I find questioning a judges ruling solely because he is homosexual to be homophobic behavior. So I think it’s an appropriate description.
Have you found something in Walkers ruling to suggest bias? Are you willing to admit he was perfectly capable of making a fair ruling on gay marriage while being gay himself?
What you claim and what you actually post are 2 different things. You come off as someone who is homophobic. Maybe change your words if you don’t want to be thought of as such
Again CP, you have some preconceived notions of what you think are innate and not innate characteristics and you are confusing them into one jumble which you call ‘class’. The word you’re looking for is ‘group’. You CAN discriminate against groups, little ‘g’, because a group is any generic collection based on some arbitrary criteria. There are groups of people that are perfectly ok to discriminate against. The government locks groups of criminals up. They give certain job groups special privileges.
What you confusing ‘group’ with is the legal term ‘protected class’. A Protected Class, capital ‘p’ capital ‘c’, is a special kind of group designated by the government with distinct privileges, usually because they’ve been discriminated against in the past. When we say you cannot have Walker recuse himself because he’s gay, that’s because the reason would speak towards a Protected Class in which he belongs to: gays.
When you talk about polygamy, you are talking about ‘groups’. Polygamists are not an officially recognized Protected Class, so you can discriminate against them in marriage. Whatever you think of that situation, it stems from the fact that a gay person and a polygamist are fundamentally different in how they achieve their statuses. And that difference contributes to the reason that one is a Protected Class and one is not
You want to claim they are the same, or should be the same, based on the simple notion that both can be called ‘groups’. But you’re wrong. Just because they are both part of a group does not mean they both deserve to be a Protected Class. Polygamy is illegal and I have no real problems with that. But discriminate against gays and I have a huge problem with it. Any rational person would agree with me
I did not say you were doing anything malicious, but frankly, you are leaving me with no choice here. I understand how the issue of polygamy came up in this thread. It’s tangential and was detracting from the main topic, so I instructed you and the other posters were to drop it. You might think this thread is already irredeemably off-topic, but that doesn’t entitle you to ignore what I said. (If you think I got it wrong, message me or post in ATMB.) Continuing to post about it here is a deliberate hijack and is ignoring my instructions. This is a formal warning not to do that again.
So does this mean no one in this thread can talk about marriage definitions, or is it just me that’s restricted from saying the word polygamy? The actual hijack of the thread had nothing to do with polygamy, but rather the moral and legal rights and wrongs of marriage.
I didn’t question Walker himself. I asked if naysayers actually had any precedent for something regarding this unusual minority.
Can I call you a liar for misrepresenting me on purpose? Probably not. So don’t pull that bullshit. It makes you look stupid.
Sorry, I’m not allowed to say the P word. You’ll have to take your poor understanding and ethnocentric-ism/bigotry into another thread. Thanks.
It means exactly what I wrote: there will be no more discussion of polygamy in this thread. That goes for everyone. There are now two other threads about polygamy anyway, so I don’t think this will be a big inconvenience.
See above. Take any further discussion of polygamy to one of the two threads on the topic. I’m giving you a formal warning for ignoring mod instructions.
No, you cannot call someone else in a liar in this forum. It’s written out explicitly in the rules. You also can’t tell someone their argument is bullshit and makes them look stupid. You’ve been here long enough to know this.
Which was a presumption based upon language and custom, as noted in the Wikipedia article:
I will refine my point to say that there were no statutes that prohibited same sex marriage, but my basic objection to CitizenPained’s claim stands.
Calling me a homophobe - against the rules last I checked - is bullshit.
I’m not entirely convinced that’s the case, but since we aren’t allowed to talk about polygamy anymore I’ll accept your refining. 
I just thought of another possible way that the SC could thread the needle and strike down Prop 8 without making SSM legal nation wide. They could rule that since the status quo in California before Prop 8 was that SSM was legal, there was no rational basis to specifically outlaw it. But they could at the same time say that if the marriage laws in existence in a state had always only granted OSM, then the would not be compelled to rewrite the laws.
That would basically mean that if SSM marriage was ever legal, no laws that blocked it in that state would stand, but it would not legalize it any place new.
That should put DOMA to pasture and may also mean that any law that prevents a state from recognizing out of state marriages would have to come down as well. Basically it would put SSM on the same status as first cousin marriage.
I don’t know of any precedence for this, any thoughts?
You are not paying attention and you are not getting it.
He did not call you a homophobe.
He noted that your arguments appeared to fit into the pattern of a person who had an animus against homosexuals. *(Posters could argue to the end of days as to whether homosexuality or left-handedness exists in sufficient proportions of the population to be anomalous or “normal,” but specifying medical anomaly invokes the connotation of a defect (although your citation fails to note that point). So while your statement might have been intended innocently, it conveyed a sinister message.) *Then you complained about being identified as homophobic, at which point he had not actually said that.
Only then did he agree that your arguments lent a homophobic appearance to your posts.
It is not a violation of the rules to post something at which some other poster might take offense. (Otherwise, you would have been gone several weeks ago. 
)
It is a violation to call other posters names. You seem to have a serious problem recognizing the distinction–which is probably why you have already racked up four Warnings in your brief soujourn on the SDMB.
I was not particularly happy with YogSosoth echoing back your use of the word “homophobic,” but the important point was that he was simply replying to your statement in your own words–and he kept his comments focused on your actions, not your person.
If you do not begin to differentiate between personal insults/name-calling and challenges, (even harsh challenges), to the words posted, you are going to find your posting privileges removed.
[ /Moderating ]
nm
Doesn’t that set a dangerous precedent? It seems like you’re suggesting that there’s no rational basis for the state to outlaw things that are currently legal. Since everything is legal until it’s outlawed, aren’t you really striking down the ability of the states to criminalize? It was the status quo everywhere to allow people to talk on their cell phones when driving, until New York, California, and some other states, criminalized using a cell phone handset while driving. It seems like under your standard, those laws would be unconstitutional, because, since talking on a cell phone while driving was legal until the law was passed, there was no rational basis to outlaw it.
I think the difference is that there was no explicit law outlining your fundamental right to talk on the phone and cross over the center line into my lane. :mad:
Does ‘will of the people’ versus ‘legislative body’ have any weight in California? We have amendments and things here, but I grew up in Iowa, where that idea was foreign.
I’m seeing an issue in CP’s basic approach to the questions being dealt with – and this is not to join a pile-on but to elucidate that problem. There were a couple of posts earlier in the thread where she made reference to whether or not the state had given people particular rights that almost caused me to speak up, but I refrained then. Post #156 looking for an wxplicit law outlining a fundamental right to do something brings it to a head.
Whether one subscribes to natural law, social contract, objectivist, or other interpretations of the underlying principles of law, rights are deemed to exist. With Tom Jefferson, I conceive of us as being endowed with them by our Creator (which neither he nor I equate with the god the Religious Right keeps in its back pocket, to pull out so it can endorse their prejudices). They are not the boons of a beneficient government, they are the constituent parts of liberty. At most, they are viewed to be recognized and guaranteed (or not) by the governments involved.
The question is not whether “we” should grant them the right to marry – rather, it is a question of whether there is a valid reason why they should be denied access to that right for a period or in particular combinations. We deny 12-year-olds the right to marry absolutely until they have grown up more, owing to their inexperience, immaturity, and impetuousness. We deny sibling pairs the right to marry each other owing to an incest tabu that is ultimaqtely founded in birth defects. We deny those already committed to one monogamous marriage the right to enter a second, because the second ipso facto violates the terms of the first one. You do not need to prove to the state why you should be permitted to do something; rather, the state must bew prepared, on demand, to prove in court why it has the power to restrict you from it. That’s the point behind strict andin5termediate scrutiny and rational basis analysis.
I think this idea – that the state is the kindly fount of rights – is iniquitous, contrary to the American ideal of government, and at the root of a lot of the disagreementsw between people.
People are free to disagree with it, just don’t expect their beliefs to be reflected in reality.
If there is no government, there is no enforcement of your rights or mine. All of our “rights”, whether people want to say they are inherent or not, would have to be defended by the a barrel of a gun. In an anarchy, you are not more free, you are merely in power or out of it
So the ideal of the US is a fine dream for people to wish for, but in reality, because there is government and laws, the rights you have are merely the rights the government says you have.
With regards to marriage, it is something the government has decided, in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, its amendments, and Supreme Court decisions that an individual has the right of. And where other local laws disagree with the rights already given to us by precedent and federal statutes, these kinds of arguments pop up. The government has already stated that marriage is a right, and it’s only an issue because parts of the government, the smaller, weaker, local parts, are conflicting with the federal, bigger, more powerful parts.
I think even Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t say that all rights are inalienable and endowed by a creator. This is going off the topic, but the natural rights theorists of the 17th-18th century distinguished between “natural rights”; those rights that people have by nature of their humanity, and “statutory rights”; those rights that people have because a law grants them those rights. So, saying “the state had given people particular rights”, isn’t an idea foreign to Jefferson. Whether marriage is one of those inalienable rights or not is another question. Marriage, in the sense of being an institution recognized by the state and society as itself giving legal rights to the people participating in it seems too much a government creature to be separated from it.
The question here isn’t so much the question of marriage as a fundamental right, but that, given that the state recognizes marriages, whether or not it’s legally permissible to deny such recognition to a gay couple seeking it, or whether that would be impermissible discrimination. Assuming the question isn’t resolved on standing, it will be resolved on an equal protection basis.
Ok. There was an explicit law giving first time homebuyers the right to take an $8k tax credit on their income tax. That expired in 2010. Is the expiration unconstitutional because the people explicitly had that right and now they don’t.