Same-Sex Marriage, Confederate Flags, and Women's Soccer

No no no, I'm not going to try to thread all of these disparate things together.  That would be impossible.  It's just that a lot has been going on recently and to stay silent on any of them just doesn't seem fitting.  My opinions are certainly worth very little, and reflect the rather muddled and confused way I view the world as I go through life with a series of "well....."s and "on the other hand"s.  But I can't let such momentous events go by and say nothing at all.  So....

Same Sex Marriage

Hooray!  Same Sex Marriage is now a legal right in all states throughout the land.  My own views on homosexuality and same sex marriage have tended to evolve with the rest of the nation's over my lifetime, and in the end with a classic gaelic shrug of indifference I say that Love is Love is Love.  Marriage is an important part of a persons's life and our society and to deny people the right to marry based on sexual orientation, which is not a choice or a sin but an unchangeable expression of one's self,  is wrong.  That is what I believe.

When I saw the news on CNN I felt like dancing a little jig, but I didn't because there are plenty of people I work with who feel the opposite and to do so would invite argument. So I let them alone and mentally ran across the fields of justice, sliding into the corner flag, arms raised in triumph, as if I actually did something to forward the cause of human kind when in reality I was the most passive of observers.

Happy People

I actually went through the trouble to thumb through the court's opinion on my I-phone.  I haven't read a Supreme Court decision since I was in high school, and this is certainly the first I have read of my own free will.  The historical import of the document compelled me to do so this time.  There are excerpts of the majority opinion that beautifully express the importance of marriage as an institution, and if I were to get married again I would even consider having some of those thoughts read aloud at the service rather than troll out the usual "Love is this and Love is that" sort of thing from one of Paul's letters that is so popular.

But then on the other hand I also read the dissent by Chief Justice Roberts and I got to say....maybe he has a point.  His argument, I think, is that the due process clause guarantees certain rights but does not allow the court to create new ones.  In re-defining marriage as, effectively, a legally recognized bond between two persons rather than between a man a woman, which has long been the accepted definition of marriage by our society, Roberts believes that the court has overstepped it's bounds.  He goes out of is way to say that he has no objection to same-sex marriage on moral or philosophical grounds...but the court is not the moral consciousness of the people, and constitutionally he feels that the majority opinion is not valid.  Roberts would rather the individual states and the People had been allowed to continue the democratic process which, in his opinion, was working as it should have.

While I am of course happy about the outcome of the decision, I can't wonder if maybe Roberts is right.  Of course if we continued to let the states decide Virginia probably wouldn't have legalized same sex marriage for a hundred years.  I guarantee we'd be the last state to do so.

And while we are on that subject....

The Confederate Flag

The tragic shooting at Emanuel AME Church a week and a half ago has swung the "Heritage not Hate" debate fully towards "Hate" and as we speak this symbol of southern defiance is being expunged from the market place, state flags, and maybe even from the South Carolina state capitol grounds.

I've wanted to address this subject ever since, but couldn't find the words.  I know that slavery was the cause of the Civil War.  Even Bud Robertson, one of the most Confederate-centric Civil War scholars I know, told us that on the very first day of his class.  "Slavery," he said simply, "was the cause of this war".

But when you grow up in the South and you have a father who reads about the Civil War as a hobby for half the year, it is very difficult not to have some admiration for the men who fought for the Confederacy and those who led them.  One of my fondest memories is riding up I-81 with my dad to some place or another, some band event or track meet or scouting function, and my dad pointed at a gap in the ridges running parallel to our right and he said "Stonewall Jackson marched his men right through that ridge", and we'd remember for a second what a great solider, what a great military leader he was.  Neither of us revere the South or "The Cause", but any student of military history cannot but be impressed by Jackson's Shenandoah Campaign.

Growing up in Southern Virginia there were plenty of confederate flags around, plenty of people with t-shirts stretched over their beer-bellies proclaiming that "The South will Rise Again", which I've always felt was the dumbest of sentiments.  I've also seen a number of people running around with both the American flag and the Confederate flag proudly flying from their pick-up trucks or plastered onto the back of their Cameros seemingly in a great nose-thumbing fart to our federal government, and expression that strikes me as odd. Those two symbols are like oil and water, pork rinds and diet soda, the Kardashian sisters and a reasoned discussion on David Hume's "Treatise on Human Nature".  They simply don't go together.

Maybe we would have been better off without them....

If the rebellious sentiment is non-existant for me there is still this nagging respect for the butternut clothed Confederate soldier, even though the cause he fought for was so odious.  I've often tried to compromise by telling myself that while Slavery started the war the normal confederate soldier was defending his home from invasion, as anyone else would do, fighting for his family and friends or simply because he was bored with life at home and wanted to give soldiering a chance.  Slavery was perhaps the furthest thing from the average soldiers mind.

Maybe that's fair, and maybe it isn't.  I'm probably lying to myself.  But it's hard to let go of that.  No government should be flying confederate flags on their grounds, no state flag should incorporate what is to many a symbol of hatred, but I do worry about how far this will go.  Are we really going to rename streets currently graced by the names of Confederate generals?  Are we going to have to take down all those monuments to the Confederate war dead that feature in so many southern towns?  Are we going to let political correctness - however correct that may be in this case- significantly alter what is to many their heritage?  Or can we somehow hold an honesty about the Civil War in tension with some respect for the men on both sides who fought in it?

Holding different ideas in tensions is hard, it takes a certain level of maturity to do so, and I wonder if we have lost that ability due to a hypersensitivity over offending anyone, that greatest of sins in the media age.

Women's Soccer

After all that, all I can say is thank god for sports.

I've been watching the US team's matches and handful of other games.  Congratulations to the US National Team in their 1-0 victory over China.  The US has looked shaky this world cup but their performance last night was, in my opinion, markedly better.  I wonder if they are actually better without Rapione, being willing to explore other options in attack....it would be a ballsy move to leave her out of the side that will play against Germany, but the manager has shown a willingness to make the tough personnel decisions before.  Of course, that supposes that leaving Rapinoe out is the right thing to do, and I am not so sure it is.  I don't think there is any real cause and effect between Rapinoe's absence and the pressure and flow that the US showed yesterday.  It might be a function of a Chinese team that is a little weaker than we'd like to think, or maybe the US has finally gotten it's act together.  Germany, as always, will be a tough test.

All due respect to the USA, the game to watch yesterday, the best match of the cup so far, was the 1-1 classic played out between France and Germany last night.

The French, whose red socks that harkened back to the red pants worn by the French infantry at the outset of the First World War (pants that may have been emblematic of French elan but provided an easy target for German infantry), looked to be the better side, darting down the flanks and attacking with great speed.  But the German defense was organized enough to withstand an endless barrage of crosses into the box and they were able to tie the game off a penalty kick late in the second half.  The two sides struggled with each other through extra time and the game was decided on penalty kicks.  France lost on the last kick when Claire Lavogez took a poor penalty;  the German keeper for once guessed correctly and the shot wasn't good enough to beat her.

Lavogez had come on as a sub and played really well.  In the second period of extra time she fought down the German wing and put a perfect ball into the box - Thiney had a virtually open goal mere yards away and she put the ball wide left of the goal.

So it was a shame that kick that lost the game had to come from her.  As she melted down on the field, at one point biting a teammates jersey in a futile effort to hold back tears, it was hard not to shed a few tears of ones one.

Strange that that, out of all things over the past few weeks, would elicit the most emotion from me.  Such is the crossed wiring of my soul; such is the glory of sport.