Cerabino: Sometimes it's hard to tell the Facebook ranter from the Supreme Court justice
I usually don't respond to the nonsense that finds its way to me on social media.
For example, the other day I got what turned out to be a viral Facebook post that began this way:
"YOU KNOW FOLKS, I never cared that you were gay until you started shoving it down my throat."
I was tempted to respond because I had just celebrated my 40th wedding anniversary, and my breathing passages have yet to be affected by the gays.
My wife and I have lived among various gay couples in our neighborhood, I have had friends who are gay, and during one visit to New York City I was a spectator at the annual Gay Pride parade.
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In all these experiences, I saw gay people not as different, but as very much the same as everybody else. All people at their core are just trying to pursue that measure of happiness that is allegedly part of America's DNA.
Like the lyrics in the jazz standard Nature Boy says, "The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love, and be loved in return."
To insist that this pursuit of love makes an unaffected voyeur's life somehow lessened is just small-minded.
So, days after getting that Facebook post, I was heartened to read an op-ed piece by Palm Beacher Nancy Brinker published in The Palm Beach Post.
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Brinker, a former U.S. ambassador who was selected by George W. Bush and later given the Presidential Medal of Honor by President Barack Obama for her breast cancer research role, is part of a diminishing breed of enlightened conservatives.
Brinker was one of the first Republicans to publicly argue against the Clinton-era Defense of Marriage Act, which was overturned in the landmark gay-marriage case, Obergefell v. Hodges, decided by a 5-4 vote in the U.S. Supreme Court five years ago.
In her op-ed, which was to decry the barbaric practice of gay conversion therapy on adolescents, Brinker argued that gay rights, especially gay marriage, align with conservative values.
"Contrary to the opinions of dwindling holdouts, it's not difficult to connect the freedom to marry with conservative philosophy," Brinker wrote. "Stronger, more loving and stable families, regardless of gender, equate to less reliance on, and demand for, services of the state.
"It also means that government does not stand in the way of individual rights and freedoms — after all, what's more personal than the freedom to express your love with a partner?"
I wish Brinker was right. That it's just some "dwindling holdouts" who are still trying to make gay people accept second-class citizenship.
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But it's Brinker who seems to be the conservative holdout.
Consider this: While Brinker was making her argument that conservatives ought to embrace gay marriage as ideologically compatible with their world view, one of the nation's most influential conservatives — one with an actual vote in the matter — was making the opposite point.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was the keynote speaker last month at the annual convention of The Federalist Society.
The Federalist Society was started at Yale University by law professor Robert Bork in 1982. Bork and fellow professor Antonin Scalia had crafted a narrow view of Constitutional law known as "originalism," which served as the scaffolding to justify a wholesale attack on Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies and the social justice rulings of the Warren court.
The Federalist Society started as a fringe movement made up of what conservatives would now call "coastal elites." Bork would later have his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court rejected due to, in part, his position against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The Federalist Society's anti-government philosophy was bankrolled by libertarian-leaning business tycoons, such as the John M. Olin Foundation, funded through munitions and chemical manufacturing businesses, and the energy conglomerate Koch Industries.
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And it has flourished, going from the fringe to the center of conservative thought. So much so, that membership in The Federalist Society is practically the only real requirement for judges to get appointments under Republican governors and presidents.
Alito is one of six members of the U.S. Supreme Court who are Federalist Society acolytes.
And in his remarks last month to this friendly audience, he disparaged the 2015 landmark gay-marriage ruling of the Supreme Court, saying that his dissent was proving to be well-founded.
Alito started off by referring to comedian George Carlin's "seven dirty words" routine, which became a First Amendment case decided by the Supreme Court in 1978.
Alito told his Federalist Society audience that Carlin's dirty words are accepted now, but there's a new list of dirty words.
"You can't say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman," Alito lamented. "Until very recently, that's what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now it's considered bigotry."
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He went on to say that he and the other three Supreme Court dissenters were right in that case, and that granting homosexuals the right to marry has had a significant effect on the First Amendment rights of straight people.
"Yes, the opinion of the court included words meant to calm the furors of those who cling to traditional views on marriage. But I could see, and so did the other justices in dissent, where the decision would lead," Alito said.
"I wrote the following: 'I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers and schools.' That is just what is coming to pass.
"One of the great challenges for the Supreme Court going forward will be to protect freedom of speech. Although that freedom is falling out of favor in some circles we need to do whatever we can to prevent it from becoming a second-tier constitutional right."
This is stunning in its regressive logic.
Alito might as well said, "OK, if we allow black people to sit in the front of the bus, think of how traumatic this will be to white people."
"Letting blacks sit anywhere on the bus just exposes objecting white people to ridicule, or maybe makes them refrain from speaking up just because some uppity black people want to shove their civil rights down everybody's throats.
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"When it comes to black civil rights, we need to look out for the First Amendment rights of white people. After all, until very recently it was the custom to call black people n------, and to make them sit in the back of the bus or lynch them from time to time to keep them in their place. And now because of some 'political correctness' we have to put up with criticism when we complain about blacks having the same rights as we have.
"Well, that's just making my God-given racism a second-tier Constitutional right!"
It would be astonishing if Alito had said those words about black civil rights. But it's no less astonishing to hear the words he actually spoke about the civil rights of gay people — another class of Americans who have suffered a different kind of second-class citizenship.
It's a sad day when a Supreme Court justice says that the civil rights of one group must be tempered due to free-speech concerns for another group of people who have no respect or appreciation for those civil rights.
And as commentary on gay marriage goes, it's on the same level as that twisted Facebook post I got. Except that the Facebook poster doesn't have a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land.
fcerabino@gannett.com
@FranklyFlorida