Oh, I think I recall reading that it is criminal to perform a ceremony in North Carolina that resembles marriage but isn’t official. Anyone got the relevant statute for that?
Agreed.
And your explanation for the language quoted which appears to run counter to your claim?
As to the immutability issue: would you agree that if it were demonstrated that sexual orientation is laregly immutable, your position would change?
I live in NC and voted against the stupid amendment and wish it had lost. I also talked some other NC citizens into going to vote and from what they say they probably all voted against it. I am worried about my domestic-partnered friends who might lose health insurance 
NC is a nice place to live despite this. Nature is lovely here. The people from here are nice to your face, despite too many of them being bigoted (any is too many). I felt, while standing in line being lobbied, happy and proud to live in a place where, despite deep disagreements, we all want to vote peacefully and abide by the result, however strongly we disagree about it.
Sorry for being so nice in the Pit 
Agreed, in part, but you’d have to ignore cases in California, as well as Iowa, Connecticut, Massachusettes, and some courts in Ohio and other states, have found that sexual orientation can be a suspect, or a quasi suspect, class. Certainly the US Supreme Court hasn’t found it to be so, but I don’t think you can just ignore that some courts have indeed found it to be.
Personally, I don’t think sexual orientation needs to be a suspect, or quasi-suspect class, to find that laws against same sex marriage are unconstitutional even using a rational basis test. (Personally, I find that whole area of equal protection analysis to be a bit overcomplicated and prefer either rights-based approach or a sliding scale approach).
Nice 
I think Rand Rover’s argument–that because sexual orientation might possibly not be immutable, it cannot be a suspect class–fails to a monosyllabic counterargument:
cite?
It’s not that it can’t be a suspect class. It’s that it isn’t a suspect class, to the extent that SCOTUS hasn’t said it’s one.
There are several immutable characteristics that haven’t qualified for suspect-class protection. Age is a good one.
Did you not read the citation from Dukes? Religious classifications are generally reviewed under strict scrutiny because they involve the exercise of a fundamental right, but it’s clear that the Court has accepted religion as a suspect class.
I don’t think it makes sense, because religion is clearly not an immutable characteristic, but jabbering about how everyone else needs to “be smarter” isn’t making you look very smart.
But that’s not what his argument is:
That’s his claim, but he’s not cited an iota of case law to support it. He just expects us to believe it, despite the fact that similar reasoning does not answer the question of other forms of prohibited discrimination. For example, we are able to forbid discrimination against pagans, even though there’s no way to determine whether someone is pagan except by taking their word for it. (And yes, granted that “pagan” isn’t a suspect class–that’s irrelevant to the issue of whether we can prohibit discrimination based on a self-reported characteristic).
In any case, in order for us to say that the class of “gay people” doesn’t exist, we need to make an Ahmadinejadian argument of saying that there are no gay people in the United States. If you’r enot willing to be quite that level of idiot, then you must admit that there are gay people in the United States, and so his conditional argument clearly fails.
Incorrect. As Steve MB has noted, the courts do not require a litigant to prove a biological substrate for race nor have the courts pointed to any such biological substrate as evidence of the immutability of race.
The law takes the immutability of race as an article of faith. And it does this knowing that racial identification is fluid. People have been known to “pass” as different races. And the law has never required any more proof that a person is of a given race beyond that person’s self-identification or the perceptions of other implicated parties. You might contend that this “perception by others” reveals an objective component to racial identification. But that is not so: there is no reason to suppose that this “perception by others” will be unanimous, and as it happens, there are plenty of cases where different third parties will identify the same person as belonging to different races. See, for instance, Nicole Richie or Mariah Carey, whose lineages include black, white, and Latino extractions. So if A says these women are white, B says they’re Latina, and C says they’re black, who is right? And if none of them are or each of them are, what does that say about the supposed I’mmutability of the characteristic? What if, say, B, changes his answer upon further reflection?
When the law states that race is immutable (and it never has said so directly and without reservation), it does not mean to suggest that the questions posed in cases like those of Mmes. Richie and Carey are only illusory. It means only that, by and large, but with plenty of exceptions, people’s self-identifications are fixed and that individuals expect it, by and large, to remain fixed (even though, as shown, this does not entirely stand up to rigorous inquiry).
This is precisely the same situation with sexual orientation. An individual claiming to be gay does not need to furnish evidence of homosexual behavior. Indeed, it is entirely consistent to identify as gay and celibate. And yes, relying on self-identification as it does, some people’s self-identification may change over time. But just as with race, it is commonly understood that in most cases, it will not. This alone, and not some objective test, is all that is required to establish immutability.
There are Supreme Court cases that, while discussing suspect class identification, don’t even mention immutability. There are, however, Supreme Court cases that do mention it, but never really define what is “immutable” or what isn’t.
As Justice Norris in Watkins v. US Army said:
"The Supreme Court has never held that only classes with immutable traits can be deemed suspect. Cf., e.g., Cleburne, 473 U.S. at 442 n. 10, 105 S.Ct. at 3255-56 n. 10 (casting doubt on immutability theory); id. at 440-441 (stating the defining characteristics of suspect classes without mentioning immutability); Murgia, 427 U.S. at 313, 96 S.Ct. at 256667 (same); Rodriguez, 411 U.S. at 28, 93 S.Ct. at 1293-94 (same). I nonetheless consider immutability because the Supreme Court has often focused on immutability, see, e.g., Plyler, 457 U.S. at 220, 102 S.Ct. at 2396; Frontiero, 411 U.S. at 686, 93 S.Ct. at 1770 (plurality), and has sometimes described the recognized suspect classes as having immutable traits, see, e.g., Parham v. Hughes, 441 U.S. 347, 351, 99 S.Ct. 1742, 1745, 60 L.Ed.2d 269 (1979) (plurality opinion) (describing race, national origin, alienage, illegitimacy, and gender as immutable).
It is clear that by “immutability” the Court has never meant strict immutability in the sense that members of the class must be physically unable to change or mask the trait defining their class. People can have operations to change their sex. Aliens can ordinarily become naturalized citizens. The status of illegitimate children can be changed. People can frequently hide their national origin by changing their customs, their names, or their associations. Lighter skinned blacks can sometimes “pass” for white, as can Latinos for Anglos, and some people can even change their racial appearance with pigment injections. See J. Griffin, Black Like Me (1977). At a minimum, then, the Supreme Court is willing to treat a trait as effectively immutable if changing it would involve great difficulty, such as requiring a major physical change or a traumatic change of identity. Reading the case law in a more capacious manner, “immutability” may describe those traits that are so central to a person’s identity that it would be abhorrent for government to penalize a person for refusing to change them, regardless of how easy that change might be physically. Racial discrimination, for example, would not suddenly become constitutional if medical science developed an easy, cheap, and painless method of changing one’s skin pigment." (emphasis added).
You can read more of what he says about “immutability” as a small part of the determination of suspect classes here: Watkins v. US Army (you’ll have to scroll down to his concurrence).
Oh, I didn’t see that post. Yes, that’s stupid.
There we disagree. I believe that under rational basis, it survives, and if California, Iowa, et al are persuasive, why aren’t the greater number of states that have found the contrary MORE persuasive?
No, the strongest argument is federal jurisprudence and the fact that it’s immutable, thus meeting he Footnote Four prongs.
Thats not what you seemed to be saying. You didn’t seem to be saying that sexual orientation is not currently a suspect class, you seemed to be saying that sexual orientation could not be a suspect class because it was either mutable or not objectively provable.
[QUOTE=Bricker]
There we disagree. I believe that under rational basis, it survives, and if California, Iowa, et al are persuasive, why aren’t the greater number of states that have found the contrary MORE persuasive?
No, the strongest argument is federal jurisprudence and the fact that it’s immutable, thus meeting he Footnote Four prongs.
[/QUOTE]
Footnote Four didn’t actually mention immutability, and mentioned religion as an example of a class entitled to heightened scrutiny, as KG noted a page or two back.
It defined the classes entitled to higher protection only as “discrete and insular minorities”. In any case, the Court has long since moved on from that definition, since it has made it clear that one need not be a minority under a particular classification to be entitled to heightened scrutiny.
I don’t always agree with you on every thing, but I have to say, I admire the simple, direct, and elegant logic you show here. Well done.
gamerunknown:
And if a man lies with a male in the manner of lying with a woman (i.e., penetrative sex), they have both done an abomination, they must die, their blood is on them.
Polycarp:
You do have this correct, although I should mention that (according to Jewish tradition) the Ezekiel reference to Sodom is perversion of justice and oppression of the poor, not homosexual sex. The people of Sodom did engage in homosexual sex, but that’s not what they were condemned for.
I was basing my query on this.
That’s an…interesting web site, and does some pretty wild etymological gymnastics. They’re not entirely wrong, in that the Hebrew word “mishkav” CAN simply mean “bed,” but it’s entirely dependent on the context. The root “Sh-K-V” means “to lay,” i.e., simply being physically horizontal, and is also used as a euphemism for sex. When the context is sexual, which is true of the sections of Leviticus in which the prohibition against homosexual sex is mentioned, the usage of “mishkav” (or in this case, its plural form, “mishkivey”) is sexual as well.
The web site in question is very obviously trying to revisit the old texts with a specific agenda, and is, almost comically, trying to out-analyze the Biblical analysts of old (e.g., the Rabbis of the Talmud). Much similar “biblical scholarship” has arisen in this age of homosexual-rights advocacy, but none of it is done with the intellectual rigor that characterizes the intense Bible study - in ALL areas of the Bible, not just one specific area that’s a modern popular cause - of those who maintain the tradition. The traditional interpretation is consistent with the context that surrounds it, and a reading of a “type of bed”, not at all.
It isn’t reasonable, period.
Claiming there’s something immoral with wool-linen blends, gays, or eating shellfish is just stupid. Observe these prohibitions in your life if you feel they have value, but if you can’t articulate even shred of a compelling secular reason, then you have no case.
You have 0 (zero) right to proselytize the bigotry of your god on the rest of us.
You have not demonstrated that. At best, you nit picked that it in fact prohibits wool-linen. Oooooo big difference.
Where’s the campaign to ban wool-linen blends? Clearly they’re wrong. The bible says so.
It’s not snarkiness to religious folks. It’s snarkiness to bigots who try to rationalize their hate with religion.
Go at the bible all you want, don’t care, but why are you trying to force it on the rest of us? Do we not have human rights to be free of religious persecution?