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<p>LOL Mini, I never thought of it that way! Clearly cause and effect. ;)</p>
<p>And razorsharp, I like your headline. Kind of how the Supreme Court overruled millions of Southerners in Brown v. Board of Education?</p>
<p>xiggi: I don’t understand what you are talking about. I don’t see any parallel between the gay marriage issue and the school choice issue. The school issue is about a government provided benefit (public eductation). If you don’t want that benefit you can pay for a private school. The gay issue is about discrimination. </p>
<p>If you want to draw a parallel to public education, it would be a law that said kids who are left-handed are ineligible for public education. People who think that being left-handed is a personal choice might be OK with this law. People who hate the left-handed would welcome this law and fight to enact it. A good judge would strike down such a law as being unconstitutional. That is what the California supreme court did.</p>
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Sorry, Xiggi - gotta call it like I see it. There’s no rational basis for denying homosexual couples the social and economic stability and legal recognition of mutual rights and responsibilities that heterosexual couples are entitled to simply because they are same-sex couples. All the elaborate ratiocination and carefully muddying of the waters can’t conceal the basis for opposition to the recognition of those simple human rights - and it ain’t pretty. </p>
<p>Instead of calling it what it is should I instead “hate the sin of homophobic bigotry but love the sinning bigots?” Either way, sometimes you have to call a thing by its name to deal with it rationally. Maybe if the haters have to confront their personal demons they will learn something about themselves which will let them free themselves from their inability to perceive other humans as their equals.</p>
<p>Or maybe not. Bigotry is hard to unlearn.</p>
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<p>Mommusic, you obviously did not read my post. Overruling a decision, means nothing. It tells you nothing about judicial actism. Try again.</p>
<p>razorsharp:</p>
<p>I have not commented on gay marriage, pro or con, but on your discussion of the appropriate role of the legislature and of the constitution of each state.</p>
<p>But for what it’s worth, the will of the people allowed anti-miscegenation laws to prevent the Lovings from getting married in 1965; the will of the people prevented women from voting until 1920; the will of the people considered that blacks were worth only a fraction of white people. </p>
<p>Democracy and demagoguery share the same root. Consider as well the phenomenon known as “illilberal democracies” where women can get stoned with the full approval of their community for falling in love with someone not of their group. There, too, the will of the people is at work. But I would not want to live there.</p>
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You are not paying attention to two of my posts in which I specifically indicated that merely because a court overturns a law, it does NOT NOT NOT mean that court engaged in judicial actism. You are confusing apples and oranges. It is not that the will of the people is overtunned, it is HOW it is overturned. </p>
<p>Although the will of the people is not the point I am making, you are forgetting that it was the will of the people that created the Calif and US Constitutions and created the US Bill of Rights. </p>
<p>If a Court overturns a referendum and there is no Constitutional basis to overrturn that referendum, then the Court has engaged in judical activism. That is what the Calif Court did. In the Lovings case, the US Supreme Court applied the will of the people in the form of the US Constitution and it was correctly decided.</p>
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<p>Just shows that republicans can be for liberty – not that many on cc would agree. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>“I could care less whether there is gay marriage. I care that laws are enacted by the will of the people instead of by judical fiat.”</p>
<p>So, if the will of the people is that we re-institute slavery, you’d be OK with it?</p>
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You are saying you would lead a proposal to amend the constitution to permit slavery? Have fun. I won’t be joining you.</p>
<p>I thought that the will of the people is the point you’ve been making, since you claim that you are not discussing gay marriage. </p>
<p>So, in your opinion, what is the role of the judiciary? of a constitution?</p>
<p>Legalisms aside (as difficult as it may be for me, as a lawyer, to put them aside!), and whether or not this decision ultimately remains the law in California, the fact remains that nobody will ever convince me that there’s any morality or justice in a system under which my sweet, wonderful son, who happens to be gay because God (if there is one) made him that way, will not be able to get married to someone he falls in love with, and wants to spend his life with, if he should be lucky enough to find that person someday. While all the kids he grew up with who happen to be straight – the girl who sits to his right at school, the boy who lives down the block, the daughter of a close family friend who was his playmate when he was a toddler – will have that right, unquestioningly. It isn’t right. Period. And nobody will ever convince me that bigotry isn’t the reason. The same way that bigotry lay behind the bans on interracial marriage that ended not so very long ago; the same way it lay behind the fact that once upon a time it was impossible for a Jew to marry a Christian. </p>
<p>And I believe in my heart that with every new generation, anti-gay bigotry decreases. And that in a few generations, opposition to same-sex marriage will seem as shameful to most people as opposition to interracial marriage – which itself was once justified by resort to the Bible – does now.</p>
<p>Donna</p>
<p>“So you are saying you would lead a proposal to amend the constitution to permit slavery? Have fun. I won’t be joining you.”</p>
<p>Nah, I wouldn’t do that. And I’m not saying you would either. But if there happened to be a groundswell movement in that direction, you might support it as the “will” of the people. Eh?</p>
<p>Donna: I agree, anti-gay bigotry is decreasing with every generation and will be eventually be seen for what it is- bigotry.</p>
<p>I think eventually we will have a round of constitutional amendments to undo the anti-gay amendments that have been won in several states.</p>
<p>Well written, DonnaL, and I agree with you.</p>
<p>Hmmm. Interesting. I just finished reading a description of the opinion from my local legal newspaper (no, I didn’t read the entire 120 page opinion itself) and it seems to indicate that the Court’s decision was based heavily on the fact that in California we already have Civil Unions which carry, for all practical purposes, all of the same set of rights and responsibilities as marriage.</p>
<p>Which gives rise to the question: why are only one type of those “unions” called “marriage” and the other, not? Is not the purpose simply to signal that homosexuals are second-class citizens? Does that not violate our state guarantee of equal protection? </p>
<p>In other words, Razorsharp, the Supreme Court didn’t change anything about our state constitution or whether or not its drafters had gay marriage in mind or not. What changed was the will of the people accepting the fact that homosexual unions were in fact entitled to be treated the same as heterosexual ones and enacting laws which did so. The vestigial desire to brand those unions as being of lesser value by refusing to call them by the same name fails to satisfy the basic test of equal protection. (There’s a lot more, but that’s the gist of it.) Hard to argue with that.</p>
<p>Here’s a quote from the start of the case which lays it out:
So, Razorsharp, what’ya say? “Activists”?</p>
<p>"Yup. It was that darn Christianity that totally sapped the strength of the empire. </p>
<p>LOL Mini, I never thought of it that way! Clearly cause and effect."</p>
<p>Actually, there is very large scholarly literature to that effect. In the first Council of Niceae, held under Constantine, rather than affirming the Empire, the bishops preferred to affirm the unanimous view of 300 years of Christian history, calling all Christian soldiers “dogs who eat their own vomit”. (Canon 15). Christian practice condemned all violence, and explicitly, violence in self-defense, and defense of women and children (Tertullian, Origen, it was the unanimous view.) Under the Second Council, and under pressure from Constantine, Christianity became part of the Empire, beginning the downward spiral of (in my opinion) both, from which neither has ever recovered.</p>
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<p>That is because, as most everyone else, you choose to see discrimination where it contradicts your individual beliefs and values. We all find the causes we support more important than the ones that do not affect us.</p>
<p>As far as bigotry, there seems plenty of it going around in this thread, especially when hidden behind feeble attempts at humor.</p>
<p>So xiggi, since you responded to the first paragraph of my post, can you please respond to the second paragraph? Would you be OK to exclude left-handed individuals from certain government benefits because they were left-handed?</p>
<p>So what would you prefer- allow gay marriage AND allow school choice, deny both, or deny one but not the other?</p>
<p>Ah yes, the demand that intolerance be tolerated, and the accusations of bigotry against those who don’t. </p>
<p>Although perhaps put a bit extremely, I’ve always kind of liked what Karl Popper had to say:</p>
<p>Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.</p>
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Wow, what’s it like to live in a state where you believe that 60% of your fellow citizens are haters? Must be tough.</p>