Their Land

This Land Is Your Land

This Land Is My Land

Folks have gotten the strangest ideas about what to use a constitution for. To control fishnets? To control classroom size? To require a bullet train? To say who other people can marry? Florida’s constitution has the amendment that rules out gay marriage, as do many other states, including North Carolina passed one just this week. It seems odd, unkind and somehow unAmerican, yep unChristian, to want to tell other people that they have to be like us, but that’s the way people are. The twenty-first century panic to ban same-sex marriage must be a knee-jerk reaction of fear, fear of changes in the culture and in cultural attitudes. Constitutions once were instruments for setting up a government and ensuring people’s rights under that government. Now they’re a vehicle for minding other people’s business.

In Florida’s constitution, I like this provision of Article I: Section 23. Right of privacy.—Every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into the person’s private life ...

But

“Inasmuch as marriage is the legal union of one man and one woman as husband and wife, no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized.”

Folks who draft resolutions and think up constitutional amendments love “Inasmuch.” It’s self-validating and smugly assuring. So are its synonyms “insofar” and “to the extent.”

Like them, it’s also self-invalidating. If assumptions and cultural norms shift and polygamy becomes the norm, as it was for Jacob and David and Solomon, and is today in some cultures round the world, and was in Utah for a time, and may become from California to the New York Island as the cultural mix shifts and the electorate with it, “inasmuch” will invalidate whatever it was assumed to assure. Like religious orthodoxy and heresy, inasmuch is majority defined and dominated. Inasmuch dignifies bullying.

What will the busybodies do when they wake up as the new minority without their inasmuch? Hopefully, they’ll find something more world-shaking to obsess about than who other people love and marry. Classroom size maybe, or fishnets. Or bullet trains. One thing’s fer sure, one thing’s fer dang sure: they’ll be demanding their rights.

This Land Is Their Land Too.