Saturday, February 23, 2013

Iowa gay marriage: Shane Vander Hart leaps to defend Iowa GOP Party Chair Spiker, attacks 'robed tyrants' of Iowa Supreme Court

Uh oh. Esteemed marriage equality analyst, Christian blogger, heterosexual supremacist and fan of right-wing talk radio station WHO, Shane Vander Hart, is pouting again.
     This time he's disturbed about the flap resulting from GOP Iowa Party Chair A.J. Spiker saying, on Iowa Press, that the Iowa Democratic Party is the gay marriage party.
     Vander Hart is annoyed that such an assertion by an Iowa Republican Party official is treated as news. (Pssst: AKSARBENT totally agrees with Vander Hart, but keep it under your hat.)
     We always enjoy splashing through the shallow wading pool of Vander Hart's musings about gay marriage because no matter how jejune his observations may be at the beginning — or even in the middle — there is usually a happy ending somewhere before Shane reaches his last period.
    In a recent installment of the Shane Vander Hart show, we laughed through this (emphasis added):
The third and last point I’d like to bring it [sic] is an objection to him [Tyler Olson, 36, recently named Iowa Democratic Party state chairman] saying that this is a battle “Iowans have long settled.”  How’s that?  I don’t remember their [sic] being a vote or even a bill passed by our legislature.  He said the Iowa Supreme Court “settled” it.  In an audio clip of his statement that I heard on WHO Radio this morning he actually called it “settled law.”  Which it is not.  It is a court opinion.  If Olson truly wants to see Iowans “settle” the issue he’d be in favor of Iowans voting on it.  I fully admit that I’m not confident that an marriage amendment would pass like I was a few years ago, but at least “we the people” would have had a say, not a group of robed tyrants.
     So basically what is the goal of all this?  Same-sex marriage licenses are already being given out? Status quo reigns and it isn’t an issue this year.  Mainly because achieving “rights” isn’t the goal. Same sex marriage advocates seek legitimacy and for their position to be “normalized” which can only be gained by quelling any opposition.
     Atta boy Shane! Way to take down those robed tyrants, those Supreme Court justices who have tyrannically grabbed from the Vander Harts and the Vander Plaatses of the world the right to interpret Iowa's constitution (what nerve!) and then tyrannically applied the equal protection clause of Iowa's constitution in deciding a lawsuit that they somehow (but tyrannically!) caused to be brought to them for deliberation. Christian witless witness!
     And good call busting those punks who regard decisions like Varnam vs. Brien, Iowa's marriage equality decision [or Loving vs. Virginia or Brown vs. Board of Education] as "settled law" when they're really just opinions! Legally, that's like a suggestion, right Shane? 
     Kidding aside, Vander Hart's pushy Christer sense of exclusive entitlement really rears its ugly head in the last paragraph.
     There he demonstrates that if gay couples want the piece of paper which entitles them to the thousands of benefits that heterosexual married couples have, then it's the job of Vander Hart to turn that aspiration into a sinister scheme of "normalization" and uppity "legitimacy" and "quelling opposition" (the part where Vander Hart et al. get to nail themselves to the cross.)
     To the Christian right, it's not about taking things at face value; it's about inventing ominous danger that has to be contained, usually at the expense of you know who.

No comments:

Post a Comment

ShareThis