There’s no gotchas. I’ve said exactly what I mean. If you choose to support someone because you think gay people’s civil rights are less important than other issues, then of course you are implicitly supporting the abridgment of those rights in favor of the expansion of others. I’m not addressing the issue of whether making that choice is wrong – I’m saying the choice was made, and the attitude that it’s irrelevant is trying to keep the cake after you eat it. There is no doubt that Obama’s inability to reconcile his awareness of the necessity of equal rights and his religious objection to them encouraged many pro-Obama voters to also vote for 8 in California.
Until the day comes when I can design my own candidate using a sleek, intuitive point-and-click interface, I will continue to face various levels of disagreement, on various issues, with the candidates presented. Just as you and everyone else who votes does.
It does? Well, that makes me feel a little bit better.
The political landscape here on the East Coast is soooo different than in Michigan. I love it.
Again, I’m not addressing that issue. I’m saying if you make that choice to compromise, you can’t turn around and pretend you didn’t make that choice.
No, sadly, it really can’t. The difference between this and the earlier measure is that this is a constitutional amendment. The California Supreme Court is bound by it. They cannot find that it violates the California constitution – it IS the California constitution.
But it’s what people DO that counts.
Obama, and anyone else, is welcome to believe that God is opposed to same-sex marriage. If they don’t do anything to deny other people’s rights to make their own decision, then i don’t care what they believe. But when they go out of their way to put up legal barriers that reinforce their religious views, that’s where i draw the line. Obama, however, does not want to put up such legal barriers.
Also, you seem to forget that, in the Presidential election, neither of the viable candidates believes in same-sex marriage. So people who do support it are faced with the fact that neither candidate agrees with them completely. They can then, as people do for all sorts of election issues, choose the candidate who is least bad. And in this case, it was Obama, because McCain is an active supporter of anti-same-sex marriage measures, while Obama is not.
Also, voting for President is quite different from voting for a ballot measure. Almost everyone who votes for President (or Congressperson, or Senator, etc.) has to make some compromises. Even hard-core party line voters generally don’t agree with every single position that their candidate holds. There are millions of Obama supporters who don’t agree with every Obama policy, but who preferred him to McCain; there are millions of McCain supporters who don’t agree with every McCain policy, but who preferred him to Obama.
A ballot measure like Prop 8, on the other hand, is a single issue. It does not require weighing up the pros and cons of particular candidates, balancing their whole raft of policies. It requires, in this case, simply deciding Yes or No on a single question. And people who voted Yes chose to deny rights for same sex couples. Period. They didn’t change anything else; they just said to a group of California citizens: “You can’t have this, because we said so.”
It is to me, and to many with libertarian leanings of both (all) parties who hold as a philosophical matter that a person’s personal beliefs are just that – personal – and do not, simply by existing and being held, justify imposing them on the entire citizenry in the absence of a demonstrable harm or good.
I don’t give a good goddamn who you sleep with, and no one has ever presented me with a persuasive argument justifying treating people differently in terms of the extension of rights or privileges, on the sole basis of who you sleep with.
I too find passage of Prop 8 extremely disheartening, and I say that as a straight Christian Republican. But I also think that it indicates a much deeper resistance to same-sex marriage at a societal level than many of us would like to think. It seems to me to be more productive to consider how best to combat that than to curse those who hold that position. But considering how personal and bitter a loss it is for many, I can’t condemn anyone for wishing the opposition to Hell today.
If it’s what people do that counts, why are you arguing on the basis of what he’s said? He has not done anything yet.
Once again, my point is not that you should never compromise. It’s that if you choose to, you cannot pretend you didn’t decide that full civil rights for gay people were less important to you than other issues.
It is possible to curse and cajole simultaneously, you know.
For me, the key here is winning the hearts of America’s priests and pastors, as those who fought for the civil rights of minorities did. Like it or not, this country is run in Christ’s name most of the time. Let’s see if we can get a little piece of it shaped into his image, too.
Here are some TV ads I’ve seen over the past few weeks:
Yes on 8:
[ol]
[li]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kKn5LNhNto[/li][li]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PgjcgqFYP4[/li][li]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l61Pd5_jHQw[/li][/ol]
So basically gay marriage eats babies and sodomizes schoolteachers, whether you like it or not!
No on 8:
[ol]
[li]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6dBUCi32c8[/li][li]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHeTVAE4ZkY[/li][li]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIL7PUl24hE[/li][/ol]
Much more level headed in my opinion – must have been the downfall. I would personally market it to a wider audience – “If marriage is about children – next they’ll come after heterosexual couples who don’t want kids – then infertile couples. Are YOU and YOUR SPOUSE next because you didn’t have enough?” 
Amidst all of this political talk, I want to say a heartfelt “I’m sorry and that sucks” to the people whose marriages were just invalidated or jeopardized.
Florida’s passed as well, 63 to 37 IIRC. The (A) Bill of Rights is just that-it isn’t the Bill of Rights Denied (and yes I know about Prohibition and we all know how that went). I am ashamed of many of my fellow Floridians right now.
I know this is a small condolence, but it’s important to remember: This ammendment in no way prevents gays from marrying. No government ever has had the power to prevent two people from marrying each other, and more than they have the power to legislate the value of pi. If you intend to get married, then do so, and don’t let this silly piece of paper stop you. All it stops is the legal recognition of marriage, not the marriage itself.
Now, of course, legal recognition is also something of value, and worth fighting for. By all means, keep fighting for it, and I’m on your side. But don’t give the bigots more power than they actually have.
That’s technically true. But he has NOT done is cast a vote against same-sex marriage. Until he does that, i’m happy to take him at his word that he opposes it. Which is quite different from the millions of people in California (and elsewhere) who have actively done something to deny rights to same-sex couples.
You truly are a fucking moron.
There was NO viable candidate for President who supports same-sex marriage absolutely. McCain opposed it openly, and supports measures to limit or ban it; Obama said that he believes it opposes God’s will, but that he did not support measures such as Constitutional amendments to ban it. Those were the only two viable choices that any voter had for President this year.
Even if civil rights for gay couples were the Number 1, Super-Maximum, Nothing-Else-Matters, This-Is-It thing for a voter this year, the fact that such a voter might choose Obama is not an indication that gay rights is less important; it’s merely an indication that this very important thing will be better served by Obama than by McCain.
And this whole issue is STILL very different from a ballot measure like Prop 8, where single issue is being decided.
It is relevant to Prop 8 because Obama’s statement that he believes God does not want gay people to get married encouraged Obama supporters to vote yes on 8. And your reasoning is circular – you’re saying “no viable candidate” as if viable candidates spring fully-formed from the ether. Viability is made by what people choose to support or compromise about. If civil rights for gay people were number-one-super-maximum-priority to everyone who supports them, there WOULD have been a viable candidate.
But for the nine thousandth time, I’m not saying it was wrong to compromise. I’m saying it’s wrong to pretend you did not.
IME, it is extraordinarily difficult to do both simultaneously and be successful at either. But like I said, I don’t begrudge the current cursing: completely understandable under the circumstances. Passage of Prop 8 was wounding, and the day the wound is delivered (or the day after) is a little too soon to expect people to rise above it.
Agreed.
To me, this is facile. In fact, a person might well decide to now downplay his or her commitment to the thing he or she considers most important, in order consolidate the power to accomplish that most important thing at a later date. I’m not saying that is the case here – and I’m not saying it’s not – but merely pointing out that it is incredibly over-simplistic to cast the issue in stark black and white, so that every calculated step taken (or not taken) in any context, on any issue, forever fixes that issue on some static and immutable scale of what is “more important” and what is “less important.” That’s not the way it works, thank God.
A Canadian here who’s asking if propositions that pass are automatically the law?
What Jodi said. And her term “facile” describes your argument here perfectly.
You put a lot of words in my mouth to argue with there. I hope at least you had some fun. I don’t get it – everyone seems to be saying “but we had to vote for him anyway because other issues were more important, so how dare you say we thought other issues were more important?” Nothing I said precludes the possibility of people who have made this compromise later deciding that the other issues which caused it have been sufficiently addressed, so that the compromises they’re willing to make change.
Propositions that create or alter legislation are law unless they violate the state constitution – something that is decided by the courts.
Propositions that amend or revise the state constitution are automatically part of it – the only possible challenge is if the mechanics of the way the proposition was introduced, voted on or passed violated the constitution, not the contents of the amendment itself.
Proposition 8 is a constitutional amendment.