A Stitch in Haste

Galois, a mathematician who isn't a lawyer (but obviously would have made a fine one) has a very good post on the polygamy non-argument regarding gay marriage:

I believe we have a fundamental right to vote. This does not mean I believe that the state should not be able to regulate voting. On the contrary it must if the vote is to be recognized in any way. Rather I believe that in order for the right to vote to be meaningful it must not only include the right to cast a ballot for somebody but it must also necessarily the right to cast a ballot for the candidate of our choice.
...
Does it follow that the legislature must permit anybody who so chooses to vote for as many candidates as they would like? Such a system, as in approval voting, could work. In fact I think it would be a better system than we currently have. But I do not think there is a right to such a voting system. The right to vote cannot include the right for us to each decide which voting system we would like to use. Every person has the right to vote (barring a compelling reason to disenfranchise), but not the right to vote for as many candidates as one would like.

Very good. If I may extend the analysis one layer -- yes, approval voting (which I unconditionally oppose on the grounds that it's, um, totally stupid) could work. Polygamy, as a legal status, simply cannot.

It's very interesting that the polygamy doomsayers always seem to posit the "traditional," Mormon style of polygamy (i.e., one male married to several females). But of course there is no reason polygamy should only apply to that fact pattern: why not one woman married to several men, or five men married to seven women, or perhaps the partners of a small business might all get married for tax or other reasons (cf., "I told you -- we're an anarcho-syndicalist commune!").

Could marriage, qua legal status, accommodate polygamous relationships? No! How would divorce be handled in polygamy? Could two "spouses" oust a third? What about property ownership -- could three out of seven spouses own property jointly apart from the others? Can a spouse in one polygamous marriage enter into another polygamous marriage without the consent of all the spouses of the original and the new marriages? What about inheritance? Tax returns? Child support? Powers of attorney? Right-to-die decisions?

The legal implications of the status of marriage require, metaphysically, that it be between two and only two people. But those same legal implications do not require, metaphysically, that it be between a man and a woman.

Circling back to the legal analysis: Since, under Supreme Court holdings -- namely Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1966), which struck down anti-miscegenation laws, and Zablocki v. Redhail, 434 U.S. 374 (1978), extending Loving -- there is a fundamental right to marry under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the state would have to show a "compelling interest" in restricting a particular form of marriage. Clearly the sheer impossibility (not difficulty, but impossibility) of implementing legal polygamy qualifies. But gay marriage is of course not impossible. That is the distinction. Polygamy = impossible; gay marriage = possible. Compelling interest to restrict one but not the other. QED.

As I have blogged previously, I still worry more about courts being intellectually dishonest and short-circuiting Loving wholesale by claiming that it was "only about race," despite the fact that subsequent Supreme Court cases have clearly said otherwise (i.e., that there is a ubiquitous fundamental right to marry).

We shall see...

UPDATE #1: Fixed the bad "totally stupid" link to the Arrow Impossibility Theorem. Apologies to anyone (understandably) befuddled by the wikipedia link to "arrow."

UPDATE #2: A dissenting view:

So arguing metaphysics to deprive a polygamist of his natural rights, and rejecting metaphysics when it impacts your natural rights.. intresting [sic] tactic...

About as interesting as the associative laws of arithmetic. Just because I say that "two minus one is not the same as one minus two" doesn't mean I'm being a hypocrite; it just means I'm being a mathematician.

Related Post:
Thoughts on the New York Gay Marriage Decision

One wonders whether Tim Sandefur fully understands the nature of the arrangement he is about to enter into with his lovely fiance:

The right to marry is a right based on contract -- which means, based on the right of more than one person to exercise and trade their liberty as they see fit. The reason for recognition of gay marriage is that if two men wish to be married, that violates nobody else's rights, and therefore I don't have the right to stop them. (Well, that's the rough version.) If that theory is correct, then the exact same thing goes for consensual adult polygamy: a person certainly should be free to marry any person he loves, who is also a willing participant.

That's all very romantic and philosophical. It's also 100% wrong.

Marriage is not (or not only) a "right based on contract." It is a legal status that, to a very large extent, complements and sometimes even contradicts the concept of contract (e.g., in most states, a spouse's elective share supersedes a will provision disinheriting that spouse).

Herein lies the (not at all difficult) distinction between same-sex marriage and polygamy. Marriage by its nature qua legal status must, in a modern society, be limited to two people. A hypothetical polygamous "marriage" qua bundle of hypothetical contracts might be feasible in some hypothetical libertarian utopia. But that is not marriage as it exists, legally, in America today. The only way to validate "polygamous marriage" is to rewrite the fundamental definition, the fundamental nature, of marriage itself -- to blank out its nature as a legal status and replace it with some fictitious "bundle of contracts" doppelgaenger. But to do so reduces the whole debate down to mere question-begging. Which is not helpful.

As I blogged previously:

How would divorce be handled in polygamy? Could two "spouses" oust a third? What about property ownership -- could three out of seven spouses own property jointly apart from the others? Can a spouse in one polygamous marriage enter into another polygamous marriage without the consent of all the spouses of the original and the new marriages? What about inheritance? Tax returns? Child support? Powers of attorney? Right-to-die decisions?

The legal implications of the [modern] status of marriage require, metaphysically, that it be between two and only two people. But those same legal implications do not require, metaphysically, that it be between a man and a woman.

As for the hyper-anarcho-libertarians who try to short-circuit the entire gay marriage debate by moaning that "government should get of the marriage business altogether," well, even if such a lament somehow helped the real-world quest for equal treatment of gays (I don't see how it does), it's also, quite frankly, an unacceptably naive and simplistic worldview.

The great thing about marriage, qua legal status, is that it eliminates the need for the (extremely complicated) "bundle of strictly private contracts" that radical libertarians and defenders of theoretical polygamy (such as Sandefur) seem to think is such a "neat-o!" idea. Ask any gay couple who has actually tried to do it -- I guarantee you they'll say it's not so "neat-o."

Stated differently, marriage, qua legal status, is extremely efficient economically. It saves time. It saves resources (e.g., lawyers drafting documents). It saves money. It saves grief over lost, destroyed or badly-drafted contracts. In an (admittedly Rawlsian) sense, the shortcut of marriage, qua legal status, does the greatest good for the greatest number. It's simply a smart idea in a modern society.

Tinker around the edges all you want. Should there be a "marriage penalty" within the federal income tax? I doubt it. Should there be a spousal benefit under Social Security? I seriously doubt it. But these are overlays that don't go to the core of marriage qua legal status. The real meaning of marriage in modern society -- automatic property rights, automatic inheritance rights, automatic child custody rights, automatic healthcare rights, automatic decision-making rights of all kinds, these all derive not from some abstract "bundle of contracts" concept of marriage, but from the legal status concept.

And they require that marriage be limited to two people.

If consensual polygamists want to try to build a bird's nest from the individual twigs and strings of contractual arrangements, then by all means they have a right to do so (assuming no externalities, especially to the children of such arrangements). But the assertion that to draw the line at two-person marriage is "arbitrary" is nonsense.

Other prongs in this debate from Jason Kuznicki, Jon Rowe and Dispatches. Separate and distinct from this thread, meanwhile, Galois has a very intelligent post that echoes my concerns on "the new polygamy." On the other hand, here's a chap who demonstrates that it's a fine line between being a smartass and being a dumbass.

Related Post:
On the Polygamy Non-Argument

Several anti-gay conservatives are making quite a big deal over a sad case in Wisconsin recently decided by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals:

Allen Muth and his younger sister Patricia married and had three children. After they abandoned the middle child, who was disabled, the State of Wisconsin petitioned to terminate their parental rights because of their incestuous parenthood. After the courts approved the termination, both Allen and Patricia were convicted of incest and sentenced to years in prison.

Apparently tired of losing the polygamy non-argument, some commentators are now picking a new anti-gay perch on the slippery slope.

National Review:

But the court's reasoning was extremely bad ... in dealing with the precedent relied upon by the petitioner in the case. That precedent was Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling declaring the unconstitutionality of laws against homosexual sodomy.

Jeff Jacoby:

Lawrence was clear: "The issue is whether the majority may use the power of the State to enforce these views on the whole society through operation of the criminal law." If the Supreme Court meant what it said, Muth argued, his and his sister's convictions for incest were every bit as unconstitutional as the Texas men's convictions for sodomy.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

There is no contradiction whatsoever between the holdings of Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003) and the Wisconsin case, for one very simple reason: Lawrence expressly declined to declare a fundamental right to private consensual sexual conduct among competent adults. All the Lawrence court found was that criminalizing homosexual intercourse served no legitimate state interest.

There are, of course, extremely legitimate state interests in proscribing sibling intercourse, as anyone with a knowledge of basic genetics understands. The right to sexual privacy does not include the right to conceive children with the genetic problems that sibling intercourse can and often do yield, as this very case demonstrated.

The rest of the facts in the Wisconsin case distinguish it from Lawrence even more. The siblings entered into a fraudulent marriage; Lawrence expressly declined to discuss the gay marriage question. The siblings had children; Lawrence did not address questions of conception, adoption or parenting by gay couples. Finally, the appeal in the Wisconsin turned on some rather arcane legal principles -- habeas corpus review, the difference between procedural and substantive rights, and retroactivity of cases -- that hardly reach to the core societal questions of gay marriage and how it compares to incest.

The Circuit Court did not so much declare that Lawrence does not apply to incest as it declared that Lawrence did not apply to this case. And its reasoning is wholly logical and in no way inconsistent with "the big questions" of legislating sexual morality.

Incidentally, doesn't this mean that the Circuit Court was declining to engage in the "judicial activism" that conservatives claim to abhor? Go figure.

The quest by some to portray Lawrence as an apocalyptic harbinger of doom rather than a modest step toward basic legal dignity for gays will no doubt continue for some time, despite the fact that Lawrence has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with gay marriage, "Don't Ask - Don't Tell," gay parenting or any of the other various challenges gays still face, let alone questions of polygamy, incest, or other "slippery slope" bogeymen that bigots seem to be eager to find around every corner.

And even if one accepts that there might be inevitable non-gay consequences that will flow from Lawrence, is it really necessary or proper to continue arguing against the basic legal dignities of millions of gays out of fear of what a minute handful of individuals might do as a result of their own dysfunctionality or for mere shock value?

Is it really about protecting the rights of incestuous siblings? Is it really about exposing supposed inconsistencies in applying precedent?

Or is it about naked bigotry?

The Wisconsin case is Muth v. Frank, No. 03-3985 (7th Cir.) (2005) (PDF - 19 pages)

I have previously explained why the "gay marriage demands polygamy" thesis is invalid.

But let's use Charles Krauthammer as an excuse to revisit the issue:

Posit a union of, say, three gay women all deeply devoted to each other. On what grounds would gay activists dismiss their union as mere activity rather than authentic love and self-expression? On what grounds do they insist upon the traditional, arbitrary and exclusionary number of two?

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

People who take Krauthammer's position do not understand the actual nitty-gritty implications of marriage qua legal status. Love and self-expression aren't the issue here -- how would you make it work legally is the Great Unanswered.

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Here's a math question for you: If you want to cut something into two equal pieces, then how many cuts are required?

The answer is, of course, not two but one. To cut anything into n equal pieces requires n-1 cuts, not n.

Same with marriage: the magic number is not the "arbitrary" number of two (as in two people) but the anything-but-arbitrary number of 2-1=1, (as in one marriage to one spouse).

This number (which is, again, the number one, not two) is not "arbitrary" -- it is axiomatic for marriage qua legal status.

It is not "prejudice" to recognize what marriage qua legal status attempts to achieve: a simple, contract-free, bureaucratically efficient system of elevating a single person above all others in terms of legal claims to (and against) another person. This form of elevation -- that of a single person -- is the only form of elevation that is possible, which is why "legal polygamy" is a contradiction in terms.

And that is why gay marriage is perfectly reasonable and polygamy is perfectly nonsensical.

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Sometimes you hear a response like this: "If businesses can have partnerships of more than two people, then why can't we have marriages of more than two people? Isn't marriage like a partnership?"

Well, no. Entering into a partnership is an act of legal equalization; marriage is an act of legal elevation. It is a declaration, as a matter of law and not just love, that one person has superior claims to the spouse (and against the spouse) than any other person.

But this elevation must, as a matter of metaphysics, be limited to a single person; it is a discrete and indivisible concept. Mathematically, A cannot be both greater than B and less than B simultaneously. Legally, Spouse A cannot have both a greater legal claim and a lesser legal claim than Spouse B simultaneously.

This is not prejudice, this is not parochialism, this is not sophistry. It is simple math, simple logic and simple law.

The better business analogy to marriage is not a partnership but a corporation. It is impossible to have multiple, truly equal "co-CEOs." The very nature of "elevation" requires that, when push comes to shove, one person be elevated above all others -- by force of law if necessary.

Or consider an autocratic triumvirate of the old Roman Empire variety -- it is impossible to have truly equal "co-dictators." In the end, "there can be only one."

Back to the legal nitty gritty: What do we mean by "elevation"? Consider the various manifestations. How exactly is divorce supposed to work in a polygamous arrangement? Estate law? Child custody? Testimonial privilege? Employment benefits?

"We'll figure it out later..." is not an answer. The whole point is that it can't be figured out at all. Neither is the snark of "Just have contracts..." You can't contract away your child's rights, or give yourself testimonial privilege by contract, or a hundred other facets of marriage that cannot be replicated by contract. Finally, "The government should just get out of the marriage business..." is not a noble libertarian proclamation but a limp-wristed cop-out.

Anyone who, unlike Krauthammer, thinks about the issue, in terms of marriage qua legal status, for more than ten seconds realizes how absurd the "gay marriage implies polygamy" argument is.

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Other thoughts at To The People, Good As You, PoliBlog, Unrepentant Individual, Below the Beltway.

I've previously chronicled the rather remarkable, and disheartening, erosion of some core criminal procedure liberties in the United Kingdom: double jeopardy, the hearsay rule and even jury trials. And of course we all know that there is no First Amendment in Europe.

Well, add another one to the list:

The historic legal principle that husbands and wives cannot be forced to testify against each other in court could be swept away, with ministers announcing a consultation tomorrow on the merits of such a reform.

There is particular concern in two areas. One is where an accused marries a key witness and thus silences that testimony, and the other relates to assaults on children by a parent, where the spouse is often the only witness.

Two footnotes: First, this is Scotland and not all of the U.K. Second, this version of spousal privilege is far more expansive than that enjoyed by American spouses, which only covers private communications occurring during the marriage and does not include conspiratorial criminal plotting. Still, it would be regrettable to see the entire privilege discarded in order to "close a loophole."

In any case, this story actually intersects another major thesis of my blogging and is the main point of this post:

The current criminal law that witnesses cannot be forced to give evidence against their wives or husbands, except where one is the direct victim of an offence at the hand of the other, has been extended to include civil partnerships for same-sex couples.

As I've pointed out repeatedly, marriage is not simply a "contract." It is a legal status that, in many ways, simply cannot be replicated by contract. Spousal privilege is among the most clear-cut examples of this. No private contract can possibly replicate it -- only the government can grant it.

Another example is estate law. Yes a person can (and usually should) draft a will (not a costless undertaking, incidentally) specifying how one's estate is to be distributed. But there are two complications:

1. Elective share, the law (in most states) that says you cannot completely disinherit a spouse.
2. The law of intestacy: You should have a will. But what if you don't?

Both of these longstanding legal provisions are strongly biased in favor of spouses (or, in enlightened regimes, spousal equivalents such as registered domestic partners).

So the question for the "government should get out of the marriage business" crowd is: Are you suggesting that spousal privilege is invariably and facially wrong as a legal concept? Should "government get out of the testimonial privilege business" too?

And is elective share an affront to your libertarian sensibilities as well? Why exactly?

And how, exactly, is the government supposed to "get out of the intestacy business"? Intestacy is by definition the government's business. What would the anti-marriage libertarians replace it with? Would they force people, by law, to draft wills? Threaten the intestate with summary escheat of their estates? Are those libertarian propositions?

As I've blogged previously:

The real meaning of marriage in modern society -- automatic property rights, automatic inheritance rights, automatic child custody rights, automatic healthcare rights, automatic decision-making rights of all kinds, these all derive not from some abstract "bundle of contracts" concept of marriage, but from the legal status concept.

The government cannot "get out of the governing business." Which is why it cannot "get out of the marriage business."

(Via Fark.)

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Just draw up contracts?

[Eric and Crispin] had made for one another all the necessary legal arrangements: powers of attorney, mutual wills, etc etc. All their bases were covered, so they thought. As soon as he heard the news [of Eric's death], Crispin had flown straight out to Provincetown, where Eric died, to make funeral arrangements. A friend who accompanied them said that when Crispin began to detail the requirements for the cremation and commitment at the funeral home in Provincetown, the funeral director drew himself up and demanded to know what the basis of their relationship was. He told Crispin: “I don’t believe you will be making the funeral arrangements”. It required the intervention of [gay rights] lawyers and lawyer friends on both coasts to convince the funeral home that he was indeed authorized as a legal partner to make the arrangements. Crispin requested an autopsy, which was contested by the Medical Examiner on the same grounds, and the cremation was subsequently questioned as well (they called during the funeral to argue the case with Crispin).

I remember in Agency & Partnership class in law school when the professor explained that banks invariably try to (illegally) refuse to honor powers of attorney unless they are on the bank's own forms. And that's not even factoring in any anti-gay bigotry.

Can you imagine such incidents occurring everywhere, with everyone, every time? That's what would happen if government "got out of the marriage business."

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Embedded deep down in this unrelated (and lengthy) post today, ueber-blogger Glenn Greenwald discusses his attempt to litigate for same-sex spousal privilege in New York State, a decade before the same-sex marriage defeat in Hernandez v. Robles. [Scroll down to "My Sexual Orientation."]

Even if I'm not winning over my fellow libertarians on the question of "getting government out of the marriage business," I'm sure we will all agree on the question of "getting government out of the marriage subsidization business" --

Ron McLain has no qualms about the federal government getting involved in marriage. Indeed, he's counting on it.

McLain has applied for a $550,000 federal grant to hire counselors for Marriage Mentoring Ministries Inc., a tiny business in Fresno County, Calif., that helps couples before and after they exchange wedding vows. He also has a bid in for a $250,000 grant to teach men to become better fathers.
...
The grant money represents the latest shift in welfare reform in the United States. For the next five years, Congress is setting aside up to $100 million a year to promote marriage and $50 million a year to produce committed fathers. This year's allotment goes out before Sept. 30.

Somehow I suspect that many, many more organizations with the word "Ministries" in their names will be shamelessly sucking at this fiscal teat.

From the Marriage Mentoring Ministries website

Our goal is that by the year 2020, 75% of all churches in these areas will be mentoring churches, offering programs that will enrich and strengthen couples and families and lower the divorce rate.

First Amendment concerns? Apparently not. Go figure.

Meanwhile, I wonder if any federal money will go to promote same-sex marriage in Massachusetts?

DOMA concerns? Apparently so. Go figure.

How politicians (especially Republican politicians) and Christians (especially evangelical Christians) can engage in this farce with a straight face is beyond me.

There's an episode of The Waltons in which the family discovers that a logging company claims to have acquired legal title to Walton's Mountain and intends to strip the land of its timber. Daddy and Grandpa Walton rush to a lawyer, armed with generations' worth of family Bibles, wills, letters, etc., demonstrating the family's longstanding claim to ownership of the land (despite never having gone through the formality of registering a deed with the county).

In a gasp of exasperated frustration, Grandpa Walton asks, "Doesn't all this count for anything?"

"Yes it does," the lawyer answers, "in court."

That is the libertarian "paradise" envisioned by the "government should get out of the marriage business" crowd, the most recent manifestation of which is this Alex Tabarrok post:

People will claim that this means a chaos of contracts for every form of marriage. This is wrong factually and also conceptually misguided. Factually, we already allow men and women to adjust the marriage contract as they see fit with pre-nuptials. Moreover, different states offer different marriage contracts with some offering more than one type. Partnerships of other kinds have access to all manner of contractual arrangements without insufferable problems.

First, it is simply incorrect as a matter of family law that individuals can "adjust the marriage contract as they see fit with pre-nuptials." Some presumptions that flow from the legal status of marriage can be adjusted by an antenuptial (e.g., property division upon divorce); some cannot (e.g., waiver of the right to allege spousal rape). But that's only a minor nitpick I have with Tabarrok's post.

More important is another question, one that I have asked before: Since when do economists ignore transaction costs? The one unarguably redeeming quality about state-recorded, "legal status" marriage is that it is wonderfully efficient. A whole host of contractual and quasi-contractual rights and obligations achieved with a simple — and inexpensive — "I do."

Let's start with Tabarrok's somewhat insolent example: How much does a typical antenuptial agreement cost to draft? To enforce? And, as Tabarrok himself notes, is there even such a thing as a "typical" antenuptial? And that, as gay couples know all too well, would only be the beginning of the effort, and cost, of trying to replicate marriage via contracts.

Are you married, not rich, and desperately in love with your spouse? Then you don't really need a will — intestacy law works wonders for you. How, exactly, is scrapping the whole notion of intestate succession (which is essentially what would happen under a strictly contractual marriage paradigm) a libertarian dictate? How is telling just about everyone that — too bad so sad — proper libertarianism requires you to shell out money for a will, a selling point either for libertarianism or for fair and equal treatment of gays? "We'll all pay the same lawyer fees!" isn't exactly a catchy slogan.

And then there is, of course, the most nightmarish example of all: hospital visitation. Here's some cruel, vicious, utterly disingenuous blather from someone I have far less patience with than I do Tabarrok — Mike Huckabee:

Q: I just wonder what you'd say to the gay couple who says, "Well, we want to live this way, and my partner can't come visit me in a nursing home.

MH: He can with a power of attorney. That's the fallacy, that this requires some new definition of marriage. It's simply not the case.

Huckabee is many things, but "libertarian theorist" is not one of them.

It's easy to be so causally flippant (i.e., "Christian") about powers of attorney when you don't need one yourself. In any event, incidents of perfectly valid powers of attorney being perfectly ignored by hospital staff (not to mention banks, stockbrokers, landlords — and government bureaucrats) are everywhere — assuming you're interested in knowing about them. Neither Huckabee nor Tabarrok seem so inclined. Even New Jersey's civil union law is a proven failure at being "just like marriage."

To summarize: Government "getting out of the marriage business" would turn every wedding into the legal and economic equivalent of a real estate closing -- times a thousand. With the additional and unnecessary nuisance (or terror) of some clerk or bureaucrat saying at any moment, in any context, "Sorry, we don't recognize that. You'll have to go to court." Why would any libertarian embrace such a regime?

Government-recorded marriage (note that I did not say government-sanctioned marriage) -- properly crafted and fairly applied based on rational standards rather than on unbridled majoritarianism -- is simply not an affront to libertarianism. Sacrificing economic efficiency in the name of blindly striving for asymptotic "markets in everything" dogma is.

To review: One of the most embarrassing forest-trees error that libertarians can make is to argue that, since "government should get out of the marriage business" (a dubious proposition in and of itself), then it must follow that libertarians should oppose gay marriage, because at least that way somebody isn't getting married, which (the argument goes) advances the (allegedly) libertarian end-goal of abolishing marriage as a legal status altogether.

It's a mind-bogglingly stupid (not to mention cruel) argument — one that not only ignores reality but also ignores theory: Since when is equal protection (writ large, very large) acceptable collateral damage in the libertarian war on governmental meddling (writ small, very small)?

On the other hand, and for the sake of perspective, here's an instance where I think all libertarians can indeed agree: Government should definitely get out of this part of the marriage business —

The [Kern County, California] office will issue same-sex marriage licenses beginning June 17 as state law requires but will stop solemnizing weddings due to lack of staff and space, Auditor-Controller-County Clerk Ann Barnett announced in a news release Wednesday evening.
...
Julie Poochigian, chief deputy clerk-recorder of Tulare County, said her office plans to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples starting June 17. She said the office has never performed wedding ceremonies for couples.

"Some other counties do that, but Tulare County does not," she said. "We are not staffed to perform the services."

I simply do not see how it is a proper function of government to provide a wedding ceremony, any more than it would be a proper function of government to provide a wedding gown or a tuxedo. The only requirement is fair and equal treatment in the issuance and recognition of marriage licenses.

By contrast, recall that this is utterly unacceptable:

San Diego County plans to comply with a state Supreme Court ruling that allows same-sex marriages but will not force employees to perform the ceremonies if they cite religious or moral objections.

County Assessor-Recorder-Clerk Greg Smith, whose office issues marriage licenses, said he has informed the roughly 115 employees deputized to conduct ceremonies to tell him if they object to same-sex marriages.

It's quite simple really: If your taxpayer-funded job requires you to treat all comers fairly and equally, but your bigotry religion prevents you from doing so, then quit. That's the only "reasonable accommodation" you're entitled to. (Compare to my previous posts on when private pharmacists object to dispensing contraception.)

(Via Good As You, who is a bit more cynical about the county clerk's motivations.)

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Speaking of Kern County and gay marriage: Be sure not to drink the carrot juice.

(Why are you reading this post here and not at the new site?)---

Half-penny, two-penny. Ashes to dust.
Almighty Dollar says, "In God We Trust"...
--Styx, "Half-Penny, Two-Penny"

An update on San Diego's taxpayer-funded bigot-enablers:

At least 14 employees in the San Diego County Clerk's Office raised religious objections to performing gay wedding ceremonies but were told by their boss they couldn't pick and choose between marriage applicants.
...
"It would unfairly burden other employees and would directly compromise the services we provide to the public ... you should realize that it will be impossible for you to remain in your current assignment," employees were told in the June 5 e-mail.

Given that answer, Smith said, several employees withdrew their objections, but a few chose reassignment.

I will, in proper Voltairean fashion, salute the few non-hypocrites who stuck to their bigotry and agreed to explore reassignment. To those miserable cretins who put their paycheck before their one-true-god: You're pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. Oh, and God is watching you.

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To review: On the topic of "religious accommodation," no accommodation whatsoever is warranted in this circumstance. Allowing someone to refuse, outright and altogether, to perform their (taxpayer-funded) function is not an "accommodation."

We are not talking here about allowing a Sikh to wear a ceremonial kirpan, providing Muslims adequate break time for their prayer rituals, or ensuring that there are kosher items in the cafeteria. Since when is allowing an employee to "just say no," absolutely and unconditionally, an "accommodation"? It is beyond preposterous.

And one hardly need ask whether adherents to a religion that objected to interracial marriage or post-divorce remarriage would be similarly "accommodated." Of course they wouldn't. Only anti-gay bigotry ever seems to warrant such "accommodation."

The post facto rationalization that "everything worked itself in the end" is utterly irrelevant. The logistical challenge should never have been entertained in the first place. Anyone fundamentally unwilling to perform the duties of a government job should be fundamentally disqualified from having it. If being a "Christian" is so important to you, then go work as a church janitor; leave taxpayers out of it.

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Elsewhere:

[T]he anti-gay Family Research Council ... in the promotional materials for their annual Values Voters Summit... is running a promo page of pics featuring 24 named speakers. Only problem? Only 10 of these names — ones that mostly make up the lesser-known, more conservative contingent — have actually confirmed that they'll be in attendance[.]

Especially mockworthy is the inclusion of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as "invited" speakers. But if some gullible "values voter" doesn't read the fine print of your deceptive ad and pays you to see speakers whom you know aren't going to accept your "invitation," then it's no big deal, right? That's not a sin, is it? After all, "Thou Shalt Not Dupe Thy Members" isn't (exactly) a Commandment — and certainly not on a par with the truly important ones.

(And we shall of course leave for another day the question of what it says about your psychological profile when you pretend that you, and only you, are a "values voter.")