Judge Vaughn Walker's Prop 8 Decision Heralds New Age of Rationality

Judge Vaughn Walker sent shock waves through the United States yesterday by ruling that California's Proposition 8, a prohibition on same-sex marriage, violates the U.S. Constitution.

"Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians," he wrote, "and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional."

The nation, and in fact the world, has been buzzing ever since: the right has decried this "activist judge's" actions, while more progressive citizens celebrated the erosion of tenacious, discriminatory policies.

The Walker ruling will be felt for years to come, thanks to the appeals process that will likely land the case at the Supreme Court. The unconstitutional clause of this argument, though important, should hardly be the only lesson we receive from the decision, for Judge Walker's ruling heralded in an entirely new, entirely progressive "Age of Rationality."

Man relies on reason and rationality to make sense of this wild world. We categorize, break down and organize everything we encounter, whether they be man, beast or otherwise. It's the "man" breakdown with which I'm primarily concerned. Thanks to the likes of T, René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza and the such, Europeans became obsessed with identifying and ranking every aspect of society. A chain reaction had begun ...

It wasn't long before we stumbled into the Age of Enlightenment, an era in which man's inalienable rights were held above all else, and monarchies were crushed under revolutionary liberation struggles. Enter: The United States of America and its many imitators. Still, the evolution was not complete.

As industrialization began and then raged on, so too did the obsessive division of everything in sight, including, again, man. The idea of "normal" became readily disseminated, and human beings found themselves broken into various groups: black, white, rich, poor and, yes, homosexual and heterosexual. We all know who won that final battle: LGBT people were marginalized, oppressed and ostracized, all in the name of "science" and rationality.

There are more straight people, so, "rationally speaking," they must be normal. Such misguided thinking has dominated nearly every Western society ever since, and gay people have paid the price. Judge Walker's decision totally demolishes this old school of thought.

"Excluding same-sex couples from marriage is simply not rationally related to legitimate state interest," asserted Walker in his decision yesterday. And, in a direct strike to social conservative arguments on the "sanctity of marriage," Walker ruled, "tradition alone, however, cannot form a rational basis for a law." The old paradigm of rationalized, "reasonable" sexual norms was thus struck down, replaced by a new order, for now, that emphasized our historic "rationales" flaws.

To bolster his point, Walker contended, "The evidence shows that the tradition of restricting an individual's choice of spouse based on gender does not rationally further a state interest despite its 'ancient lineage." Times have changed, he's saying, and American law needs to keep up.

There's no way Walker's decision won't be debated and discussed for years, perhaps even generations, to come. He totally reoriented previously entrenched ideas about "rational" sexuality and gender identities and placed them in a new context, a more relevant context.

Walker's Proposition 8 reading totally revolutionized the nation's idea of "rational reason," and now there's no turning back. Not that a reasonable nation would want to in the first place, right?

Photo credit: DoNotLick's Flickr