that it can encompass simply Land/Area owned by the State. There’s a lot of land owned by the state that you wouldn’t know you were on at any given moment. At a minimum, it would need to be clearly marked, which might not be possible once you move past obvious public buildings.
3. But the real ‘issue’ is the arbitrary assessment of an entire jurisdiction as being ‘zoned’ dangerous based on FBI statistics(!) [Hah! Inside joke at OT, right Chip? 🙂 ] which are, well, arbitrary. Specifically it determines that 1,000 violent crimes per 100,000 citizens AND 90 firearm-related emergency room visits for the last year. [note, there’s a special circle in the inferno for people who publish docs on the internet that disable select/copy].
It’s not quite as bad as I thought it might be… essentially the zones where this applies basically become ‘Castle Doctrine’ zones.
If it’s a precursor to something popular like Stop-and-frisk to actively find illegal guns and remove them? Hah, I jest… no Gov is going to do stop-and-frisk again. But theoretically, that’s how you’d sell a temporary measure… except for the constitutionality of taking ‘legal’ guns away from citizens for no other reason than stopping/frisking. Illegal guns? Sure. But that’s the circular problem: Illegal guns don’t abide by legal restrictions, so banning them doesn’t have the effect we want, unless it’s coupled with a sting operation.
I suppose you could attempt to sell it as something like that? It would require significant resources (note, not Federal Prosecutors, but Extra-Funded Police), general public support for the concept, and preparation for adverse effects like possibly increased gun crime to whatever (unknown) inverse proportion the possibility of an armed target presents to would-be criminals… plus whatever racial disparate impact might or might not emerge (I have no good demographic sense of Albuquerque). Etc. etc.
Basically, she hasn’t done the full work that would be required to experiment in this manner.Report
Albuquerque is about 50/50 white/Hispanic, which makes me wonder what the hell is going on. The homicide rate has quadrupled since 2014. There was no spike in 2020 like there was in many other cities, but in 2021 it just skyrocketed, and hasn’t come down. In the US, Hispanics commit a bit more homicide than non-Hispanic whites, but not that much more. At 21 per 100k, the deviation from what would be predicted based on demographics is nearly as extreme as that seen in Portland. Is it cartel violence, maybe?Report
Is it cartel violence, maybe?
Feasible. I-25 has been a major drug route for a long time, and there have been sporadic outbreaks of violence. My city stretched out to annex multiple I-25 interchanges and the motel clusters around them because the county couldn’t react quickly enough to deal with drug-related incidents there.Report
Invade Mexico was an Idea already taken.Report
She’s targeting minorities!Report
Are malls, grocery stores, etc. — private businesses open to the general public — considered “public property” for purposes of the Governor’s order? If yes, that’s getting out of the “ownership control” that Philip refers to, and falls back on the state’s police power.
I don’t think the issue with cost applies to prosecutors, judges, courtrooms, staff — as noted by Dark Matter, that’s a pretty trifling expense. The issue with the cost of justice mainly comes on the delivery end of it: policing and incarceration are what’s expensive. (But also when considering the cost of administration of justice, please don’t forget the necessity of paying for counsel for the indigent defendants. Can’t constitutionally incarcerate a defendant unless they’ve had a fair legal defense.)Report
Eh, it reminds me of the whole abortion thing on the part of the Pro-Lifers.
It’s screaming about a sentiment instead of addressing various things that are involved with the three or four root problems.
But addressing the root is difficult.
Expressing a sentiment is easy.Report
Right, it also skews public sentiment against you in ways that aren’t entirely accurate, e.g. Hogg et al.
A brave politician might even claim that there are overlapping root causes for several societal ills.Report
One of the life lessons that surprised me the most is that people are actually very consistent. You notice people’s inconsistencies day-to-day and laugh at them, but the truth is that people don’t like them and work toward resolving them over the long term.
That’s why slippery slope arguments are more accurate than the logician would like us to think. If the assumptions which lead to statement A also would lead to statement B, and those assumptions are accepted, then eventually someone will propose statement B. There’s no logical reason why gay civil unions had to lead to gay marriages, for example, but it was inevitable.
It’s possible for someone to have looked at the covid debate over the last few years and not see that the same reasoning was going to be use to excuse other government overreaches. It’s possible for someone to not see it coming, but that person isn’t worth listening to if he can’t see the inevitable.Report
I’m still waiting for the inevitable polygamous underage dog/child/man/refrigerator marriages that SSM opponents predicted would inevitably follow gay marriage.Report
Gay marriage took decades. I think churches being required to perform them is next. They’ve renamed paedos and given a few Oscars to them, the sex robot industry is doing quite well, and the little I’ve heard about animal stuff has been tourism. When you consider that every prediction up to where we are now came true, it’s hard to see the fact that some things aren’t here yet as a strong argument that they’ll never happen.
AI de-aging and deep fakes are going to drive onlyfans out of business, is my guess.Report
Never say never I guess but the constitutional climb to requiring a church to perform marriages it wouldn’t otherwise is pretty steep.Report
I’d anticipate a different angle where Churches lose their Secular ability to contract Marriages… it’s a delegated clerkship that’s not required. This is how it’s done in Austria, for example.
This doesn’t concern me; it probably simplifies things to say there’s a concept of Secular Marriage and another one of Religious Marriage. We pretty much have that in Catholic Canon law where you can dissolve your Civil Marriage by whatever means is lawful in the state – but your Canonical Marriage is another matter.
On the slippery slope question the question is this: What is the Secular Argument against Poly? What are the limiting factors (if any), and what makes any of us think it’s not coming and already in the process of being normalized?
I’ve seen some attempts to say it’s bad for women, some say it’s bad for men, others make differentiations within polygamy as polygyny and polyandry. But I’m not seeing an enduring principle that the State could use to limit the marital contract.Report
What is the Secular Argument against Poly?
That almost no one wants it. It is for all intents and purposes legal for multiple adults to cohabit and raise families, but almost no one takes advantage of it.
So the constituency for legalizing it is nonexistent, and the consequences of legalizing it would be nothing.
But if you want to terrify the rubes just ask them to watch a reality show about Sister Wives, and contemplate the drama of four women bickering with one man.Report
But what if some fool does want it?Report
Then the first thing the fool needs to do, when making the policy ask, is describe what it is. And if you put three poly advocates in three rooms you’ll get three different descriptions of what poly marriage is as a practical and policy matter.
Forget about advocating for the legal institution of poly marriage- poly marriage advocates haven’t even gotten to defining what a legal poly marriage actually even is.Report
Why do you say “What if”?
Aren’t there plenty of real life examples to observe?Report
The secular argument against poly is watching 20 year olds attempt it.Report
That’s certainly possible, though I think it’s unlikely to come out of a Supreme Court holding. I can also think of some free exercise and establishment clause arguments off the top of my head that would at minimum complicate it. Not that I’m particularly bothered by the idea either, given my understanding of my own marriage as well upstream of what the state does in a civil context.
I think the biggest hurdle to poly is bureaucratic. You’d be re-writing a pretty massive rulebook to accomodate something thats appeal and popular uptake is really limited. Maybe some of the criminal laws against it become unconstitutional but that’s not the same as constructing a coherent legal structure, that itself is going to challenge about a gazillion years of precedents. Best case for it is it becomes an eccentric pursuit that you can no longer theoretically be incarcerated for indulging.
But that all gets back to why I don’t see the gay rights successes in the same kind of slippery slope terms. The reason it happened so fast is because at the end of the day it was extremely easy to fit it into pre existing structures.Report
I think this points to the ‘real’ slippery slope (and Chip’s comment) … the slope is that we can deconstruct marriage into any contract we want if all we’re doing is providing govt. services or protection under the law.
There are incentives to request marriage benefits: Tax reasons, Health Insurance, Inheritance, legal rights/protections, etc.
Heh, I’m not really feeling the ‘gazillion years of precedents’ argument. I mean, there are actual living residents of the US who have legally contracted multiple-marriages. I have no idea what happens if/when they apply for citizenship.
Also, are we not already deconstructing the Bureaucratic hurdles? Many services are moving to named persons rather than assumed relative/spouse. It’s a consent based change… you get a plus 1 of your choice. Why not plus 2 or plus 3? Sure there’s potentially an Economic Argument… but only a**holes make those kind of arguments…
It’s kinda weird to say that as long as a small weird minority are the only people who want these things, we’re perfectly safe, nay, justified in ignoring it?
Ok. But, I’m pretty confident that once that minority asks, it will be granted. Else, I ask, what’s the secular argument that will survive the No?Report
I think the basic secular argument is protection of women and children and the property stuff Burt referenced. The government can’t stop the sharing of bedrooms with as few or as many people as one wishes but it doesn’t have any reason to create a license for them to go around creating new problems for it to solve with respect to things like alimony, child support, relationships between children and non biological parent spouses of a biological parent, court mandated mediations, and on and on.
If we end up on the path of ‘isn’t it all just a contract anyway’ I think it’s more likely we would just dispense with civil marriage altogether before we would try to create legalized poly marriage.Report
Writing laws allowing for poly marriages that are Constitutional under the equal protection and due process clauses but aren’t a legal headache for the courts ang government is going to be tough.Report
Agree. I think the only way to really attempt it would be to replace marriage entirely with contract law but even then the complications abound.Report
Again, you’re ignoring the actual demonstrated history of marriage.
During the Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s, as living together without marriage became commonplace, the “end of marriage” was regularly predicted, and indeed championed by all sorts of people.
So what happend with that?Report
“Divorce only skyrocketed for one generation! And it only has been in moderate decline rather than serious decline! This is just like Poolmageddon!”Report
This, but unironically.Report
“You should have had a longer timeline!” is a good criticism of any given prediction.
It is not a refutation.Report
I’m not refuting anything.
I’m agreeing with your statement, except without sarcasm.Report
The statement lives and dies on whether the counter-arguments were “oh, nothing will happen, stop worrying” or whether they were “it won’t be an 8, like you’re predicting, but will only be a 3 or a 4.”
If the counter-arguments were “oh, nothing will happen”, then the sarcasm is warranted.
If the predictions were that it’d be a 3 or 4, then the sarcasm should be criticized as missing the point.Report
Such points would have, maybe, a point if they weren’t discussing things that occurred twenty to thirty years prior to SSM. But, as they are, they’re as toothless as a rotten stump.Report
For what it’s worth, I see SSM as one of the results of the things that occurred twenty to thirty years prior to SSM.
SSM, oddly enough, was an attempt to shore up the damage done to marriage.Report
It would have, if conservatives got on board with it and made it legal back int he 90s.
But they did not, so gay relationships were forced to exist outside of marriage for so long that it actually made it clear how little marriage was needed as an institution.
If the lesbians down the street got together in 93, bought that house together in 95, had a kid in 96, and by the time they can legally get married it’s 2015 and they’re sending their kid off to college along with everyone else on the block…half of whom got divorced in that time period…
…at some point everyone around them wonders what the hell the point of marriage was. Well, not them, but those kids are going to remember the lesbian couple on the block that was the most stable of all relationships.
Not, to be clear, a lot of this is a statistical illusion: It’s harder to notice failed relationships that don’t end up in divorce and/or kids, and also there’s a large problem of completely incompatible straight people getting married just because they accidentally made a kid together, something rather less likely with gay people.
Gay people are probably exactly as bad as relationships as straight people, just it’s harder to see it as they didn’t leave kids and failed marriages strewn everywhere.
It’s the same way that such couples tended to be financially stable, because for the longest time, you sorta had to be very financially stable to be willing to come out like that. And pretty sure of a relationship before introducing someone as a partner.
But just because it’s a weird statistical illusion doesn’t mean people can’t see it and subconsciously think to themselves ‘It sure is weird that of all the relationships I know, some of the most stable ones are the gay people who cannot even _get_ married. I wonder if marriage is actually that useful.’Report
No, the statement lives, and in this case dies, on the counterargument “The consequences will not be bad”.
The rise in divorces seems to have had no ill effect on the overall state of marriage.
So yeah, it is pretty much like Poolmageddon.Report
Yeah, we’re speaking two different languages here.Report
Let’s bear in mind the difference between polyamory and polygamy. Having multiple sex partners is not the same thing as having multiple spouses.
The poly people I actually know who participate in polyamorous dating and sex, and if they are married are socially married to a single partner. Apparently some polyamorous people are married sexlessly on the theory that sex and marriage aren’t the same thing so they don’t marry for sex and don’t have sex for marriage. Others seem to enjoy sex with their spouses as well as other boyfriends/girlfriends. They sometimes use the phrase “primary partner” whether married or not to indicate that some individual (a spouse when they are married) has a special sort of role.
This lifestyle isn’t for me so I don’t live or participate in it personally; I’m reporting what others tell me. What I don’t hear any hunger for, from any of these people, is a desire to have multiple marital partners. There seems to be an understanding that a plural marriage is neither legally sanctioned nor practically feasible the way plural relationships are.
Which doesn’t mean that such a desire isn’t possible or real; it means that among the people I know who actually live this lifestyle, it isn’t a thing. The folks I know are, other than the polyamorous structure to their social and sex lives, reasonably similar to myself and probably a decent number of people here: urban or suburban dwellers, educated, employed in a white collar capacity of some sort, generally law-abiding, and not particularly religious.
So when we talk about polygamy, multiple simultaneous marriages, I think we’re talking about things like FLDS or other religions that sanction or in some cases encourage multiple marriages. Those almost all seem to be hugely patriarchial, fertile ground for sanctioning abuse of the women involved in capacities subordinate to their husbands and invariably male church elders. I don’t know of any non-religious situation where there are multiple polyandrous marriages (one woman married to multiple husbands, who are in some fashion subordinate to her).
My Secular Argument Against Polygamy, then, is two-part. First, it appears to coincide with abusive situations. Second, in the event of divorce or death, it’s too complicated to lend itself to the standardized set of rules for dissolution of property that are associated with the end of two-partner marriages and baked into the law. If people want to privately work out in advance what happens in a plural marriage situation that’s great but to make something legal and available to everyone, we need to have a fair and generally-applicable “default model” for what happens when people haven’t thus prepared.
I have no Secular Argument against Polyamory, so long as it practiced ethically (meaning peole involved all know what’s going on and are treated respectfully by one another).Report
That’s why I’m in favor of Marriage contracts. I think I first saw examples of this in old sci fi books…..
You buy a contract, specifying the number of years (1, 2, 5 10, etc.), and any kids. After the term of that marriage, either or both parties can walk away. Provisions made for the kids. None for the spouse. Seems fair.
Since marriage and divorce, regardless of kids, generally favor the woman, I doubt I’ll ever live with someone again or marry them. Too much asset risk.Report
I appreciate the response; however, I find it illustrates a particular problem that comes with these assumptions – which I mention in passing far below – in case you have further thoughts on my partial response.Report
The most critical argument is that there’s no concerted push for them, and without that push, there’s no one pointing our a clear policy problem that they would solve.
This stands in stark contrast to gay marriage, which was pushed by activists who wanted straightforward things for obvious reasons.
Pretty much all of the other slippery slope arguments founder for the same reason.Report
Well, I appreciate all the replies. I’ll be honest, though, I’m totally underwhelmed. The best answer seems to be basically an Internet Meme:
It’s Not Happening <-- we are here . . . . . And it's good. <-- this is where your non-arguments lead. I suspect this is mostly fueled by the Seed Question of SSM and Slipery Slopes where y'all are motivated to make sure that SSM is not implicated. Imagine instead a different seed question that has nothing to do with SSM. Does that change your view?Report
The difference is that we beleive that the actual things which have come true are good and therefore a refutation of your warnings while you view them as bad and therefore a confirmation of youur warnings.
Your struggle is to point to SSM as a dire warning of the consequences of starting on the slippery slope.
For the majority of people, if a lesbian couple joining the PTA is an example of a bad outcome, the response will be something like “Yes, please more of this!”
If your example is the death of marriage, then you would need to explain why 50 years on, it is still not happening.Report
Shrug… I literally removed SSM as the seed.
I see this as just part of the marriage deconstruction project.Report
If I were going to point to a seed I guess I would point to ‘no fault’ divorce before I would to SSM. To me that’s kind of the concession on the subject.Report
Sure, but I think that’s JB’s point… the slope is longer and slipperier than simply SSM… SSM is just one point on the way.Report
I gotcha, but at risk of turning this into something much bigger than marriage it’s where I think the need for positivist cases for traditional concepts comes in, and the need to have some flexibility in making them. There is a component of the small-l liberal project that is inherently deconstructive, and it needs constructive forces within it to course correct, and to build a vision that keeps the best parts of the accumulated human experience.
Which is in part just to say that Henry VIII is also a point on the way, but I wouldn’t point at that and say nothing can ever endure, or that any change will open the proverbial floodgates. To me that concedes a lot more to the deconstructionist perspective than its earned.Report
If I wanted to argue that Poly Marriage ain’t gonna happen despite SSM, I’d rely pretty heavily on Social Security and, to a lesser extent, stuff like 401ks and health insurance and all sorts of heavily legislated stuff that doesn’t necessarily come from the Feds directly but remain pies with plenty of federal thumbs within.
PLUS!
I don’t know how Poly Marriage works.
A is married to B. Good.
A is married to C. Fine. Sure.
What is B and C’s relationship? Legally, I mean. Are B and C married?
When it comes to inheritance, what claims does C have on B?
And that sort of thing.
When those questions get answered, I’ll see Poly Marriage as likely.
The moral argument for why it should be allowed follows the whole divorce from biology that The Pill gave us. “Hey. Why not? Come on! COME ON!”
But when it comes to civil plural marriage? I’m sorry, we don’t have a template. We can’t even begin to imagine the forms.Report
These are good questions.
The most likely (initial) scenario will be A marries B and then C. A could be a man or a woman. B could be either and so too C. B & C are married to A and inheritance/separation ‘templates’ follow that patter – which contra all of us cultural illiterates has long history of law supporting it.
In a consent based society where A & B Consent and C & A consent, If B doesn’t object by removing the relationship to A, then consent to C & A can either be implicit or explicit as a matter of law.
It’s then no particularly difficult thing to allow the ‘option’ of B & C — which in the event that A & B separate, A would have to provide consent for B & C to continue; and, absent that consent, would withdraw from the A & C relationship resulting in either a New configuration where B is married to A and C (but A & C are not) or B & C are married and A exits.
I’m a little suspicious of these, “How could we possibly write laws to divide property” arguments.
I take your point about various financial institutions not wanting to extend benefits from plus one to plus one plus one plus n… but it simply gets priced into the cost of benefits. Like, for example, the cost of Health Insurance has a curve like this: Employee, Employee +1, Family (where Family = infinity).Report
I know that we can possibly write laws to divide property, but I want to see the template.
Like, A gets $500/month in Social Security.
A dies. We hardly knew him.
Do B and C split the $500 check? Does it depend on the will? Will we, instead, have someone show up and start explaining that B should get $500 *AND* C should get $500, how dare you?
Can A marry C without B’s permission? Why or why not? (Can A marry C without *MY* permission?)
Can B divorce C?
I’m not saying it’s never gonna happen. I’m just saying that there’s a lot of green shade accounting that needs to happen first and, without it happening first, I’m not seeing the change being made.Report
It’s all perfectly clear in my comment above, but simplifying:
In HR terms, each marriage would be a qualifying event that would enable you to either a) Consent or b) Exit.Report
I dunno. I see a web and with each additional player, the web gets weirder.
Treating it like a software development team “A is the lead. You don’t have to like your co-workers but you do have to work with them” strikes me as a fair enough template, but I don’t see that being adopted.
We worked a long time to make A and B more or less equal, more or less.
Going back to A being the Lead will have side-effects.
Maybe they won’t all be bad (weirder things have happened).
But I’m not seeing *ANYBODY* willing to argue this on the campaign trail nor am I seeing this gaining the moral high ground the way that SSM was able to (that hospital visitation thing, man… that was a bazooka to the foot).
And if the polyamorous pods that I’ve seen are any indication, by the time the case gets to court, half of the people will be broken up and explaining how this isn’t an indictment of polyamory, it’s only monogamy that has a failure state.Report
I’m surprised… the point isn’t that someone is going to come up with a model and execute it. I’m not claiming some sort of top-down plan.
It’s precisely that Polyamory is not only a thing, but a thing that Brother Burt was keen to point out that while not for him, it’s not for him to judge. Why not?
Poly folks are having babies, they are buying property (makes sense, damn boomers hoarding all the wealth!), they are doing life things the point of which right now, you folks seem perfectly keen to say, “whelp, that whole Poly thing really f’d up for you… too bad, should’ve done the right thing and done Serial Monogamy. Ha Ha.”
I’m bemused by all the little ‘c’ conservatives here tut-tutting the harm that people will experience when they don’t have access to the Poly’s Health Insurance, or #3 kicks everyone out of the house in her name because they didn’t incorporate and were ‘in love’ when they bought it together (and why should they have to incorporate when marriage does the thing they want off the shelf), or the emotional harm that #2 experiences when the baby for which he’d been the primary caregiver is taken away because biologically it’s between #1 and #3. Or, who makes end-of-life decisions? #2 is legally married, but #3 is (legally) just a paramour. The Atlantic think-pieces practically write themselves.
It isn’t the Theory that will drive the thing, its the thing that will drive the Theory.
I’m asking for how you say NO to the harm real people who no longer believe in the oppressive institution of marriage will suffer. I’m getting a mix of, ‘why would we say no?’, and ‘of course we’ll never have to deal with not saying no’.
There’s a weird, it’s bad when the Mormons do it, but cool in Berkeley. I don’t think we’re going to get a Patriarchal LDS model, I think we’re going to get an Equity Consent model.
Basically the Secular Argument against seems to be vestigial Christian morality with a dash of It’s not happening.Report
Well, pragmatically, I think that it’s not going to happen because the 20-somethings who are really into Polyamory legal theory will break up before they get to the 9th Circuit, let alone SCotUS, and one of the old Secondaries will have some incredibly toxic stories to tell. “Consent should never be *GRUDGING*. It should only be *ENTHUSIASTIC*!” or some dumb crap like that.
The 40-somethings who are capable of pulling this off will be far, far, faaaar more likely to be able to explain the importance of separate bank accounts, separate saving accounts, separate 401ks, and separate kitchen utensils. Separate houses. Good lord. If I wanted to see my partners, I’d have married them.Report
Fair enough, sometimes the social contagions just go away on their own.Report
p.s. I meant to also say that I’m don’t think this is simply a ‘Next Election Cycle’ timeline.
If all we’re doing is 2024 analysis, then I’ll concede that point.Report
I’m willing to go so far as to say “in my lifetime”.
Note: I have hypertension.
The SSM thing made sense given the groundwork laid by The Pill and No-Fault Divorce over decades.
I don’t see what groundwork has been done for plural marriage UNLESS we are talking about the Mormon/Saudi version of Bi Glove.
The Mormons will *NEVER* be fashionable and the Saudi version will result in Oppression Olympics.
The Portland version, which could theoretically take off in a “we have to destroy marriage in order to establish Utopia” way, will collapse under its own weight. And that’s not a “what polyamorous people look like in practice” joke, either.Report
Maybe it isn’t bad when consenting adult Mormons do it, but only bad when they groom minor girls into it.
Which brings us right back to Roy Moore and how enthusiastically conservatives pointed out that Mary was only 14 when she wed Joseph, and how so many of them stood up in legislatures to argue that its ok for middle school girls to have sex with adult men.
Seriously if conservatives want to claim that they are merely trying to prevent harm, they should come to grips with the vast ocean of harm inflicted by major religions on minors.
Not rogue outliers but the systematic coverup and aiding and abetting thousands of innocent people, with the eager assistance of the people sitting in the pews.
I think the best thing relligious people can do wrt any talk about healthy human relationships is to lower their heads and keep very, very quiet.Report
So the secular argument against Polygamy is, ‘Don’t do it because Roy Moore didn’t do Polygamy, but did do underage dating and we hate Roy Moore.’
It’s a start. Better than some of the arguments so far; but, I’m going to have to say, probably not going to deter folks from future Polygamy. And I’m not sure that future Polygamists will find this argument against their civil rights very compelling.Report
The secular argument against it is that it has consisently been proven unwise, in the same category as open marriage andswinging.
And those things also cause heartbreak for the consenting adults who attempt them, but as a free society we allow consenting adults to do all sorts of unwise things.Report
I don’t think it’s fair to lay all of that on March. I haven’t seen him defend anything like it anyway. He’s asking for a particular type of rationale.
March, if you’re reading this comment I propose these secular interests, in order of my opinion of their strength:
– First is that the relationships are inherently exploitative, usually but not exclusively to women. The possibility of healthy scenarios is insufficient justification for the legislature to endorse what we know will mostly be bad,.most of the time and to twist itself into a pretzel to try and make it work.
-The state has an interest in clear chains of responsibility with respect to children and distribution of related benefits. This severely muddies those waters and no liberty interest outweighs it.
-the state has an interest in preventing the social problems and unrest inherent in endorsing such relationships. If Elon Musk has 10,000 wives in his harem, and this can be scaled, you end up with significant numbers of unmoored single men, a recipe for trouble. At a lower level think the issues you hear about in Asia where sex selective abortions have led to bad ratios of men to women.
-Over time the aforementioned issue could create lower levels of genetic diversity. The state cannot coerce genetic diversity, but it will not put its thumb on the scale in the other direction.Report
The problem, Marchmaine, is no one can even define it. You can go with a certain model but every poly couple can have a different one. Which poly model will the slippery slope supposedly force us to endorse? No one knows. And on top of all that you’re only discussing property but not decisions. A is in a coma. Which of their poly married partners makes medical decisions? What if they disagree? Binary marriage has a simple answer. Poly? Historically there was entire reams of intricate rules to try and sort it out. Frankly, with SSM now legal I have observed that the talk of legal poly marriage has declined, not increased. The pressures for it have simply imploded.Report
I just don’t think it’s apples to apples. Interestingly I don’t think the ‘man and woman’ aspect is of critical importance to the enterprise in its modern form, but the fact that it’s only 2 people may well be.Report
Yeah, like I said early on- poly relationships sanctioned by law lie behind us, historically, not ahead. Perhaps they will come back around (The wheel of time turns and ages come and go, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the age tha gave it birth returns again.) but I don’t see it happening any time in a society we recognize.Report
Funny how arbitrarily and capriciously the whole “divorce from biology” thing gets trotted out.
Like, antibiotics and vaccines allow a woman to have ten children live to adulthood, whereas before the “divorce from biology” only 3 would make it.
Modern technology allows the rate of starvation to fall to near-zero, whereas before the “divorce from biology” famine would regularly cull the human herd to managable levels.Report
Oh, so *NOW* you see “divorce” as “necessarily bad”.Report
It must be a day that’s not ending in “Y”. I think this comment by Jaybird, to which I fully, 100% subscribe, describes exactly why poly marriages are not going likely to be a thing. And let me add another question:
D is A and B’s biological child, and is born during the poly marriage. Is C D’s parent? Does C get shared custody in case of a divorce?
People simplify poly marriage in their heads as “plural” marriage: one guy (gal) simultaneously married with several gals (guys). In Big Love, all the wives were married to Bill Paxton, but to each other (for a starters, there’s no SSM in Mormonism). Had Paxton’s character died, the wives would, under Mormon law, all be widows, and no longer anybody’s wives. It’s like serial marriages without the divorces between each one.
But in a poly marriage everybody is married to everybody else, and remain married even when oneReport
Imagine instead a different seed question that has nothing to do with SSM. Does that change your view?
Unless the other seed somehow clarifies what exactly we mean by “poly marriage”, and what giving it legal recognition would accomplish, the answer is no.Report
Not only has none of the exaggerated nonsense about what would follow same sex marriage not come true but pretty much none of it has any form of organized advocacy in existence.
The number of people you can find advocating for animal marriage is infinitesimally small even in the nutfarming twittspace.
The number of idiots you can find advocating for allowing under age children to have sex (a necessary precursor to under age same sex marriage) is less small but remains an incredibly fringe view that would be shouted out of all but the most deranged left-wing spaces. You can find an occasional tenured idiot pushing the view but otherwise, nothing and as political advocacy it’s as dead as NAMBLA. The only place you can find large scale child marriage is *cough* on some fringes of the religious right but those’re men and underage girls so I guess it’s fine?
I’m unaware of any concrete movement within the Dems to try and go after governments forcing churches to perform same sex marriage. IIRC some religious groups and some Catholics have voluntarily mused on some kind of blessing but that’s intra-religious. As InMD observed, in the US there’s a rock solid constitutional block for trying to do it and, to be blunt, most LGBT+ people couldn’t be less interested about getting churches to endorse their marriages- you’ll struggle to find a less religious group.
Polygamous marriage is a funny one because it’s technically in our past and, in theory, you can find a lot of poly couples but they have little policy oomph to try and institute poly marriage. This is likely because not even poly couples can easily outline how, exactly, a legal regime of poly marriage would work in any literal manner. The legal marriage binary just can’t easily paste onto a larger number of people than two.
When one read same sex marriage opponents, they didn’t say that these outlandish outcomes from same sex marriage would happen in fifty to a hundred years. They claimed that said outcomes would naturally follow and would do so in short order. The only sane response to those claims, looking at the current political landscape is a simple three words: They were wrong.Report
But let’s be real, there were a ton of predictions that have come true. You can’t just look at the last change and say that nothing has followed it. Without thinking about this too hard, I remember that it was voting down the Defense of Marriage Amendment, then the Court finding that gay relations were a right, then civil unions, then states passing gay marriage laws, then the court finding that gay marriage was a right, then refusing gay adoption became illegal, then the trans stuff and cross-dressing rights, and gay sex education, and the mandating of bakers etc. to participate, and all this while social media began to pressure companies, and seriously this is all off the top of my head and probably out of order, but it’s been a constant pressure on a lot of fronts with each one claiming that the next one wasn’t going to happen.
I do believe in the power of the pendulum, and I don’t know how much of the above is going to last, but seriously you can’t pretend like we were all just sitting here when all of a sudden the left had a great new idea and the right predicted it’d have bad consequences. We’ve been playing this game for decades, and not just on gay marriage.Report
We are sitting, however, in a place where there have been many consequences, but none of the bad ones.
Even if you count “mandating baking of cakes for gay weddings” as a bad outcome (debatable) that was predicted (not so much), such mandates have fared badly in court, and your argument critically depends on court decisions as part of its chain of causality.Report
That’s the point. After the last few changes, the people who are pushing it said that we’d only made the good ones. After the next few changes, they’ll say the same thing. I’ve heard Cenk argue that if the pet is on the pleasurable end of the coupling, there’s no argument against it, and I can guarantee you that a lot of people here would go along with that argument next year, because it fits with their beliefs this year.Report
You are appealing to downstream consequences of gay marriage validating slippery slope arguments made before gay marriage was legal.
But so far as I can tell, none of the downstream consequences that have occurred (and that you cite) are related to the parade of horribles that social conservatives appealed to ahead of time have come to pass. The pre-gay marriage complaints were about animal marriage (where you have some idiot saying a thing as alleged movement toward that goal) and churches being compelled to marry gay people (when the courts have blocked much less intrusive anti-discrimination measures on religious liberty grounds).Report
Except that “the pet’ cannot give consent and, thus, is being raped is the iron clad retort that the tiny fringe of human/animal love advocates can never surmount as a principle. And, I would note, that just like you just did, the anti-SSM advocates said that allowing SSM would bring about man-animal marriage “next year”. Well it’s been way more than a couple “next year”s and not only has man-animal marriage (or it’s myriad other scary co-travelers) not materialized; no material sign of them ever materializing has presented. They were wrong.Report
I would add that civil marriage, at least at this point, is the creation of the state. Even the best steel man version of the slippery slope argument I can come up with doesn’t account for the need to legislate something these things.Report
Exactly, a court can’t insert poly marriage into a binary marriage by fiat even if some deranged judge managed to find some principle to try and point at to do so. And of the even less savory slippery slope downsides, well frankly, I can’t be bothers to dispense with them because they’re so odious and so effortlessly dealt with.Report
“After the last few changes, the people who are pushing it said that we’d only made the good ones.”
Like, we didn’t actually permanently ban large soda cups, so, everyone who claimed they were worried about the government banning large soda cups was a dumb lying liar who told a lie!Report
And to head back toward the original article, there was this one commenter Jaybird who used to post every once in a while around here, and I remember him being upset that the moral justification for covid isolation was suspended for street riots, but he was remembering it wrong: the excuse was that covid was a health concern, but so was police violence against blacks. That line of thought made this NM thing inevitable.Report
Eh, the Floyd protests were assuredly a thing but, being as they were outside, they weren’t really linked to much Covid increase as far as I can recall. They’re also rather non-sequitur regarding SSM.
But every example you raise is not really a slippery slope so much as a… I don’t know… duh? Like if we let gay people get married they’ll call each other their spouses. The horror! Likewise, as Pillsy noted, none of your examples are anything anyone who isn’t frenetically opposed to SSM would consider bad. The original anti-SSM arguments raised things everyone could agree would be undesirable and couched them as consequences of SSM and they simply haven’t shown any material signs of coming about.Report
Eh, the official policy was to not perform contract tracing with regards to the protests.
Seriously.
Now, from what I understand, being outside at all and just milling about is probably the safest thing you can do that isn’t “sitting in your own basement for 4 months”.
But the whole refusal to contact trace was weird.
Especially after a few months of positive coverage of Grim Reaper costumes at the beach.Report
That the health extremists were nuts and had serious overlap with the more nutty identarian leftists doesn’t surprise me in the least. But that the Floyd protests didn’t cause a huge surge in Covid is, in my mind, mostly dispositive on the subject.Report
Oh, sure. But I think that one of the lessons learned includes “maybe people can go to the beach” and “masks outside aren’t a big deal”.
If we want to use the Floyd protests as evidence of stuff.Report
And you’d be right. I don’t nutpick myself but I suspect you’d have to sojourn long and hard in the most neurotic corners of the interwebs to find someone seriously carrying a torch for the “masks outside are necessary” or “sequester inside or we’ll all die” line.Report
In the current year? You can find them. You don’t have to look *TOO* hard.
At the time? Including at the time of the Floyd Protests themselves?
Oh my goodness gracious! They were ubiquitous.Report
Never said otherwise. Covid was new, no one knew definitively what it could do and everyone was nuts over it. Now? There’s no plausible expectation you’ll even see new mask mandates, let alone anything more.Report
I’ve started hearing minor horror stories about the new variant. (Are we still on Omicron? How?)
I am not as confident as you are about mask mandates.
I think that it’s likely that we’ll see them again (to the point where I will be surprised if we don’t see them).Report
You MAY see them in Purple Colorado in places where large crowd gather inside – we won’t in deep red Mississippi except in doctor’s offices.Report
We’ll see mask mandates, but we’ll also see mandates that no action be taken to enforce them.
It’ll be like those people who stand at the front of the store and ask to check your receipt as you leave. You don’t actually have to stop and let them look, you can just keep on walking, and they’re not allowed to stop you. (They’re not even allowed to follow you to the door.)Report
I think Duck is more right than not on this.Report
I’m going to assume you’re not being a jerk. But you have to understand that you can’t point to L and say “nothing has followed L” and think that negates the fact that B followed A, C followed B, et cetera, that got us to L. My slippery slope evidence isn’t about what has followed from gay marriage, trans athletes, and whatever other things are today’s norm. My slippery slope evidence is that we got to these points on a clear slope that the right has predicted and warned about every step of the way, that we were called crazy for claiming.Report
That’s an interesting framing of the expansion of defined rights to cover everyone who isn’t a cis-het white conservative male.Report
It’s one thing to predict that M (or N, or even Q) will follow L.
It’s another thing entirely to invent a horrifying new letter called “flarg” and insist that it will follow L.Report
There were more predictions, as we see with Marchmaine’s comments right here.
The prediction was that IF we allowed
Women to take The Pill;
No Fault Divorce
People to live together before marriage;
Gay people to be gay
Gay people to marry;
etc;
THEN
Marriage would deconstruct;
Society would fall apart;
People would lve lives generally unhappier and less fulfilling than before;
None of those predictions came true, or have any plausible evidence of happening in future.
By all measures, American society in 2023 is happier, more peaceful, and more orderly than it was in 1973.
And honestly, this is what conservatives understand on some intuitive level, but refuse to confront because the implications enrage them.Report
I recall hearing ‘If we let gay couples marry, we’ll have to let people marry their box turtles’ about as often as I heard ‘If we let gay couples marry, we’ll have to let threesomes marry.’
I don’t really see or hear the pressure to allow threesomes to marry. So I’m content, as before, to say that if society changes in such a way that a significant number of people who are in threesomes demand the right to marry then our cultural and political institutions can deal with that then.
But neither the threesome nor the box turtle arguments were actually arguments against same sex marriage itself. Now that we’ve experienced it for several years, I don’t see that there are any objections against same-sex marriage at all. I see there are people who say “I personally don’t want to officiate or sanction them, but I guess they can exist,” and that seems just fine to me as a general matter (the actual public officials charged with the ministerial duty of issuing marriage licenses being a narrow exception to that).Report
I think this is true as far as it goes. I think the more interesting question is ‘what is the case for marriage’, and what do we want from it as a society in 2023? Which shouldn’t imply it’s a hard case to make. I actually think it’s a trivially easy one. What we seem to lack is anyone that wants to make it, at least not in a way that is forward looking.Report
What’s the case for marriage?
1) People want it.
Do we need a 2)?Report
I’ve mentioned a few times that conservatives need to take the win on marriage.
After all the breathless predictions that marriage would fall apart and become extinct, there does seem to be some deeply ingrained desire in people for a permanent monogamous union. With just one other person, not two or twenty, and not with cats or dogs but just people.Report
I think this is exactly right.Report
Strangely I think we do. Maybe we didn’t used to but for increasingly atomized people living in an increasingly atomized society I think it would be a good thing.Report
Andrew Sullivan wrote a very good description of what the case for marriage is, and why marriage is a conservative institution. After 35 years I think it still holds
https://newrepublic.com/article/79054/here-comes-the-groomReport
You’re trying to argue two different things.
The right has, indeed, made claims that if certain laws were changed, other laws would be changed. That is reasonable true, and has reasonable happened.
What hasn’t happened is the reason you insisted those law shouldn’t change, that warning you gave about bad effects.
We are over _eight years_ into country-wide gay marriage, over a decade in a lot states, and absolutely none of the negative side effects that were predicted have happened.
So basically the conservative position was ‘We shouldn’t walk down that road fifty feet, bears will eat us, and everyone else will want to keep walking and if we go even farther we’ll be _definitely_ be eaten by bears ‘.
And you’d trying to claim you were proven correct because when we walked down that road fifty feet, we wanted to walk another fifty, and did, and this makes you right somehow. Meanwhile, there appear to be no bears.
So, yes, you have correctly predicted the direction of society, and your reasons that would be bad have been spectacularly proven wrong, repeatedly. Which is…a pretty concise summation of conservativism in general.Report
I never alleged that -nothing- has followed from gay marriage, Pinky. I observed that specific, cataclysmic, and terrible outcomes that were specifically and loudly predicted have not occurred and have shown no signs of moving towards occurring. You pointing at other, neutral or benign or minor things occurring as a result of SSM is narrowly correct but is incidental to my point.Report
“They’re also rather non-sequitur regarding SSM.”
A quick forensic exam of the thread will reveal that the original topic was the expansion of power under pretense of a health emergency.Report
And that has what to do with SSM?Report
“There’s no logical reason why gay civil unions had to lead to gay marriages, for example, but it was inevitable.”
Quoth the Pinky in his original comment.
Now, a bajillion comments on I’d like to note, actually, that I hopped on it somewhat incorrectly. You stated that gay civil unions led inevitably to gay marriage and that it was inevitable. I commented on the failure of the specific slippery slope predictions against SSM to materialize in decades since but I didn’t even consider how your original statement was, actually, remarkably a-historic.
To wit: gay civil unions were never instituted generally across the country and were never really supported by conservatives. I recall when Vermont embarked in their civil union scheme in 2000 that Jonah Goldberg, at NRO, commented in an article that agreeing to civil unions might be a very good idea for conservatives because if they didn’t agree to them then same sex couples would be in danger of abandoning them and going for same sex marriage directly. My googling hasn’t yielded the article but I am extremely confident that he wrote it and it proved very prescient.
Conservatives never supported gay civil unions. There were never national civil unions or anything like them. So, the slippery slope example you cite is, itself, a phantom. If anything, Goldbergs slippery slope prediction was the reverse of yours: if we DON’T institute same sex civil unions then one day we’ll have to face same sex marriage. And he was right.Report
I never said that conservatives supported civil unions. This can’t be as hard to communicate as it seems. My position is that, whoever in the world argued in support of any of the positions along the way toward where we are now should have seen where we are now coming, and anyone who did suggest that we’d end up here was right. I can’t make that more open-ended. I’ve also been specific, listing some of the changes that got us here. And we’re here.
My point is simple: if the assumptions that get you to position A are accepted, and they also get to you to position B (and all the way to Z), then L is inevitable. You can’t look at the current situation L and say that no one foresaw it, and if it takes a while to get to Z you can’t say there’s no evidence we’ll end up there.
And back to the original subject, if all the arguments that got us to the covid policies of the last several years are accepted, it has to be acknowledged that they are sufficient to get to the position that the NM governor has taken.Report
You said that civil unions led to same sex marriage but civil unions weren’t, in fact, widely instituted so they couldn’t have led to same sex marriage. The upper end of your slippery slop is moored to… nothing. You’re basically saying that a policy that never happened (civil unions) led to what you view as an unfortunate outcome (SSM). Am I misreading you on this?
To your covid point, though, I’d say that the if is, itself, unlikely. I don’t think that the arguments that got us to the covid policies of the last several years are, specifically, accepted now that the experts have learned more about Covid and the masses have experienced those policies.Report
I’m talking about intellectually. Intellectually, civil unions led to where we are now in gay marriage, and intellectually the government reach under covid lays the ground work for NM.Report
I don’t think we got to SSM via civil unions at all.
The introduction of The Pill divorced procreation from sex.
This (eventually) turned marriage from “What two people do when they want to start a family” into “What two people who love each other very much do”.
After a while, “when are you two going to have kids” turned into “are you two going to have kids?”
And right around there, SSM was more or less inevitable. Why shouldn’t two people who love each other very much and who may or may not want children get married?
That’s what two people who love each other very much do!
And the opposition could only point to religious assumptions (that were no longer shared) and appeals to it being an important institution were held up to the history of the 70’s and 80’s and, lemme tell ya, there were the two years of 8th and 9th grade where it felt like EVERY WEEK, one of my classmates explained “yeah, my parents are getting divorced”.
Oh, that’s the institution we’re arguing about? That sacred institution?
As for NM gun-grabbing, I’m not surprised that they pulled that move but it was too early by a damn sight. Even David Hogg said “NOT YET”.
If Conservatives can be thankful about anything, it’s that Chaotic Good doesn’t want to wait and they certainly don’t want to listen to any advice given by Lawful Neutral.Report
Intellectually? How about historically or empirically? Civil unions couldn’t have led anywhere because they didn’t exist. They were, at best, a fall-back position for those who favored SSM or wished to appear “reasonable” about the subject. The arrow of causality does not run backwards in time.Report
Precisely. Many years ago, I served on a bar committee reviewing a report that listed everything that opposite-sex married couples get off the shelves and went into somniferous detail on what complicated and expensive arrangements lawyers would have to make to allow same-sex couples many, but by no means all, of those rights and benefits. The report advocated some kind of status allowing a package of off-the-shelf rights for same-sex couples, hardly in the interests of billable hours for lawyers.
In those days, I considered myself a hard-nosed political realist and said that although same-sex couples ought to have access to that basket of rights, it was silly to care whether the necessary legal status was called marriage, civil unions, or broccoli with garlic sauce. (My actual words at the time.) I thought there was a deal to be had.
I was wrong. There was nobody on the anti-SSM side that would come to the table. Indeed, many state-level anti-SSM proposals banned civil unions as well.
When SSM became the law of the land, I had great fun pointing and laughing at all the anti-SSM advocates who whined that same-sex should have been happy with the civil union option that none of the whiners had been willing to accept and ended up with SSM being forced down their throats..Report
When I was debating SSM at Marriagedebate.com (Maggie Gallaghers outfit) waaay back in the early aughts the more strategeric anti-SSM-marriage types were all in on “Reciprocal Beneficiaries” that did generally what you were talking about but were at pains to include all kinds of non-sexual couples like the spinster sisters living together or the elderly friends who cohabited for eligibility too. Of course us pro-SSMers would scoff at it and, on top of that, the rabit anti-SSMers would dogpile it something fierce.
I never doubted SSM was going to win once I saw how conservatives were not going to get on board of civil unions. Every alternative short of it had no constituency.Report
Without thinking about this too hard
As opposed to?Report
The number of idiots you can find advocating for allowing under age children to have sex (a necessary precursor to under age same sex marriage) is less small but remains an incredibly fringe view that would be shouted out of all but the most deranged left-wing spaces.
Roy Moore (and all his enthusiastic defenders of child marriage) say hi.Report
*cough*Report
Yeah, um, can we stop pretending there are not defenders of child marriage.
And also…no one needs to advocate for it. Child marriage is legal in 40 states, and was legal in _all_ states until 2018.
Should we pretend not to know which side is trying to outlaw this, and which side seems fine with it?Report
For the record, Roman Polanski was last given an Oscar in 2002, which makes it seem unlikely it has anything do with gay marriage. I mean, it would be unlikely anyway, but it seems unlikely from the mere sequence of time.Report
I was thinking of “Call Me By Your Name” and “Moonlight”.Report
You were thinking of ‘Call Me By Your Name’ and ‘Moonlight’ when you said ‘paedos and given a few Oscars to them’?
Call Me By Your Name only one Oscar, for Best Adapted Screenplay, so I assume you’re calling the director, Luca Guadagnino, that?
Moonight won three, Best Picture, Best Supporting Actortress and Best Adapted Screenplay, which I guess would be either the Director, Barry Jenkins, or Naomie Melanie Harris
Do you have any evidence of this allegation whatsoever, or do you just habitually call directors of gay romances pedophiles?
It’s actually worth pointing out that while Call Me By Your Name’s theme of a relationship between a 17-year-old and a 24-year-old was criticized, the whole thing really falls apart when you bring Moonlight into it, which has no such age-inappropriate relationship.Report
Maybe he was thinking of 1978’s Pretty Baby, with Brooke Shields?
Or 1979’s Manhattan?
That slippery slope has an incredibly long and gradual slide it seems.Report
These will be more serious issues after we get artificial humans.Report
After we get artificial humans none the whole policy question flies out the window.Report
As Bill Maher once said, what could possibly go wrong in a household with a man, his 40-year-old wife, and her 16-year-old clone?Report
You clone yourself and transfer your mind into a 16 year old body. Are you still you and are you still married?
You download yourself into a computer, same questions. If I download myself into 5 bodies, am I five people?
Are sentient animals human? Are sentient machines? Are new species? Are human/animal combos still human?
We’re going to get all of Mother Nature’s tools and our legal system will need to change.Report
For the 16 year old clone, that’s easy. The legal system has had to deal with clones since the start, they’re called identical twins. The usual laws and norms still apply.
The 16 year old is probably the daughter of the man and his wife.
For the others, I’m not sure we can even make bright clear lines.Report
Turing Police, arrest this man…Report
Is a Testa with full AI a Turing car?Report
Have you ever played Soma Dark?
Because when you commented on ‘transferring” that was right where my mind went. Though I suppose with some form of euthanasia being allowable “transfer” could mean “I copy my brain into the clone and kill myself” which would, from the clones point of view, mean that you transferred yourself but from your own, direct point of view would mean that you created a copy of yourself and then killed yourself.Report
It can get a lot weirder than that.Report
One comment on the statistics:
In general, gun deaths will be spread across suicide, which is the majority of firearm deaths nationally (~26k, per the CDC), then homicide as a close second (~21k, ibid. and then accidents, which are a distant third, accounting for a few hundred deaths a year. Police shootings are also generally treated as separate and probably account for about as many gun deaths as accidents.
It’s maybe possible that gun deaths, which make up about half of both overall homicides and suicides, outpace accidental deaths among people under 18 in NM. Regrettably, the data easily available on the NM webpage neither supports nor refutes this, as it provides age- and cause-stratified death statistics only for the top 10 overall causes of death, with no breakouts between gun- and non-gun-related deaths, and age cuts that don’t align with the common definitions of child vs adult.
All in all this is about what I’ve come to expect from easily accessible state-provided data sources about important public health issues: a complete PITA.Report
Following up because I missed the edit window:
To be clear, I think the way anti-gun activists lump suicide and homicide together when discussing gun deaths or gun violence is extremely misleading. They’re both obviously very bad, but that doesn’t mean that a policy response to address one is going to do a hell of a lot of good for the other.
Suicide is almost tautologically a mental health problem, while the relation between mental health and homicide rates is much murkier. Outreach to gang members can help with homicide rates, but is unlikely to do much to reduce suicides.Report
That is a 100% true, and needs to be addressed. But the problem with guns and suicides is one of opportunity, and of perceived painlessness.
It is more or less agreed that the desire to commit suicide eases out significantly if the victim is unable to kill himself at that moment. Guns are deemed a fairly quick and painless way to kill yourself. Barbiturates are probably better, but more difficult to obtain. Jumping off a window is intuitively very scary and much less frequent.
But though I don’t own any guns now, I can still buy one and kill myself before dinnertime this evening. If It was harder to get a gun -let’s say 48 hours- there’s a significant likelihood I would not kill myself. Guns not just replace other methods, they likely increase the total number of suicides, and that, too, is a problem.Report
The case that gun control reduces suicide is, in my understanding, much stronger than the case it reduces homicide. But people aren’t generally terrified of suicide the way they are of homicide, so it doesn’t provide nearly as much traction for gun control advocates.Report
Question: Is Grisham conspiring to deprive citizens of their Constitutional rights? Is there a solid reason why she shouldn’t be arrested, indicted, convicted?Report
No and no. Government already restricts access to, carriage of and use of firearms in all sorts of facilities at all levels. Adding other public properties to that list is nowhere near unconstutional. In addition, by issuing public health orders she’s in no way hiding her work, so the conspiracy charge would fall flat.Report
Conspiring with who? The subordinates she’s giving orders to? That isn’t a conspiracy. It might be something else, but a conspiracy requires the conspirators to share a common intent to do a particular criminal thing.Report
I’d assume she spoke to someone before the speech.Report
An interesting wrinkle:
Should the AG have, instead, resigned?Report
No. I think the AG has done what is appropriate for a public official acting in that capacity to decline to defend the Constitutionality of something that the AG believes in good faith is not constitutional.
In my mind, for an Attorney General to decline to defend a procedurally valid act of the State, the action has to be unambiguously constitutional, and the AG has to be able to back up that opinion with substantial legal research. This looks a little thin on the research side but I can’t say on the face of it that it’s so thin that he reached this conclusion in bad faith.Report
Well, she has admitted it:
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