Prop 8 struck down.

[mercury14]

Taking your argument and turning it around, if same sex marriages are to be allowed then why not polygamy and/or polyandry? After all these are nothing more than alternate combinations of the same principle? How can the state legitimately define one form of marriage, the union of two and only two people regardless of sex, to be legitimate while disallowing all other combinations?

Homosexuality is an innate state of human existence. Polygamy is a behavior - it's a choice. The fact that you think they fall under the same principle exposes your ignorance on the matter.

That being said I'm fine with the idea you floated and just heard a caller on NPR today make the same comment. Conservatives will never support it though. They actually want to oppress other people's rights and have no interest in a system that puts hetero and homosexual marriages on equal footing.

 

[Peregrinator]

Why should I? 1) What does gay marriage offer the nation? 2) What stake in the future do they have? If most people want it, why didn't most people vote for it?

There's the Vetteman post I've been waiting for.

1) Collective thinking and 2) Tyranny of the majority.

Good, solid, conservative principals there.

 

[Peregrinator]

I hope that the SCOTUS does strike down the decision by the ninth. Although my reasons for that hope are a little different.

I would like to see ALL governmental bodies to cease issuance of "Marriage Licenses." I would rather see them require "Partnership Certificates." These 'certificates' would carry with them the same legal requirements and protections normally associated with marriage. The various government bodies have no business being in the marriage business to begin with.

The first instance I could find of Marriage Licenses being issued/required was in certain counties in Nebraska during the Mormon migrations to Utah. They were issued to prevent those pesky Mormons from practicing polygamy. In other words they were issued as a discriminatory practice. The practice of issuance spread for differing reasons in differing jurisdictions, revenue, health, etc. With the increased prevalence of divorce in our society they became more important as a legal tool. In reality they are nothing more than a cheap way of forming a partnership with certain other benefits in the formation and deficits in the dissolution.

Marriage has almost always been a religious sacrament and as such has been the province of the various religions. One of the reasons that marriages were traditionally recorded in the family Bible within the Christian community. Other religions have other means of recording same. And if some church, or other independent entity, wants to issue "Marriage Certificates" upon completion of some ceremony, same sex couples or not, then sobeit.

Rys, when he was still posting (and I hope he's doing well), and I had a protracted discussion on this subject and it all boiled down to the word 'marriage' with both the gay and the straight community. The gays, generally speaking, were not at all receptive to measures such as 'domestic partnership', while the straight community, the religious portion thereof, were not going to surrender the term marriage to the gays. The solution is for the government to get out of the marriage business altogether.

If the gays can find someone to issue them a marriage certificate they can wave it around and the religious can scoff at it. And the government can sit back and say, "we have nothing to do with marriages."

Ishmael

Agreed on all points.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Peregrinator]

Those would be "principles" genius.

You are correct in your assessment of my error. It would have gone better if you had either A) not posted such hypocritical nonsense in the last post or B) employed a comma in its proper position in this one.

 

[unregistered]

 

[richard_daily]

Yes, but then I've never been as good as you when it comes to picking fly shit our of pepper.

lol at veteman's one handed typing while watching gay porn.

 

[Peregrinator]

Yes, but then I've never been as good as you when it comes to picking fly shit our of pepper.

Care to address the substance?

 

[unregistered]

 

[FloridaCouple]

Homosexuality is an innate state of human existence. Polygamy is a behavior - it's a choice. The fact that you think they fall under the same principle exposes your ignorance on the matter.

That being said I'm fine with the idea you floated and just heard a caller on NPR today make the same comment. Conservatives will never support it though. They actually want to oppress other people's rights and have no interest in a system that puts hetero and homosexual marriages on equal footing.

We could also say that humans fall in love with other humans because we know it to be true. Is falling in love innate? Or is it a behavior? If innate, and we know humans have the ability to fall in love with two or more humans concurrently, then should this type of marriage be allowed?

 

[RoryN]

I've made my point to my own satisfaction

Translated: The only validation I have of my existence being meaningful is through self-praise and masturbation.

Psych 101, folks. Lonely, old, dead man walking...

 

[Peregrinator]

I've made my point to my own satisfaction, as I did when the vote of the people of California was overturned by a gay federal judge. We are miles apart, why don't we just appreciate that fact and move on.

You know I don't hold your positions against you, Vette, or at least I hope you do. But I think it's probably a reasonable exercise to compare those positions to each other. You may find that you are not consistent and that may cause you to think about some of them vis-a-vis your p r i n c i p l e s. Seems to me that if the majority votes agin you, you're likely to bemoan it for all manner of reasons. Why not when it happens to vote for you in contrast to one of those principles?

 

[Disgustipated]

You know I don't hold your positions against you, Vette, or at least I hope you do. But I think it's probably a reasonable exercise to compare those positions to each other. You may find that you are not consistent and that may cause you to think about some of them vis-a-vis your p r i n c i p l e s. Seems to me that if the majority votes agin you, you're likely to bemoan it for all manner of reasons. Why not when it happens to vote for you in contrast to one of those principles?

Drunken Pereg post!

 

[Peregrinator]

Drunken Pereg post!

I wish I still drank. This place isn't as much fun sober.

 

[unregistered]

 

[phrodeau]

All that Mormon money going to waste, what a pity. They should have stuck to doing things for charity or building more elaborate temples.

 

[richard_daily]

All that Mormon money going to waste, what a pity. They should have stuck to doing things for charity or building more elaborate temples.

Or more magic underpants.

 

[Wok]

Of all the "leave me alone" rhetoric, somehow, the bedroom seems where government intervention is OK.

 

[SgtSpiderMan]

Nice theory Pereg but I do not think you can think of a single instance where I didn't accept the judgment of the people as the lawful outcome in an election.

If the people of the state of California voted the other way, I might not have liked it, but I would have accepted it as the law. I obey the law.

However, it's a fairly recent development that a federal judge has presumed to overturn a vote of the people. Certainly the founders never contemplated such an outcome. Especially based on a fanciful penumbra in a totally redefined 14th Amendment that now bears no legal relation to it's original intent. You will note that the stay remains in effect and until the Supreme Court rules it isn't the law.

You don't obey laws, you pick & choose. A judge has ruled, under The Constitution that's the law.

You can't vote away someone else's civil rights.

 

[quietman1]

Don't get me wrong, I don't care if gays get to marry. Hell, let them, they're human aren't they?

What bothers me is that the judicial system believes it can override the will of the voters. Wonder when some judge will rule a president for life?

 

[NightL]

Prop. 8 - District 9

http://front.moveon.org/two-lesbians-raised-a-baby-and-this-is-what-they-got/

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

Don't get me wrong, I don't care if gays get to marry. Hell, let them, they're human aren't they?

What bothers me is that the judicial system believes it can override the will of the voters. Wonder when some judge will rule a president for life?

There quite simply is no reason for Prop 8 other than to discriminate against a minority and paint same-sex couples as somehow less than heterosexual couples. It is Jim Crow all over again, just aimed at Gay couples' rights instead of those of African Americans.

From the decision:

"All Proposition 8 accomplished was to take away from same-sex couples the right to be granted marriage licenses and thus legally to use the designation of ‘marriage,’ which symbolizes state legitimation and social recognition of their committed relationships. Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples. The Constitution simply does not allow for “laws of this sort.”


"The People may not employ the initiative power to single out a disfavored group for unequal treatment and strip them, without a legitimate justification, of a right as important as the right to marry."


"That designation [of marriage] is important because ‘marriage’ is the name that society gives to the relationship that matters most between two adults. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but to the couple desiring to enter into a committed lifelong relationship, a marriage by the name of ‘registered domestic partnership’ does not."


"A law that has no practical effect except to strip one group of the right to use a state-authorized and socially meaningful designation is all the more “unprecedented” and “unusual” than a law that imposes broader changes, and raises an even stronger “interference that the disadvantage imposed is born of animosity toward the class of persons affected."

Prop 8 proponents have until feb 28th to file an appeal to the decision with either the 9th circuit court of appeals or the the US Supreme Court.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Just remember, the Catholics got what they wanted when they voted for Obama, a fellow of the Social Justice cause...

You want to redefine marriage?

Great!

Just don't expect the final definition to be the one you approve of.



The answer was no; it [that their drug use was currently considered an illegal act by their own 'democratic' government] didn't bother them. It doesn't really bother anyone who accepts mob rule as a desirable form of social organization. The reason is that democrats never regard existing democracy as their preferred political system — they regard it only as a transitory state to a democratic utopia in which the elected leaders will agree totally with their own values and social-political views. Mises has observed that "the critics of the capitalistic order always seem to believe that the socialistic system of their dreams will do precisely what they think correct." Hence, when people talk about the importance of democracy, it is never democracy as it has ever actually functioned, with the politicians that have actually been elected, and the policies that have actually been implemented. It is always democracy as people imagine it will operate once they succeed in electing "the right people" — by which they mean, people who agree almost completely with their own views, and who are consistent and incorruptible in their implementation of the resulting policies. This is what allows an intelligent group of people to espouse mob rule as a desirable principle, even as they simultaneously commit acts that brand them as criminals worthy of imprisonment under the very social system they maintain.
Ben O'Neill
http://mises.org/daily/5879/Worship-of-the-Mob

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
A House Divided on Marriage
By The Editors
February 7, 2012 4:00 A.M.

It’s not a good sign when a 77-page judicial opinion contains a falsehood in its first sentence. Judge Stephen Reinhardt, the most notorious liberal activist on the oft-overturned Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, begins his opinion for the 2–1 majority in the California same-sex-marriage case, Perry v. Brown, thus: “Prior to November 4, 2008, the California Constitution guaranteed the right to marry to opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples alike.” This is only true in a legal fantasy land in which the California supreme court’s unilateral creation of a right to same-sex marriage is treated as equivalent to the constitution itself.

Following that decision, the people of California went to the polls and passed Proposition 8, putting an end to the judiciary’s lawless 143-day experiment in permitting same-sex couples to marry. Clearly, the majority of Californians did not think the state supreme court interpreted their constitution correctly, which is why they chose to amend it to reverse the court’s decision. But in the ensuing months, the Ninth Circuit would have us believe, that earlier decision took on the same status as the state constitution. This is not a plausible legal theory.

That proposition is nonetheless central to Reinhardt’s strategy. His claim is that the State of California, in Proposition 8, did not merely decline to grant marriage rights to gays and lesbians but stripped them of an accepted right — and did so without any rational basis, inspired only by animus toward them.

This is a textbook example of the “ratchet effect” — for liberals, every change they desire is a blow struck against stultifying tradition while every change they do not desire is dismissed on the grounds that the new status quo is sacrosanct. In the courts, this pattern appears in a predictable on-again, off-again respect for precedent, depending on whether the precedent advances liberal aims.

There is something interesting about Reinhardt’s incrementalism in this ruling. He ignored the broad due-process reasoning of district judge Vaughn Walker in the court below and chose instead to base his ruling on the narrow ground that in a state that permits recognition of same-sex couples’ unions with all the “incidents of marriage,” it is a violation of equal protection to “deprive” them of the powerfully symbolic label of “marriage” itself. Which is to say, the judge finds an alleged animus against homosexuals in the very electorate that has invested them with such generous domestic-partnership rights. Reinhardt offered no opinion on whether a state that has provided no legal recognition of same-sex couples’ relationships would be in violation of the Constitution. Roughly half the states in the Union fit that description.

Reinhardt’s incrementalism is squarely aimed at Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose 1996 opinion for the Court in Romer v. Evans (overturning Colorado’s constitutional reversal of gay-rights antidiscrimination ordinances) is the constant touchstone of Reinhardt’s reasoning.

If the Supreme Court affirms the Ninth Circuit and takes its reasoning seriously, the result will be a house divided — no same-sex marriage wherever there are no same-sex civil unions, and a high risk of judicially invented marriage rights wherever there are such civil unions.

As Lincoln knew, on a fundamental moral question the nation must become all one thing or all the other. Ultimately, the people of the nation, who are the real owners of the Constitution, may have to weigh in on whether the truth about marriage — the union of a man and a woman to make a family — will prevail over the inventions of the judges

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

GUMP

John Marshall did the same with Marbury vs Madison when he ruled that Congress had no Constitutional authority to tamper with the judiciary. In fact the Constitution explicitly authorizes Congress to tinker with the courts and judges. But no one challenged Marshall, and he got away with the ruse.