So basically, when the older generation dies, gay marriage will be legal. Our country has a choice: drag it’s feet on civil rights issues like it always does, or actually live up to it’s name of being the “land of the free.”
So instead they were supposed to just keep the issue in Limbo for two years to give the Troglodyte Right the opportunity to lock an airtight legal program of second-class citizenship into place in perpetuity?
Well, I can’t say it’s the first time total shite has come out of your keyboard…
The MA constitution requires amendments to be passed by 2 sessions of the legislature and then (also) pass a ballot vote by the electorate. That adds up to about 2 yrs (+/-).
There was no legislative option the court offered other than to legalize gay marriage. Perhaps the legislature could have eliminated marriage as a state sanctioned institution altogether, but I don’t think that’s very realistic.
Can you provide a cite for any instance where a court has determined that a state or federal constitution guarantees certain rights, but then holds off on granting those rights for two and a half years in case people want to change the constitution? It’s not like Massachusetts couldn’t have brought up an ammendment before if we really wanted to.
Well, they held off on granting them for several months, didn’t they? The mid-May timeframe set by the court was completely arbitrary.
I guess when you’re not the one waiting for justice the question of time passed becomes academic…
You’d have preferred the SJC implement its decision immediately then.
The SJC didn’t set a “mid-May” timeframe. The SJC set a 180-day timeframe. It’s really not unheard of, in fact it’s rather common, for courts to find in favor of one party and give the other party the opportunity to remedy the situation before imposing a remedy. The Legislature had six months to remedy the injustice and failed to act. The case was filed more than two years ago and the Legislature had time to put an anti-marriage amendment before the people well in advance of the ruling. It failed to act. It seems bizarre to go after the SJC for doing nothing more than its job.
Oh no, I didn’t say that, jayjay. And I’m on record as favoring civil unions (though not full gay marriage).
However, it’s not unreasonable, when placing a burden on the legislature to address a constitutional anomaly, to give them the time necessary to actually do so.
Unless, of course, that’s not actually your aim. If your goal instead is to push through your agenda without any legislative or popular input whatsoever, you’d do exactly as the Massachusetts Supreme Court did.
Bills can be passed in a day, if the legislature wants to pass it. MA had six months to address this deprivation of constitutional rights and failed to do so.
Not seeing that cite from the SJC’s notes that it has an “agenda”…were you going to post that at some point or just continue to rely on baseless and asinine assumptions?
You seem to think that the only way to “address” this situation is to find a way to shore up discrimination. There are other means of addressing it in six months – such as preparing the state for same sex marriages. Or, dissolving marriage entirely, if they were that opposed to gay unions.
It is not the job of the courts to give evil men the time necessary to more firmly entrench their evil ways.
You’re on the record, as you say, as hating gay people, so of course you think the only reasonable action of the court would be to open the door for continued discrimination…
The Massachusetts Supreme Court had made it clear that civil unions weren’t an allowable option in their ruling. So it’s unclear what the legislature could have reasonably done in the timeframe involved.
Also, Spectrum, I’m not on record as hating gay people. You’re on record as saying I hate gay people, which is a different thing altogether.
What could the legislature have done? They could have addressed and alleviated the disparity.
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They could have passed and instituted a gay marriage system on their own, prior to the deadline.
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They could have ended marriage altogether and moved all couples, gay or straight, into a standardized civil unions system.
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They could have simply ended marriage.
What you seem to want is an “out” that would allow them to continue the discrimination that the Court had found illegal. What would have been the point of the ruling?
You can’t give people an out when it comes to ending discrimination. That’s simply asinine.
Though, since you support anti-gay discrimination, you clearly don’t agree.
I don’t see it happening short-term. I predict it’ll get shriller as we near election time, and that paradoxically, they may be invigorated if Dub-man is sent back to Crawford, as they’ll have a convenient boogieman in the Evil Massachussetts Lib’ruls in the White House.
Of course, it’ll help if in those states where there may be legalization,they take things seriously about it. I mean, Massachussetts has never been exactly known as the Las Vegas of the Northeast, matrimonywise, so a wee bit of measured response may go a long way.
OK, and as some people seem to not have noticed even as it has been mentioned before, here it goes again:
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In Massachussetts, it takes 2 Legislatures and a referendum for a State Constitutional Amendment to pass. Which means it takes at least 2 years, no way out. Had the Legislature wanted a DOM Amendment in place by now, they should have started rolling as soon as there were cases in court about the issue – at least 2 years ago.
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What the SCCM did was stay the effect of the decision 6 months to allow the legislature to try to adjust the law to the constitutional finding – by formally legalizing what would be the terms of gay marriage, by getting the state out of the marriage business and leaving it to the ministers, by creating one single civil union no longer using the word “marriage”… The Court DID however instruct that it could not go CU for one/marriage for the other: since the decision was based on a Constitutional equality clause, whatever the answer it HAD to be 1-size-fits-all.
(Speaking of that: the failed last-minute attempt by the governor to reenforce the residency requirement was one of those things that the Legislature COULD have dealt with in the 6 months: if they were concerned about a flood of people coming in for quickie gay-weddings, they could have properly established strict rules applying to EVERYONE trying to get married in the Commonwealth. But nooo, they had to try for some way to exclude gays specifically. That attitude leads me to not be very upset it was crammed down their throats.)
Remember how hard it was for them to get text approved for an amendment? It’ll be even harder to re-approve, I think, after a year of happy gay families setting up lives in the Commonwealth. The testimony of a few dozen families – and perhaps their children – could easily sway some of those “yay” votes back to “nay,” and in the end the amendment may never be on the ballot.
Every couple who gets married is a living symbol of equality, and powerful symbols at that. Every family that sets up a loving home puts the lie to the right-wing’s claims of social doom and imminent gloom. Unless society DOES crumble (it won’t), then nothing that happens from here forward can possibly reinforce the anti-marriage movement’s claims.
It’s one thing to vote against a theoretical. It’s quite another to vote to rend apart thousands of functioning, loving families. Even if the legislature, tucked away in its ivory tower, can hold their nose enough to do it, the average voter, many of whom will soon have gay families in their neighborhoods, kids with married gay parents in schools with their own children, won’t.
The amendment in Massachusetts will not pass. It may not even come up to a vote. The Federal amendment is DOA in the Senate.
All in all, this is the greatest thing to happen in America in decades. Every pair getting wed in Massachusetts are honest to God American heroes, and that says a lot about those who would pull the rug out from under them.
The timetable business is not wrong. Having found that the Massachusetts constitution required marriage to be offered to both same-sex and opposite-sex couples, it seems foolish to suggest that the court should have stayed the effect of their ruling. The fact of the matter is that the Massachusetts constitution requires it - period. On this there can be no real debate.
Now, if the people of Massachusetts are regretting their system of requiring two years to amend their constitution, they would be well-advised to change that system.
- Rick
Of course, it’ll take them two years to do that. 
Yes, but whose fault is that but their own?
The beauty of the federal system is that it allows states to innovate without jeopardizing the entire country. If a state runs into trouble adopting a certain system, other states may learn from their errors; similarly, if a state adopts a system that serves them well, other states may emulate the successful model.
In this case, by luck or ill-fortune, depending upon your point of view, we have two years to observe both the effects of requiring two years to change a state constitution as well as two years of the effects of recognizing same-sex marriage. Whatever decision is reached at the end of that time - wise or foolish - at least has the advantage of being better-informed.
- Rick
You know, I was under the mistaken impression that at least some of the people opposed to “judicial activism” were not using it as a subterfuge for prejudice, but seriously meant that they wanted to see the legislatures rather than the courts correct wrongs embodied in the law.
This thread makes clear that that’s not the case.
Case is brought arguing that gay marriages are legitimate under the Massachusetts state constitution, but outlawed by statute and regulation. Court hears and examines arguments, discovers that they have a point – the broad prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sex in the state constitution means that the law restricting marriages to heterosexual unions violates that provision. Judicial review holds that the constitution supersedes statute or regulation.
An activist judge would have immediately ruled that the state law was so much garbage. The SJC did not.
Exercising judicial self-restraint, they found as they had to under principles of constitutional intrpretation and judicial review. Then they stayed their judgment for six months, to enable the Great and General Court (state legislature) to rectify the problem legislatively.
From the perspective of most members here, the appropriate move would be to legalize gay marriage. However, the court did not direct that.
The legislature might have petitioned for an extension of the stay on the decision, to enable them to enact a constitutional amendment to enable them to keep one man/one woman marriage. While I do not agree with them so doing, it was within their powers to do so, if they felt strongly that that was the preferential solution. They did not do so.
Please note carefully that the court acted in accordance with the principles laid down for it – interpreting the constitution and statutes, and striking a statute which does not conform to the constitution. And rather than causing their judgment to go into effect immediately, they provided a stay to enable the legislature to act. The legislature’s choice was to allow the court judgment to go into effect, while passing for the first time the constitutional amendment that would if adopted twice and ratified by the voters reverse it.
If this does not constitute judicial self-restraint in the face of a constitutional challenge, I’d find it difficult to decide what that term really means.
Yes, the six months is arbitrary. It’s a typical span when a court sua sponte issues a stay on its order to enable the situation which its order would correct to be corrected by other, non-judicial means. The point is that they did choose to issue a stay, that that stay had to have a definite time span, and that they chose one of the longer common time spans – all to allow a non-judicial solution to be created.
So explain to me again how this constitutes judicial activism?
If I can get back to the OP, I don’t think making it legal for homosexuals to marry will lead to the fall of anti-gay marriage groups. Maybe I’m being pessimistic, but look at it this way. Brown vs. Board of Education, which led to the desegregation of schools and the civil rights movement was 50 years ago this month. Still, the KKK and other white supremacist and white nationalist groups are still around and still manage to find new recruits. We’ve seen some of their adherents here, defending their views, adamantly convinced that they are right and denying that their views are tinged by hate.
Human beings seem to have a fear of what is different wired into them. There seem to be some people who believe that if two things are different, one of them must be bad, or at least less good than the other. Homosexuals are different from heterosexuals, at least on the surface, just as blacks are different from whites, just as Christians are different from atheists. Those who are inclined to fear and dislike that which is different will do so, whether what’s different is straight or gay, black or white, Christian or atheist, or, for that matter, bisexual, mixed race, or agnostic. Me, I was the one who was different. I was a straight, white, Christian, but I was English, not American, and my best friend had handicaps which were even more visible than quirks such as having a funny accent and calling potato chips “crisps”.
Hate groups, organized or disorganized, will still be around 50 years from now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were around 100 years from now. While it’s only been 80 years, I do remember a thread here saying giving women the right to vote was a mistake, and I remember a congresswoman saying something to that effect a few years ago. Since I suspect my wish that such groups not exist is about as likely to come true as my wish for world peace, I suppose the most realistic plausible scenario is this: that opposition to homosexual marriage is seen as a quaint, socially unacceptable unpleasantness, not the sort of view which any sensible or thinking person would hold. I’m afraid I do know that’s an insult to those who do believe homosexual marriage is immoral. It’s a harsh thing to wish that the viewpoints another holds tenaciously be effectively eradicated or to be compared with views which, while commonplace 100 years ago, are now considered socially unacceptable pleasantness. Still, I’m afraid this is what I believe and hope for.
Respectfully,
CJ
IMO this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. There is a lot of inertia against change in this country and I don’t think the final outcome is a foregone conclusion. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy may be considered mainstream but gay marriage and clergy are not… yet.
My church, the ELCA - Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is facing the gay and lesbian issue. The current non-policy is that clergy must be married to have a sexual relationship. This means straight married clergy can have all the sex they want, straight singles must be chaste and gay and lesbians must be celibate. Tough titties if you are in a committed relationship as you may be defrocked because of it. The issue of gay clergy and same sex marriage will come to a churchwide vote in 2005 and I’m predicting it will split the church no matter which way it goes. If the vote goes for gay rights a lot of people may leave as has happened in the Episcopelian church.
Our congregation has many gay and lesbian members including a lesbian who is ordained and works as the chaplain in a local hostpital. She often preaches when our pastor is away and she attends with her partner and her parents. She may be faced with leaving the ELCA is the vote goes the wrong way. Many of the rest of us don’t face the same consequences but we will have to face the choice of staying in a church that would not accept all our brothers and sisters or leaving with them. IMHO it ain’t what Jesus would do.