Gun control is the only one I can think of, and only where states (and cities) are more restrictive. But that has to do with a different issue, which is what conservatives consider are the rights properly under the protection of the federal government, because they are enumerated in the Constitution. Vs. what liberals consider are those rights, which should be under the protection of the government because liberals want them and can’t muster enough support to amend the Constitution.
That’s a very conservative friendly interpretation. Here’s mine: liberals want the people to decide, by literally being able to decide for themselves whether or not to have an abortion or be in a same sex marriage. In this case, the liberal position gives far more control and freedom to the people than the conservative position.
It doesn’t in the case of SSM. Liberals don’t merely want to let people decide for themselves whether or not to enter into a gay marriage, they want other people to recognize this, and to extend to gay marriage the same financial and social benefits given to regular marriage.
That’s why liberals were happy when the Supreme Court overruled the referenda of the various states saying they did not want to recognize gay marriage - it removed the decision from the states and relocated it to the Supreme Court.
There isn’t any contrast between interracial marriage and regular marriage. Both are defined as the union of one man and one woman. See Loving v. Virginia.
Yes, you are correct. Conservatives seek to amend the Constitution, which is licit and is the process by which such things should be decided. Liberals prefer to have justices make up legislation, which is not.
Piffle and nonsense. It wasn’t Liberals who supported, desired, or benefited from the Citizens United case.
That was pure Anti-liberals arranging for a new interpretation of the First Amendment, all by their little selfish selves, with zero effort of any kind to modify the Constitution “licitly.”
Unless you are suggesting that those corporations were owned and run by Liberals? And that their lawyers, AND the Republican appointed justices who decided the case, were all Liberals as well?
You are conflating AND confusing the role of words in law, at the same time. Determining what the law says and means is a PROCESS. yes of course the meanings of words are debated in law, but that is not because words have “precise meaning,” rather the opposite. We do TRY to use words, especially in contracts,
in such a way that here is no alternate interpretation possible, but the only reason why lawyers DO have to study so long and hard, is because most laws are NOT written precisely and narrowly ENOUGH, for a clear and obvious decision to be made. If they were, then no lawyers would be needed at all.
In the Constitution particularly, AGAIN, much was said, but not enough of it was “narrow and specific” enough, even to allow the government to immediately function in the most basic ways, after the first post-Constitution elections took place.
You’ve added support to my case, not your own, with this. This is what I said: they wrote a document designed to get signatures from people who DID NOT AGREE. Narrow and specific content tends to mess that goal up.
Ahem. Actually, general is almost EXACTLY the same thing as vague.
You are the one who has now used the term “weasel words.” if you want to pretend that that was what they intended all along, you go right ahead. Don’t blame me for your self-propelled illusions, though.
Conflating again, I see. Words are inherently NOT RIGID, so you’re stuck with your fantasy again.
You can try that, if you like. If you win your case, you will YET AGAIN be proving me 100% correct, and yourself 100% wrong. And if you lose, you would have utterly failed to support your arguments, having fallen into puerile name-calling instead, and thus openly showed anyone else who reads all this, that you have no rational support for your claims and attacks at all.
If there was no contrast existing between inter racial and regular marriage, I don’ t think the Court would have accepted the case. Apparently there were many states that thought otherwise.
The Constitution does not define what a marriage is. It doesn’t even mention marriages. So you’re wrong the claim any constitutional definition of a marriage as a union of one man and one woman.
Marijuana legalization? At least some conservatives seem happy to see the federal government to keep marijuana as a Schedule I drug. Meanwhile marijuana legalization efforts seem to support a state’s right to set a drug policy counter to the federal government.
Certain immigration matters such as sanctuary cities? Liberal supporters of sanctuary cities seem to again support a state’s rights approach.
bolding mine
Whether they supported or desired the ruling, liberals (ok with calling that Democrats?) have benefited from Citizens United. The Wall Street Journal noted that Hillary Clinton was the overwhelming beneficiary of hedge fund money, for example.
And the Super PAC money was strongly behind the Clinton campaign. Thanks, Citizens United!
Citizens United is an interesting case. The fact Hilary gained from it is missing the point. Right up there with Founding Fathers who owned slaves, but questioned slavery as a legitimate or moral enterprise. A difficulty arises from a distinction of the press with corporations. Money in elections is a big problem and is getting worse. It alienates the majority of “we the people” on all sides from getting factual information, instead it gets hype or as our new President puts it, fake news. It is more than a little ironic in that it could be said that he invented fake news. Maybe he was born in Nigeria? Has anyone checked?
I didn’t say the Constitution defines marriage. Loving cites the definition of marriage; it doesn’t create it. The definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman was established in common law.
SSM proponents claimed that they were denied the equal protection of the law establishing marriage as the union of one man and one woman, which is nonsense. Therefore the Supreme Court made up a new definition and claimed that SSM proponents were being denied the equal protection of a law that didn’t exist. That’s nonsense as well. Yet here we are.
This is ridiculous. People amending the Constitution doesn’t take the choice of amending the Constitution away from the people, as should be obvious.
There is a subtle but very important fact, which some people seem to be missing in this.
That is, that the reason why we do have a legal process for ADMINISTERING the law, which insists that each word in laws have specific and narrow meanings, is NOT AT ALL because we assume or believe that the words in laws were written by people who were wise beyond the limits of time and space.
The reason for administering the law in this way, is specifically to AVOID giving all power of the state over to individual people, and to preserve the Rule of Law itself, as impartially as we can manage.
That is why courts will often be seen to enforcing laws that the judges themselves, personally disagree with. It is also why people will occasionally be seen to ostentatiously break laws, and demand to be publicly punished, in hopes that the majority of the rest of us will realize that we have existing BAD laws, which need to be reversed.
“Originalists” often go a step, or perhaps several steps past the limits of logic in this.
Instead of stopping as they should, at the question of whether or not the Constitution can be recognized to already allow what needs doing, or must be amended in order to preserve the Rule of Law, they get caught up in the opposite of the rule of law, and instead, both venerate what they guess to be the original intent of the “Founding Fathers,” and vastly worse, declare that we in the present must live, not by the letter of the laws, but within the limits of the abilities of now two hundred years dead men, to foresee the future. By doing so, they set aside the rule of law, in favor of the rule of specific people. The very antipathy of Americanism.
Was it? I gather it was broadly accepted as the convention and there was little thought to challenge it until the 1970s or so, but weren’t the efforts to specifically define marriage as “one man, one woman” mostly backlash against the recent pro-SSM movement?
It’s not nonsense - the ability of a couple to form a legal marriage is affected solely by their gender. Sounds like a textbook case of unequal protection. Besides, one can be an SSM proponent even if not seeking a same-sex marriage, or even being gay. Simple respect for equal treatment under the law as a concept could make one an SSM proponent.
Conservatives really should concentrate on fiscal conservatism - taxes and expenditures and such. Trying to push social conservatism is tricky, at best, because it often contradicts the notion of “the government should keep its nose out of my business.”
The reason why two men cannot marry each other is because the word and the institution of marriage presumed (from dawn of civilization until 2001) people of the opposite sex. You might as well ask why a meat cannot be a vegetable or why a rock cannot be a tree. This definition of marriage was so openly known and obvious as to not need any discussion. The reason these “definitions” of marriage only came into play later was because people were asking the question of why can’t two guys marry each other. Why? Because that is not a marriage…marriage is this.
Now, I understand that people wanted to change that definition of marriage, which is fine. The law evolves with each generation and perhaps for now and going forward the term marriage should encompass any two (and why only two?) people who wish to enter into a lifetime commitment.
That is a new question for the people to decide. To Constitutionalize it and claim that this new definition of marriage was required by the 14th amendment in 1868 is absurd sophistry.
It was defined in the common law. The discussion dates back further than the polygamy debate before Utah was admitted to the Union.
Wrong. Anyone of any gender could enter into the union of one man and one woman. That is the definition of a legal marriage, and no one was being denied the right to enter into one.
So? A legal marriage is just a legal construct, not significantly different from a legal corporation or a legal partnership. Saying homosexuals cannot form a legal marriage is as arbitrary as saying they cannot form a corporation or, for that matter, that a pair of women (even if not romantically linked) cannot set up a law partnership, just because they were women.
As for the “time immemorial / dawn of civilization” traditions… who cares? As soon as you try playing that card, you have to justify why polygamous marriage is not okay (or maybe to you it is).
It didn’t need any discussion until someone decided it needed some discussion. Can you explain to me why it needs to not have any discussion? Was the concept supposed be eternal and unchanging, because if so, then we have to revisit the polygamy issue again.
I appreciate your effort to have it both ways - marriage is strictly defined, except when we choose to redefine it. As redefinitions go, this one was pretty minor - we had assumed a gender requirement and now we don’t. Big deal. Women getting the vote didn’t fundamentally change what a vote is or how it worked. A woman establishing a corporation didn’t shatter the legal foundation of corporations, even if it had been previously assumed that only men would set up corporations.
Well, of course not, because the case laws on the legal structure of marriage came about gradually and after 1868, and the various legal benefits and privileges have slowly accumulated over decades. Prior to 1868 (and indeed right up until the present), any couple could go a friendly house of worship and have a willing priest/rabbi/whatever recite a marriage ritual and declare before the relevant God or gods that the couple was now married. Who was going to stop them? In the U.S., how could anyone stop them without running afoul of the first amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion?
*Hypothetically, *I guess, the 14th should have legalized same-sex marriage the moment it was ratified (among a great many other inequalities that weren’t addressed until decades later), but it doesn’t shock me that an idealistic concept like “equal protection of the laws” didn’t get much play in practice. “All men are created equal” looks good on paper, too, even if the person who wrote it used the same pen to fill out a bill of sale for one of his slaves.
Anyway, the possibility of extending legal marriage to more than two people… sure, I could see that happening but there are a number of issues to hammer out. I don’t care in the least about the traditions or history or whatever - I want to know about legal issues like spousal privilege in testimony, inheritance issues, property division in divorce, child custody issues in divorce, medical decisions for children or incapacitated spouses and a few hundred other potential problems that are relatively simple for two people but potentially nightmarish for three or more.