Comments

1. ed gleason 04/17/2009 - 1:42 pm

   With the ND flac intensifying Kmiec’s odds as Vatican ambassador goes from 25% to 80%.Why?
   Obama’s team knows how to both ‘block out’ and ‘drive down the lane’. They did win the election, starting from way behind, and winning going away..

2. Cathleen Kaveny 04/17/2009 - 1:44 pm  contributor

   Picking up on the last Colbert thread; I had the sense that the “real” Colbert was talking to Doug–Mollie–how about you?

3. Mollie Wilson O’Reilly 04/17/2009 - 2:26 pm  contributor

   Thanks for posting this, Cathy! I have it DVR’d, but this is a good excuse to watch it right away.

   I would say “Colbert” remained more consistently in-character here, but in a way that allowed you to sense his real-life sympathies. His pushback to Kmiec’s argument was consistent and (ideologically) predictable, but it seemed plain the real Colbert’s heart wasn’t in it — and that he did want Kmiec to have the chance to make his point between the jokes.

4. JC 04/17/2009 - 7:43 pm  subscriber

   I find Kmiec’s position politically appealing.

   However, doesn’t the Catholic view of marriage have something to say to all humanity? He seems to concede that it is just a narrow sectarian position. What happened to faith and reason?

5. MAT 04/18/2009 - 8:25 am

   “They did win the election, starting from way behind, and winning going away..”

   I think you may be conflating their campaign with that of the eventual opposition party nominee. The ruling party’s nominee actually had a vast fundraising advantage before Iowa, won Iowa by something like 10 points is my recollection, and did not trail at any point during the primary season. His eventual opponent had almost the exact opposite experience. I believe he may have even adopted some sort of moniker to refer to his come-back-from-behind path.

   My recollection is also that the ruling party’s nominee never trailed in any major poll for any extended period of time (I believe the polls were statistically tied from approx. August 29 to September 19 or so) from his nomination through Election Day and during that period enjoyed a fundraising advantage over his opponent of close to half a billion dollars.

6. MAT 04/18/2009 - 8:39 am

   I have been arguing for Prof. Kmiec’s position for quite some time so by definition agree with him. I do think he is wrong about contracts between three or more parties. In fact his position on that totally undermines the logical argument. It makes for compelling rhetoric for the post-modernists in that audience and elsewhere, but it is bad deduction. And he is wrong on the practicalities as well – American contract law is plenty robust to accommodate infinite combinations of contractual arrangements and parties contracting to proscribe ownership of real and personal property as well as delivery of services, management functions, etc.

7. David Nickol 04/18/2009 - 1:02 pm  subscriber

   While the idea of the state getting out of the marriage business does in some way resolve the issue of same-sex marriage, it resolves it in the same way as some cities in the South resolved problems of integrating public swimming pools. Rather than ceasing to discriminate by letting blacks swim in the same pools as whites, they ceased to discriminate by closing the pools altogether.

   Colbert’s most effective comment (although I am not sure what he really believes) is that he likes the idea of leaving marriage to churches because then atheists can’t get married. It’s a rather stunning observation. It seems to me to undermine the whole argument of having the state get out of the marriage business, because it implies that marriage is and out to be a religious institution, which is at odds with the entire history and current reality of marriage.

   John L. McKenzie, in Dictionary of the Bible says:

   Marriage in Israel was neither a religious nor a public concern; it was a private contract, and it is this conception which leaves so little room for it in Hb law, which deals only with the exceptional cases. The contracting parties were not the bride and groom but the families, i.e., the fathers of the spouses; the brothers of the bride had the disposal of the girl if the father were dead.

   Presumably this is also marriage as Jesus knew it when he made pronouncements about divorce. Marriage was “religious” in a broad sense, since a man and a woman joining in a relationship to have children was part the way creation was set up. But the idea that religious agents or authorities performed marriages is not found in the Bible, and even in the first thousand-plus years of the Catholic Church, marriage was left to civil authority, with Church weddings becoming mandatory only in the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

   The idea that only people who belonged to a religion that performs marriage ceremonies could get married is preposterous.

8. jpm1977 04/20/2009 - 3:19 pm  subscriber

   Isn’t the main problem the tax code? You can handle estates, hospital visitations, child custody, etc. with contracts; fine. The real problem is the government handing out massive tax breaks, refunds, etc. to married people that are denied single people. As a single, straight man, I pay a lot more in taxes than I would if I were married. Is that fair? It is if you think the government should encourage marriage. If its going to do so, under American constitutional law (not canon law) those breaks should be open to everyone. But the only reason those tax breaks are there is to account for the cost of raising children, which the government wants to encourage. If you choose not to have children, why should you have to subsidize those who do?

   All of this is to demonstrate that the foundation of the government’s interest in marriage is the promotion of children. If you take that out of the equation in marriage, which modern jurisprudence on this issue does, then the government should bow out of marriage, and tax away that tax breaks while they’re at it.

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