Well, that’s solid legal analysis if I ever saw it. :rolleyes:
The same might once have been written in regards to my wife’s Jewish father and black mother, or my wife herself & me.
Well I don’t see why this shouldn’t be so, but the Bill of Rights doesn’t talk about marriage, and neither does the 14th Amendment. In any case, the CA constitution has been changed by Prop 8.
California already has laws against bigamy, so you have no need to worry.
Dude, you are makin’ shit up. There was a right for gays to get married. Its provenance and its duration are immaterial. It existed. It was removed. The end.
Also, it’s wrong and dismissive to characterize a result that was clearly correct under California law as a loophole, but whatever.
–Cliffy
Is it a human right?
No.
Is it a long-standing tradition that has become part of mainstream life?
Yes.
Marriage is not a right. Marriage is a wrong. It’s a stupid institution and it should not continue to receive governmental recognition at all.
Having said that, I think gay and lesbian people should have the right to make themselves just as miserable, and attorneys just as rich, as hetero couples do.
EDIT: I contribute to Human Rights Campaign.
And yet you dismiss 130 years of interpretation.
And you’re dismissing the CA court systems long-standing approach to dealing with civil rights issues.
What does 130 years have to do with anything?
Can a state forbid any/all of its citizens from marrying, and dissolve all existing marriages, by legislative fiat?
I have a right to freedom of speech. Does that automatically allow me to drive around town in a truck with loudspeakers at 3:00 A.M. expressing myself? Can the state prohibit me from doing that without infringing on my freedom of speech?
The logic here is: Rights can exist and can be regulated by the state for legitimate governmental purposes.
Also, to distinguish “the state” from “the courts” is disingenuous. American governmental units have three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial.
But what makes something a human right? Religion is a long-standing tradition that has become part of mainstream life. And as ancient as some of it’s traditions are, the practice of mating for life is far more primal.
Rights are what we as a society or a group of societies agree are rights as basic axioms.
In this regard I think the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be looked to as a basic starting point for what we’ve agreed. And they say it is.
Why should a married person have more rights than an unmarried person ? Doesn’t anyone question that ?
As a single man doing his income tax and supporting a common-law spouse many years ago this really pissed me off .
The real answer to equal rights for all is to get the government out of marriage altogether.
Just as an aside, HRC isn’t what it used to be. Lambda Legal and other organizations are doing a lot more good work these days.
I doubt that the UN’s use of the word “marriage” there refers to the same thing that is being contested here. I would assume that they would consider de facto relationships to meet that standard, rather than suggesting that a failure to provide tax benefits to married couples would represent a violation of human rights.
I was unaware that the op asked if tax benefits were a right.
It would be nigh but impossible. There are hundreds of laws that touch on the institution of marriage, and many of those laws invoke or protect separate rights themselves. The right to contract, the right to dispose of property, the right to control medical decisionmaking, right to rear your children, and a plethora of other rights. If someone came up with a brand new institution that did all those things, but got rid of all the benefits, I suppose it could work. But marriage is so ingrained as an institution in the law that it is clearly the place to start.
True, but banning SSM has no legitimate governmental purpose whatsoever. The Tax protections are no different than those offered to hetero married couples. Therefore, the law is either implying that the state of marriage is purely a legal benefit in the expectation of children; (which would then imply that childless couples ought lose those protections), or that homosexuals are second class citizens who are going to pay a “sin” tax on their lifestyle by exclusion of marital rights.
Otherwise, the law’s basis is on the ever-so-solid ground of religious bigotry on the part of the opposition.
There is NO LEGITIMATE REASON to ban SSM. I have no problem with someone opposing it, but they should have the decency to be honest about their intolerance. (Not aiming this directly at you Polycarp)
Really?
Really?
I don’t any specific definition of what constitutes the “family” here. It makes no specific mention of the number or arrangement of the participants, only that it is right of both men and women to enter into marriage and that the participants must be willing.
What Prop8 and Amend2 did were try to establish the definition of the family as “one man, one woman, nothing else”. There is no reason for that other than religious bigotry.
I see marriage less as an institution unto itself and more as a recognition of the type of relationship it represents. Two consenting adults living together in a romantic, committed relationship, regardless of gender, are often considered ‘married’ by the people around them. I suppose in that light, extending legal marriage to same-sex couples would be a way of extending the same benefits that a hetero couple enjoys, and a recognition that the relationship is the same, even if the genders aren’t.
There are all kinds of things Americans have the right to do that aren’t specifically enumerated in the Constitution; it would be impossible to list every activity that a person can do that could be put under the general category of “living in a free country.”
The relevant parts of the Constitution are two, in my mind; the Ninth Amendment, which very specifically notes that the rights inthe Constitution are NOT the only ones held by the people; and the Fourteenth, which requires equal protection.
IMHO, marriage is a right, in the sense that any one person has the right to access any civic service, status, or construct that other citizens have. The position that best maximizes equality and liberty in this regard - again, IMHO - is the legalization of gay marriage.