From Jim Aune, Andrew Koppelman’s reading of the judicial opinion in California making same-sex marriages legal. I don’t quite get all of the legalese (esp. in regards to substantive due process), but I found the read pretty interesting. Koppelman pretty much argues that the California Supreme Court made the right decision, but for mostly the wrong reasons.
But I’m not exactly for gay marriage — in that I don’t think the goals of queer folk should be to enter institutions that are historically and currently screwed up. This isn’t meant as an affront to anyone’s that married, but rather to the institution itself. Why does the state determine a legitimate family? Why are health care and other benefits loaded in favor of those families legitimized by the state? Why do the family apparatus and the state have to be so intricately linked? In Habermasian terms, why is the state encroaching so much on our lifeworld? And why do queers keep battling for this intrusion? Why look for legitimization from the very structure that also, through its various ideological state apparatuses, demeans and destroys queerness?
I’ll try to go more into this when I have more time and energy.
