Why bother? Might as well just skip to the court challenge, you know, after they wrap up their current rejection of the TSA, Obamacare, and immigration.
Well I’m glad it’s over, now let’s focus on important stuff like the debt ceiling impasse.
Iowa is not typically considered an east coast liberal state. It’ll be legal elsewhere soon enough.
If it were up to the majority of New Yorkers, this probably would have happened several years ago. Getting it through our sclerotic state legislature and getting blocs of narrowly-interested politicians to vote for it is another matter. Spitzer and Paterson both favored gay marriage laws, but they couldn’t get anything done because of scandal, incompetence, and bad relationships with the senate and assembly. Cuomo was the third consecutive governor to try to make this law happen.
I am sorry, and I don’t mean to be offensive, but democracy is not perfect. It’s better than other forms of government, except the one in which I rule the planet as a benevolent and wise philosopher king.
Unfortunately, the problem with that one is what to do when I die, because finding another prefect ruler is unlikely.
So we settle for a system in which the people are sovereign, and not a system in which we are ruled by wise judge philosopher kings. The latter system again is fine until we start getting judge philosopher kings that don’t agree with us.
You want to go with the judge rulership method now, presumably because you think it will provide the results you like. I assume that if judges came along and announced the unborn children had a right to life, and thus abortion was outlawed, you would not be swayed by that argument and would argue vociferously that we should stop listening to judges.
You cannot credibly embrace a system only when it produces results you like.
I am willing to let lumbering old democracy work, and in the process offend people who feel it moves to slowly, in order to preserve it and save it from a de facto replacement by “wise” philosopher kings.
Did you miss the part about how the checks and balances system works back in Civics class, Bricker? If your idiosyncratic ideology held sway, putting your particular non-reality-based view of how the system should work above the needs and desires of the people themselves, we’d still have Jim Crow laws.
You are being offensive, yes, and you obviously know it, but you obviously don’t understand why.
The thing is, the wise philosopher kings demonstrably take the will of the people into account in reaching their decisions. If enough people decide that babies have a right to life, judges will find it in the constitution, just like some of them are finding a right to gay marriage in the federal and state constitutions now. It’s one of the hallmarks of American democracy.
ETA: Yay New York!
It isn’t “finding a right to gay marriage”, it’s reading the right to equal protection of the laws.
Yeah, the legislators (the voice of the people) already spoke, long ago, in favor of equal rights for all. All they’re really doing now is saying “And we really mean it!”. Which shouldn’t be a necessary step in the process.
The people are sovereign. They voted to put an Equal Protection clause in the Constitution. A judge would merely be holding legislatures accountable to what the people already decided. Isn’t that what the court is supposed to do (US Supreme Court at least)? We can of course argue whether the SCOTUS decides correctly or not but it remains their job to make these calls. Balance of power and all that jazz.
It the people wanted to outlaw gay marriage they can get a constitutional amendment doing so.
That’s oversimplifying the issue. The people decided that everyone should enjoy equal protection of the laws, but they did not decide that gay people should be able to marry. Deciding what the people meant is the job of the courts, but also the job of the legislature.
No, they did not say “gay people can marry”. They said everyone gets equal protection of the law. The law allows people to marry. Denying one group that ability is discrimination which means there had better be a good reason to do so. It is simple but not oversimplifying it.
I’ll just leave this here: http://i.imgur.com/Woz8B.png 
I imagine that he or she, like the rest of us, would try to appeal until the Supreme Court, and then if the Supreme Court ruled a way we didn’t like, would try to use other legal avenues (such as an amendment or narrowly tailored legislation or a case with different facts) to achieve something closer to the result we want. Simply disagreeing with a court ruling or legal philosophy doesn’t mean that you’re throwing out the court system, and agreeing with a particular court ruling or legal philosophy doesn’t mean you have to agree with every ruling that pops out of any court anywhere.
Well, somebody is certainly getting a credibility problem, and it’s not Inner Stickler.
And it’s a fine example of why we have a Constitution - part of its purpose is to protect ourselves from ourselves. We know at a higher level that we need to have equal protection, but the right to it that we recognized and codified is subject to attack when we “exercise our democracy” on a *lower *level. We therefore established the right in our document that is not subject to easy attack, and placed enforcement of it in the hands of selected people who are also not subject to easy attack. But there are checks and balances there too, just not easily-used ones, but that’s part of the beauty of the system.
But, under Brickerism, in a world in which *Marbury *was nullified and the antebellum “states’ rights” ideology held sway, there would be no such thing as fundamental rights. We could continue to discriminate against people we didn’t like, or whom we feared, on the basis of a transitory simple-majority vote. It is hard to understand how he can fail to see how offensive, not to mention historically and factually and morally ignorant, the ideology he espouses here truly is. Fortunately, it’s a minority view, but unfortunately, that minority has real power.
Well, Bricker can defend himself, but I wanted to add that I believe that this is a terribly unfair accusation.
The immediate distinction between Jim Crow laws and SSM is the intent behind the 14th amendment. The 14th was specifically enacted to protect the rights of former slaves and to give black men equality in political and social life. For over 100 years many southern states defeated the intent behind this amendment by having Jim Crow. Finally, the constitution was upheld when this system was dismantled.
As far as SSM, to say that the authors of the 14th amendment even conceived of such a thing is absurd. To say that the Constitution confers such a right requires such a dishonest slight of hand to be almost laughable. Hell, even way back in the 1990s the most liberal people I knew thought that SSM was a bridge too far. Even the most liberal President in our history opposes SSM. Not just a judicial fiat SSM, but presumably even a legislative enactment.
Now, it is becoming more accepted, and the way to show this acceptance of an emerging approval is through the legislative process and it is beginning to work. To force it on states like Mississippi and Alabama by judicial fiat perverts the wording, spirit, and intent of the 14th amendment.
If the 14th protects SSM, then what new thing to come down the pike does it NOT protect? That’s such a broad reading to give the equal protection clause almost no boundary whatsoever.
Congrats to NY for being the first to do this legislatively. We almost did in CA, but Arnold was too busy diddling the maid to pay attention to doing what was the right thing to do. There’s an interesting front page article in the NYT today about how Cuomo got a few super-rich Republicans to essentially buy the votes of some Republican legislators in order to get this done. I guess sometimes the big money can be on the right side of history.
NYS isn’t the first to legalize SSM via it’s legislature. Vermont, New Hampshire, the District of Columbia, and the Coquille Nation all legalized SSM legislatively with Vermont being the first to do so. NYS also isn’t the first state to not have any kind of residency requirment involved. Only Massachusetts ever had such a law and it was repealed in 2008; 4 years after SSM was legalized.
I stand corrected!
Didn’t Maine pass one through it’s legislature as well?
Yes, but it was overturned via ballot initiave. That isn’t possible in the Empire State. I do believe this the first time SSM was passed by a legislative chamber controlled by Republicans (even if the vast majority of them still voted no).