Oh, Obergefell! What have you destroyed?

Here's one kind of rather typical comment on the Obergefell decision: "The US Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges is to the sexual revolution what the execution of Louis XVI was to the French Revolution. It has destroyed the mystique of marriage. No longer is marriage a pre-political reality which pre-dates the US Constitution, a sanctuary from government planners. This decision asserts that the government can define marriage in any way that it sees fit." (See article by Michael Cook here.)

So, says Cook, the US Supreme Court has destroyed the mystique of marriage. Please. What a dumb narrative. What "mystique of marriage"? If the mystique of marriage is a real thing, then SCOTUS doesn't have the power to destroy it.

You might as well say that Roe v. Wade-type decisions destroy the mystique of conceiving a new human life (i.e., at - when else? - conception). That's obviously silly. Even if a woman knows she can legally kill her newly conceived child, this fact does nothing to change the enormity and the wonder of the experience of discovering that a new life - your own child! - has come into being as a result of your own life-giving activity.

Or again, the Dred Scott case did not destroy the mystique of the idea that people of African descent born and permanently residing in America should indeed be recognized as bona fide American citizens, and that slave-holding was something that should be understood to be wrong, irrespective of the legal deliberations and contrivances and pronouncements of the certainly-not-almighty-and-all-wise Supreme Court of the United States.

Similarly in the case of same-sex couples obtaining the legal sanction of the state to pretend to be 'married' to each other: as if this law somehow actually makes such 'marriages' 'equal' to or the 'same' as a real marriage. That's like thinking that a law recognizing corporations as legal 'persons' actually makes it the case that corporate 'persons' are 'equal' to or the 'same' as real persons. Are there really people out there not bright enough to recognize that the same word can have different meanings in different contexts? Just because the same word is used, it doesn't mean that the same reality is referred to - the 'stars' in Hollywood are not the same as the 'stars' in the sky, you know?

It's true that there are plenty of people running that very rhetorical line in regard to same-sex 'marriage.' But it's a very obviously stupid argument. It's true that the general population of humanity contains a lot of very sheepish people who will believe any dumb line they're told to believe, because the easiest thing is to fit in and to conform to whatever the other sheep are doing and saying. (As the evolutionary psychologists would say, "Evolution made me do it!"). But that's not a state of affairs that was brought about by any court or legislature.

So enough with this kind of absurd narrative about SCOTUS destroying the mystique of marriage, with its implicit sub-narrative endorsing the mystical power of the courts to effect such destruction. The courts have no such mystical power - never have, never will. The real lesson to be insisted upon here is that those whose narratives presuppose this kind of mystical power of the courts are being silly.

On the other hand, thanks to the general sheepishness of human nature, the courts do have considerable power to impair the general population's understanding of an issue. But this is only in concert with the much greater power that is exercised in this regard by the mass media. So it behooves any intelligent, well-intentioned person contributing in any way to the mass/social media narrative to try to get this basic framing issue right: the poorly-reasoned opinion of five not particularly wise or good people may happen to carry great legal weight, and can have a serious impact on important affairs in the real world; but to think that it carries any weight in actually defining reality outside the Wonderland-domain of legal fictions wherein they exercise their arbitrary power? Destroy that mystique!