June 27^th

In downtown Traverse City today there was a Gay Pride parade. There were hundreds of marchers. Not all of them were gay, there were many sympathizers too, and many not in the parade, standing along the way, applauded those who marched. Michigan has a law against gay marriage but Governor Snyder has agreed that SCOTUS’ decision is now the law of the land and ordered the authorities to “fully comply” with the ruling…and then there is Texas!

Texas Governor Abbott ordered officials there to “prioritize religious objections” in complying with the law. This means that if you work for the state office that issues marriage licenses and you object to gay couples getting married you can claim your religious beliefs compel you not to comply with that request. Keep in mind that the “religious” clerk who makes this claim may not have been in a church since he was six years old, Governor Abbott allows him to hide his bigotry behind a phony religious mask. I wonder if Viet-Nam war draftees were encouraged by the then Texas Governor to exercise the same privilege. Want to bet?

Texas has no shortage of public officials outraged over the SCOTUS decision on gay marriage. No less than a sitting US Senator, Ted Cruz, has remarked about the effect of “five unelected Judges on the Supreme Court nullifying the wishes of 300 million Americans.” Most any high school kid could tell the Senator that the federal constitution which he claims to revere, and which he has sworn to uphold, specifically requires that the Justices of the Supreme Court be appointed by the President of the United States. You would suppose that a graduate of Harvard Law School would know at least as much about the Constitution of the United States as a high school kid. Can you skip the course in Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School? Probably not but maybe Cruz snoozed through the lectures on the selection of Supreme Court justices.

Then there are Cruz’s comments about this decision being in opposition to the “wishes of 300 million Americans.” That’s demonstrably horse hockey; most polls show that slightly better than 60 percent of the population support gay marriage and an equal number say that states have no right to prohibit it. One Republican panelist, S.E. Cupp, was in full support of the SCOTUS decision; she claims that the Republican Party will be a “relic” if they don’t update their rhetoric. I’m afraid it’s too late for that Ms. Cupp.