"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
That's the Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution. I have read the Constitution many times, for many reasons, and reading it today for the umpteenth time for the umpteenth reason I still don't really understand this amendment. When I encounter something I don't understand, whether due to vagueness of language or abstract ideas that my widdle bwain can't bend itself around, I simply re-word the statement, try to make it simpler, so in this case I might translate this statement as 'In the process of listing all the rights and liberties of the citizens of this country, we might have missed some shit in the first eight amendments, but just because we didn't mention them doesn't mean that folks don't have those rights and liberties.'
But is my translation correct? And, if so, what does it mean? I know what it says, but... When my primary method for understanding something fails me, I have a Plan B. I look on Wikipedia.
Go on, give it a try. Look it up for yourself, and if, at any point, you don't say to yourself 'Holy fuckballs!' then you're doing a lot better than me.
I'm interested in gay marriage right now. Not because I'm gay, I just simply believe that gay people are human beings too, which means they have human rights and civil rights as well, and the right to marry whomever we choose is not something that can legislated or be put up for a popular vote. Arguments against gay marriage are usually rooted in either religious grounds or on sexual bigotry or both, and it's obvious to me that neither of these are legal tools on which to make a legal decision. Apparently, it's not so obvious to everyone because the debate rages on every minute of every day in this country.
Last night while bartending, I overheard some conversation on the subject, which you will no doubt be familiar with by now. "You can fuck a dog or a goat, but you can't marry 'em. If two guys wanna fuck each other, great. But they can't get married. It's...it's...unnatural!" This was from a retired Chicago police officer. It was Mardi Gras weekend, and the place was packed, so I didn't really have time to get in the conversation even if I'd wanted to point out the obvious, that people aren't fucking animals, whether they're straight, gay, white, black or otherwise and therefore deserve human dignity and the right to live whatever life they want to. I wouldn't have convinced him anyway; this is one hard-headed sonofabitch we're talking about with a lifetime of bigotry and stupidity behind him.
Another reason often cited is that gays marrying violates the sanctity of marriage. This point is invalid. We are not, no matter how loud and obnoxious some people want to be over this, a Christian nation. We are a nation founded on laws, not religion, and at the end of the day marriage in America is little more than a legal contract binding two people in a legal union. You can make it religious if you want to, all you like, with the priest or minister or rabbi or bhagwan or whatever, but the fact is as soon as you, your partner and a couple witnesses sign your names at the County Clerk of Courts and pay the fees, you're already married. You don't need to wait for some guy in a dress to tell you to kiss the bride. You can have as much or little sanctity marriage as you want to put into it, but it isn't necessary. Sanctity is a term denoting the sacredness of something, which is an unquantifiable religious expression and therefore has no merit in a legal sense. It has no value outside of it's own cultural context, and just because seven out of ten Americans feel that something is sacred, it doesn't mean jack shit to me. Eight out of ten Americans believe in angels- does that make 'em real? Four out of ten (dumbass) Americans don't believe in evolution, but I guaran-fucking-tee that we share the same ancestors as the great apes and that this will be undeniably proven one day. Hell, there is a considerable segment of our population that feel that BASEBALL DIAMONDS are sacred spaces. Why don't coaches have the authority vested in them to perform marriage rituals, in that case?
Sorry, I start ranting and I start losing the plot. I was talking about gay marriage and the 9th Amendment. There is no mention of gay marriage in the Constitution for a simple fact; namely, back when the Constitution was being framed, they'd string your ass up in the nearest tree if it was discovered that you were gay and engaging in homosexual activity, much less wanting to get married to someone of the same sex. Or they might've skipped the rope and just beat you to death. Either way, you were toast. Not that it didn't happen, ever since there have been people there have been gay and straight people. Back then you just had to be really ultra-top-shelf-triple-red-dog secretive about it. But, these guy were smart, knew that the world is not static and there would be things our country would experience that they had no way of foreseeing then, so they created a living, breathing, malleable document that could change with the times and cover issues undreamed of in their frame of reference. They definitely were out to create something that would insure that everyone would have the freedom and the liberty to live as they wanted to.
Less freedom for some is less liberty for all.
As John Rawls wrote in 'A Theory of Justice' in 1971, "No system can be called efficient if there is an alternative arrangement that improves the situation of some people with no worsening of the situation of any of the other people."
From our vantage point of history, we look back and think, 'How could it be that women weren't allowed to vote or own land back then?', or 'How could they think it's okay to not let black people go to school or vote or own land? Or have jobs that actually pay?' I firmly believe that fifty years from now, people of America will look back at our times and shake their heads, wondering 'Why would anyone give a shit whether someone else is straight or gay?'
(And probably also, 'How could they not see that Rick Santorum and Rick Perry were totally hot for each other?' And 'Who the fuck was paying good money to listen to Justin Bieber?' And 'Who couldn't have seen that Oprah was going to own her own planet someday?' And 'Wasn't it obvious that weed is good for you?' And ......(ran out of time, they're closing the Playstation down for the day.))
