California is a strange, strange place:
It was like being at a klan rally except the klansmen were wearing Abercrombie polos and Birkenstocks.
This is backlash for the defeat of Proposition 8 in California, which banned gay marriage. Blacks and Latinos voted heavily for the proposition. It’s apparently been quite a wake up call for a lot of the gay community that Blacks and Latinos are, in fact, quite socially conservative.
As I’ve told my gay friends, there’s a huge generation gap on the gay marriage issue. In a generation, it will be possible to pass gay marriage through legislatures. Right now gay marriage is 0 for 30. This has largely been a backlash against the attempt to accomplish this through judicial fiat, which is difficult to sustain when the population is overwhelmingly against your proposal.
I am not threatened by or opposed to the state recognizing marriage between same sex couples, but I think it needs to be accomplished legislatively, when society is prepared to have that debate. Right now they are not.
The backlash is also a reflection of people’s reaction to Gay Pride. I’m quite comfortable with Gay Rights, and simultaneously quite turned off by Gay Pride events. A little adult supervision here will go a long, long way.
“We’re just like everyone else” is a little hard to square with what you see at Castro Street parades. If that’s their thing, then whatever. But pick one of the two.
Better yet, the government could simply get the hell out of the marriage business – a place where it had no business being to begin with. But that has even less of a chance of happening than state-recognized unions between homosexuals.
None of my liberal friends can believe that blacks and hispanics are overwhelmingly socially conservative and especially homophobic.
I can count on one hand the number of openly gay black men I’ve met in the past decade. I don’t really keep a running tally, but it’s pretty rare. As I understand it, openly gay blacks meet with pretty intense hostility from within the black community. It’s been a real problem for HIV education apparently.
This is even funnier than watching the libertarian and church lady wings of the republican party fight each other.
>I am not threatened by or opposed to the state recognizing
>marriage between same sex couples, but I think it needs to
>be accomplished legislatively,
You mean like when the California state legislature voted on two seperate occasions to legalize gay marriage?
>when society is prepared to have that debate. Right now
>they are not.
So you think Heller was wrongly decided, since the Supreme Court didn’t decide to wait until DC was ready to have a debate on the right to keep and bear arms?
When your rights are being infringed, you should not have to wait until other people are ‘ready’ to recognize them.
It was like being at a klan rally except the klansmen were wearing Abercrombie polos and Birkenstocks.
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I’m pretty sure that the Klan guys aren’t *bone smokers* too, that would be a HUGE difference…
“his is backlash for the defeat of Proposition 8 in California,”
Defeat? I think you meant “passage of Proposition 8”.
Marriage is an institution many centuries old, and worth protecting as the foundation of our society. Gays started out saying to stay out of their bedroom, and what they did in privacy was their own business. Now that Sodomy is no longer illegal, they want to shape our culture into their liking. Keep it in your bedroom.
I agree that it’s worth protecting, I just don’t agree that letting gays enjoy the legal benefits of marriage really threatens marriage at all. We’re not talking about forcing it on churches.
Actually you are talking about forcing it on churches, just not real loudly yet. cf. abortion demands in catholic run hospitals; adoption demands against catholic run adoption agencies.
I don’t agree with forcing abortions on catholic hospitals.
“So you think Heller was wrongly decided, since the Supreme Court didn’t decide to wait until DC was ready to have a debate on the right to keep and bear arms?”
Note that the ban was in 1976 and Heller was in 2008. We DID wait.
“When your rights are being infringed, you should not have to wait until other people are ‘ready’ to recognize them.”
It’s not right, it’s not fair, but it is the way life works. Read the Amendments after the Bill of Rights, especially #14 and #19.
BTW; you just proved Sebastian’s point….
Stormy:
If anyone has a right to marry whomever one wants, then there’s no legal basis for prohibiting polygamy, marriage between siblings, or any number of marital arrangements that are unacceptable to very large numbers of people. To some degree, this a hazard of the state being in the business of recognizing marriage, but I think in this instance you have to go with the common law understanding of marriage unless the legislature dictates otherwise. In common law, marriage is between a man and a woman. Regardless of what I think the legislature should do, and I think they should confer the benefits of marriage on same sex couples, I think the judiciary needs to be very wary of overturning centuries of common law for the political cause du jour.
I should note that the Achilles heel of this argument means that the state would appear to be free to dictate that couples of different races or religions should be unable to marry, equal protection under the law be damned. I actually think in the case of mixed race couples, you have a pretty powerful equal protection argument, since our legal tradition accepts discrimination between the sexes, to a large degree.
In marriage, I don’t think the question is whether it’s a right. I do think for religious purposes, you have a right to marry, but there is no right to have that recognized by the state. Recognized marriage is a privilege, I think pretty clearly. But to what extent does that obligate the state to not discriminate on the basis or race, or, say relation? Are there freedom of religion issues if the state chooses to recognize, say, catholic marriages but not protestant ones?
It’s a very complex issue, and I don’t think there’s a good answer, but I think in situations like that, judges shouldn’t pretend to have any particular moral insight, and should defer to the legislature.