Matthew J. Franck, a conservative religious scholar and scruffy understudy for Beaker the Muppet, has written not one but two posts for the National Review explaining how the Supreme Court's deferral on same-sex marriage is just like an infamous 1857 pro-slavery decision, because you just don't get it.

Franck—who hangs out at all the hot clubs for conservative older white men, like Heritage, Heartland, and the kinky-sounding Witherspoon Institute—was down in the dumps Monday, after the high court declined to review any downstate rulings that had overturned bans on same-sex marriage. The upshot: SCOTUS was, for now at least, deferring to an emerging consensus in the several states that there's no legal or ethical basis to deny marriage benefits to all spousal partners, regardless of sexual orientation.

What an affront to liberty, says Franck! An affront that conservative Republicans must smack down:

The GOP was founded as a party standing for human liberty, the sanctity of the family, and a free self-governing people. As we re-enact a slow-motion Dred Scott for the twenty-first century, it remains to be seen whether any political party in America will continue to stand for those principles.

Astute readers will recall that 1857's Dred Scott v. Sanford, widely considered the worst Supreme Court decision in history, declared that blacks in America were "beings of an inferior order" who could never be U.S. citizens, and the federal government had no power to ban slavery in the states, lest it infringe on a slaveowner's constitutional property rights.

What Franck is saying is that the 2014 SCOTUS essentially letting gay marriage stand in lower court rulings is just as much a miscarriage of justice as the 1857 SCOTUS declaring much of America's population to be permanent chattel.

Some people— libruls, mostly—were a little skeptical about that comparison. So Franck clarified what he meant by writing the exact same thing again, only with more words. He listed six reasons that "the judicial imposition of same-sex marriage" is "a comprehensive threat to republican government" as Dred Scott. But really, only one of his reasons is truly instructive here:

Like Dred Scott, decisions for same-sex marriage rely on a false anthropology that drives a political decision made by judges. In Dred Scott it was the false idea that some human beings can own other human beings, and that a democratic people cannot say otherwise. In the same-sex marriage rulings it is the false idea that men can marry men, and women can marry women, and that democratic peoples cannot say otherwise.

The result, says Franck, is undemocratic tyranny, because he believes that "the freedom to live in a country where slavery [is] minimized" is exactly the same as "the freedom to live, work, and learn in communities, schools, universities, and other organizations in which people can live the truth about marriage."

Which totally works, if you believe that having to live in a world where two men can exchange marital vows is exactly like having to live in a world where black people are owned, tortured, and bred from life to death for maximum profit by wealthy white gentry.

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