If it were about having children, the benefits would be based solely on how many children a couple has, and there would be no benefits simply for being married.
Also, it’s not a “fairly small number of married people don’t have children”
There’s a Reverend I recall hearing about who is. I believe his name is Phelps or something…
A “gay rights” amendment would NOT be redundant – to the contrary, it would solidify as a matter of federal constitutional law something that is not true now: namely, that the federal constitution protects “gay rights” in some special manner. If you want that to be so, I agree completely that getting an amendment is the way to go.
Since President Bush will be appointing some more lifetime-tenured justices to the Supreme Court, perhaps a future Court will be even LESS likely to go with same-sex marriage than this current Court.
And this is an excellent example of the folly of wishing to be ruled by the judiciary: it’s great wehn they’re on your side, and not so great when they’re not on your side. This can be said of the legislature as well, of course, but with one key difference: the legislature can be voted out quickly. These SC justices are going to be around for a while.
So far as I can tell, you believe the proper method of statutory analysis is: “(1) Determine which way Diogenes wants the decision to come out, and then
(2) Make it so.”
There is no question, by the way, that a case can be made for finding a right to same-sex marriage in the Constitution. It’s obviously one I don’t agree with, but you could probably find a panel of the Eleventh Circuit that would reach that conclusion. You wouldn’t find a panel of the Fourth Circuit to get there, but it’s not something that’s in Utterly-Whacko territority.
But neither is it in Utterly Obvious territory. And this is where I think the intellectual dishonesty comes into play. If you live by the sword, then you die by the sword. If you’re willing to tout the superiority of judicial resolution, then you should stick with that even when it doesn’t go your way. Otherwise, what you’re arguing for becomes, in essence, “I want the result I want, by whatever method will get us there.”
It is my position that petitioning the courts for “gay rights” is not about asking for anything new, it’s about asserting rights that already exist. It’s not about asking for new law but about striking down discriminatory law. There is no attempt to demand new rights, only an assertion that individuals cannot be deprived of rights simply because they are gay. That is a violation of equal protection and the Supreme Court already ruled that way in the Texas sodomy case.
The “why” is because it is desperate, reaching bullshit that falls apart like a house of cards under any examination at all. There is no condition of parenthood attached to receiving marriage benefits. There are no benefits to millions who raise children without getting married (or without the ability to get married).
There is simply no practical correlation between breeding and receiving marital benefits.
Let me ask this, do you think that same-sex couple should have the right to visit each other in the hospital or list each other as next of kin? If not, why not?
I’d like to press those, including several who have posted already, who are willing to assert that yes, including gays in all the legal rights stuff is only fair and right, but if it’s called the M-word, then it will undermine civilization itself, for an explanation. What difference does the word make? If you’re willing to define something called “civil union” or anything else, what makes you hold back from calling it “marriage”? How is it that extending full legal rights to gays is morally right, but the use of the most obvious word for it would make it morally wrong?
Can’t help you there (and I’m not sure anyone can, with the tendentious way you’ve phrased it (". . . undermine civilization itself . . .").
I don’t know that either would undermine civilization itself.
I don’t know that what you call it makes much of a difference, and I’m not sure there are any “antis” here who are totally okay with it when called civil union and totally not okay based solely on the use of the M word. Setting up the debate that way is an open invitation for a bait and switch, in game theory. Are you sure there are a lot of “antis” who are saying civil union is definitely morally right, “marriage” wrong? Of the many ways I’d analyze it, that’s not one that strikes me as helpful either, assuming it’s not a strawman.
What’s “morally right” is completely subjective and is irrelevant to the topic. What;s at issue is what’s legally right. There are a lot of things that people think are “immoral,” but don’t think should be illegal.
Bricker has explained to you multiple times that it is legally meaningless and of no practical use (and probably epistemologically meaningless) to talk about positive rights that pre-exist, and of which individuals can be said to be culpably deprived, but for which there has never been a single enforcement mechanism and of which there has never been a single authoritative recognition. Rights are not free-floating in the air (well, except to natural law advocates, a road down which you don’t want to go, and even they understand there is no enforceable right until someone in authority codifies it).
A tremendous, overweening, and deeply-ignorant arrogance underlies the notion that constitutional interpretation can take place by virtue of your asserting that you (and apparently you alone) know, to a certainty, that the Constitution does and always has recognize an immutable right to sodomy and “gay marriage,” because if it didn’t “that wouldn’t be equal protection.” Has it occurred to you that if the conclusion were this simple, it would not have taken thousands of lawyers and judges millions of pages and hundred of hours of argument to determine the exact metes and bounds of what “equal protection” means?
Nah. They were just idiots who never put two and two together and “realized” the “inherent inconsistency” in having laws against sodomy on the books at the same time the “equal protection” clause was on the book. Do you honestly think you’re the first to notice this “inconsistency?” If it’s so evidently inconsistent, why didn’t anyone before last year fix it? There have been a lot of liberal, well-intentioned judges. But none as liberal and smart as you, is that it?
Or did you ever, for one second, consider the alternate possibility – viz., that this inconsistency, so obvious to you, was not at all obvious to people with training in the specialized term-of-art meaning and history of “equal protection,” and that maybe the dolt-in-the-street conviction that it must mean “everyone gets to do do everything that everyone else gets to do” was based on ignorance of how the law works?
You can’t know anything of law and jurisprudence, and I’d cut you a break on that, except you continue to insist on putting forward your non-legally-based exhortations of what illogical cart-before-the-horse constitutional rights “require.”
You’ve posted 11,000 times. You must have know have some actual experience-based knowledge about something (well, maybe not, with 11,000 posts constituting the past few years). If so, it’d be welcomed in threads on that subject, whatever it is. It isn’t constitutional law, or law, or the Constitution.
[QUOTE=Bricker]
On the contrary, the federal situation today is drastically different from the Massachusetts situation of 2003:
[ul]
[li]Many states - eleven just in the past election - have passed anti-same-sex marriage laws (and this is more signficant to the Supremes than to Massachusetts)[/li][/quote]
Which means nothing if they are in violation of the equal-protection clause, of course.
[quote]
[li]These referenda appear to be, at least in part, a reaction to Massachusetts’ decision[/li][/quote]
So? The test of a law’s constitutionality is not its popularity.
[quote]
[li]The dicta is Lawrence is persuasive to federal analysis but not to Massachusetts’, since Massachusetts decided Goodridge based on state law[/li][/quote]
State constitutional principles which is not different in substance from the federal ones.
A case can be decided either way, yes, and the predilections of the judges are critical. Your point? I was suggesting that your dismissal of any possibility of the matter being settled federally in favor of equal protection is premature.
I’ll go along with Diogenes on that - not with this crowd. As much as Scalia and Thomas, most notably, claim to be strict constructionists, and as honorable and objective as a certain Doper would like to claim them to be on other matters, they have still shown a tendency to overlook their principles when the result would make them uncomfortable. Let me ask you in return: If the case had been brought before the Warren court, would you be happy to let it become a precedent?
:shurg: From this thread alone:
Marriage is in itself valued because most of the time it leads to having children in a stable productive economic unit. If you do not place a value on marriage, you may not get to the children stage.
Meanwhile, you don’t get the childcare tax deductions if you are not married? You don’t get into family medical plans (with lower cost grouping packages)? You don’t get increased welfare benefits with additional children?
As to the first, of course I think they should. As to the second, it depends on what benefits you expect to arise out of being “next of kin.” As I said before, although I don’t pretend to not understand the reasoning behind it, I think that the idea of providing subsidies for anyone who decides to contract with or live with someone else in a “marriage” type arrangement may be outmoded. I would prefer see the heterosexual marriage bonuses dropped before I see homosexual marriage or civil unions recognized by the state.
It seems to me that you are not really arguing that gays should have the right to be married; you are arguing that the benefits given to heterosexuals who get married are bullshit. If you want to argue that gays should have the same rights, I would then ask you why am I excluded if I choose not to pair up with anyone?
You can have those rights too. I don’t care. I’m just saying the rules have to be the same for everyone. We can not create a special, more priveleged class of “couples” based on genital configurations.
It might baffle you, but there are people who have no problems with this. Take my father for example. My dad is about as right wing as you can be without involving fire arms in your politics, and he does not think that gays should have the right to marry. “Marriage is supposed to be for a man and a woman,” he drones. Yet, suprisingly he doesn’t have a problem with the idea of CUs and the rights that would go along with them. I asked him why, since they’re basically the same thing, and he only repeated that marriage is for hetrosexuals. Some people really are that hung up on a definition.
So what is it okay to create a special, more privileged class for? Two people living together? Why?
It’s not about giving them priveleges so much as just letting them form contracts with each other. Letting two people designate each other as legal “partners” who will share economic responsibilities, properties, etc. and who can also be designated as next of kin for purposes of hospital visits, inheritance etc.
I see no reason why those partnerships even require any fucking. You should be able to have a civil contract with your roommate or your dad if you want to. It would be purely a legal partnership without regard to any sexual relationship.
“Marriage” should just be a private religious (or non-religious) ritual which is available completely at the whim of the individual but with no more legal significance than being “saved,” or being “confirmed.”
Because it’s EQUAL PROTECTION FOR GENITAL CONFIGURATIONS, you BIGOTED MORON!
It’s in the Constitution AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN (the double-secret version, with invisible ink, that only I and S. O’Conner had a copy of).
If only, if ONLY, we lived in a country in which two adults can enter into an enforceable contract.
Can ignorance be this boundless?
If only…but we don’t.
Er, SFrog, I’m hoping you’re seeing where I was going with that, i.e., not in your general direction . . . .