You are completely ignoring the substantive points of his posts and you appear to have no understanding at all of the different roles upper houses play in different forms of representative democracies.
The result is that what you think are telling points are irrelevant in the specific context of the British political system where the upper house is not a distinct legislative body but one subject to the will of the elected House of Commons which at the moment is the sole repository of electoral legitimacy.
We are a parliamentary system that is explicitly not built as a system of checks and balances designed to keep a seperately elected and independent Executive in check.
That is the role of the House of Commons.
All the house of Lords can do is scrutinise and propose amendments to legislation put to it by The Commons. It cannot block finance bills or bills related to the manifesto of the government.
Even if it refuses to pass a bill it can, has been and will be over-ridden by the Commons. In practice it rarely ever comes to this as The Lords is aware of its role and the consequences that would follow. The least of which would be the thwarted government appointing however many hundreds of new peers out of thin air it needed to get its way.
I prefer our system to the US one one where politicians on a permanent election footing pander to rich and powerful special interests.
It can, just as our own Supreme Court can, require changes in a law to comply with its rulings in its specific field. The enforcement of the decision lies with European Ministers.
It hasn’t the same wide-ranging power and remit as the US Supreme Court though.
It isn’t though. They’re subject to the laws of the country and there is marginal, unenforceable (without a means of recall) party discipline for peers that are not independent.
I was never under the misapprehension that both chambers could propose bills. I just don’t think an unelected chamber should have power of scrutiny over bills. The fact that they cannot propose legislation is essentially insubstantial. Arguing that they do not “rule” just divorced them even further from the democratic process.
The Supreme Court does not really have legislative power. They have the power of judicial oversight, determining whether specific acts (and their implications or methods through which they are enacted) are in concordance with the Constitution based on test cases. They don’t convene to discuss acts independent of such cases, nor do they communicate explicitly with the legislature. I’ve discussed issues with their appointment in another thread.
Compare that to the UK, where there is no entrenched Constitution to refer to and the upper echelons of the judiciary sat in the House of Lords until reforms introduced by the previous government.
I accept this as a fair criticism of the OP - it’s a bit unfair to compare London to the entire US; London/NYC is more comparable, and I am unaware of any NY mayors taking a strong anti-gay stance (although Giuliani was a fruitcake in other ways). In fact ISTR Ed Koch being presumed gay, although a quick peek at his Wiki (oo er) reveals that his standard response to questions about his sexuality is
On the other hand, as has already been pointed out, Conservative PM David Cameron is also currently in the pro-SSM boat and while I’m sure there are local and national politicians of various stripes who are anti-gay to differing degrees (and certainly the bishops in the Lords are fairly grumpy about it) it is definitely not a huge political issue here.
You’re not allowed to accuse other people of trolling in this forum, and you made a couple of other inappropriate personal comments as well. Don’t do it again. And both of you should take this British parliamentary discussion to another thread. I let it go for a while here, but it’s a distraction and I don’t want to see it clog this thread up any further.
I agree with the underlying point of the OP, which I take to be “Britain is nicer to its gay people.” I just think that the answer to the question the OP actually poses- “can you imagine a Republican doing this?”- is yes.
I agree with this although it’s becoming less common in most areas. However, as another counterexample, some of the major congressional proponents of SSM in New York State were Republicans. Now there may be many reasons for them to do this other than idealism, and Republicans in NYS are sort of like Democrats in Texas before they went completely red*, but it is another counterexample to the thesis.
*Witness the spectacular downfall of more than one Teahadist in NYS in the 2010 election.
Are Repub’s in New York for SSM or for a SSM ballot measure? At least California has put it to the voters rather than deem it so by the courts. (or court jesters)
Same-sex marriage became legal here about a year ago as the result of a change in the law. Some Republicans in the state legislature did support it, and the measure would have failed in the assembly if they hadn’t.
Hey, you were offered “cake or death”. It’s not the UK’s fault Americans went for the other option.
I’m fairly sure that Boris doesn’t have the power to ban this sort of thing from all venues inside the M25, but TfL and the Mayor’s office do have responsibility for public transport and this was bus-side advertising. Free speech doesn’t mean a guaranteed platform to speak from, no matter what country you’re in.
We may not have a bill of rights but the restrictions on free speech in the UK (libel, obscenity, national security, shouting fire in a theatre etc) are little different in practice to the US.
The only real practical difference is that we have explicit rules on hate speech.
And as I said upthread, while I can imagine ads like this running in the US, if you were to invert it to “we will turn you gay” I’m sure it would not be permitted on whatever grounds (e.g. obscenity).
