Maggie Gallagher: Justice Kennedy declared a 'fatwa against us'

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07/03/2013

by Jeremy Hooper

Probably the most famous fatwa in recent history is the one where the Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for Salman Rushdie's death. However, if National Organization For Marriage co-founder Maggie Gallagher has her way and her loose rhetoric takes hold, it will be Justice Anthony Kennedy (a Ronald Reagan appointee) who earns cultural distinction for having to defend himself against charges of faith-driven bloodlust:

[National Review's' KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Are last week’s rulings on marriage as monumental, with the staying power, of Roe v. Wade?

MAGGIE GALLAGHER: What you are really asking is: Will we concede the legitimacy of Kennedy’s fatwa against us, or will we respond with a sustained opposition — legal, political, cultural, and of the moral imagination?

I don’t believe in inevitability, I believe in human freedom and our power to shape the future. So it depends on us. But certainly I believe, as I wrote in the Los Angeles Times, that the questions raised by marriage — deeply rooted in our conception of who we are as men and women, the meaning of sexuality and gender — cannot be put to rest by the power of five lawyers on however high a court.

The cultural struggle I predicted in “Banned in Boston” is clearly playing out. Will they succeed in persuading us to accept the second-class status Kennedy lays out for us?

Not me, what about you?
FULL INTERVIEW: The Roe of Marriage [NRO]