My parents forwarded me the video below, they and a great many of our family friends are Latter Day Saints (Mormons). I couldn’t watch the video and not respond back to them (all of them sending the letter below to about 100+ people who had the video forwarded or CC’d to them. As I get replies from them I’ll post their emails and my responses back. If you don’t understand some of what I’m saying, don’t worry I’m just arguing church doctrine with them, but hopefully there won’t be too much of that
The terrible video:
My Response:
I’m sorry, but I couldn’t watch this and not reply to it. The CA supreme court’s ruling was not a whim, it was a very strict reading of the California and federal constitution. The reasoning of the California Supreme court was the same reasoning behind the Federal Supreme Court’s decision used to strike down the anti inter-racial marriage laws of the 1960’s (more info here).
As we all know “separate but equal” by its very definition is not equal. The Supreme Court decided in 1967, “These statutes also deprive the Lovings of liberty without due process of law in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”
furthermore the California constitution specifically states in Article 1 Sec. 8 (b) ” a citizen or class of citizens may not be granted privileges or immunities not granted on the same terms to all citizens…” the judges weren’t imperialists they were strictly interpreting the State’s and federal constitutions.
I will not participate in a proposition that denies equal rights under the law to a small subset of people, regardless of how I may personally feel about those people’s actions… In fact I will fight against any such proposition as any act which limits the freedoms and rights of my fellow American, limits my own.
Sincerely,
Jonathon Howard
I don’t think most state courts have even ruled on the issue as of yet, most were waiting to see what the CA supreme court was going to do, as many of them take their cue from it…
We’d still be having the discussion, people just won’t lie down and accept discrimination, even if Prop. 8 passed it wouldn’t be the end. Homosexuals won’t stop being “uppity” until they have the same rights and privileges as the rest of us.
Your interpretation might be more convincing if it was also held by a majority of other state Supreme Courts or was held by more than a bare majority of the seven person panel. The difference of one person and we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.
California was one of the “early adopters” of anti-miscegenation laws, with its courts ruling multi-racial marriages were okay about 20 years before the U.S. Supreme Court addressed the issue. Someone has to be first, and on civil rights, I prefer to live with the leading-edge folks than the drag-your-feet-kicking-and-screaming folks.
Thank goodness California voters knew enough to continue affirming these judges to the bench – after all, we could have voted them out, but we made our voices heard and kept them in office.
Exactly Calif Voter! rights are rights and regardless of the argument denying them to people is a crime! I’m glad as well too!
Have I Told You Lately, That I Love You?
No, seriously, love you. Excellent response, nice use of previous SC ruling history. I say, Here! Here! and I concur wholeheartedly. You should watch this weeks COD council stream. There was the wonderful spectacle of a man I’ve never seen before arguing impassionedly for the anti-Prop 8 support position taken by the city to struck down. Why? And I (mis)quote: to stop putting people of faith to the back of the bus. Si se puede.
Gag me with a marriage license.
Civil Rights are not at issue here. Marriage laws in CA previous to this ruling were the same for everyone. This ruling changes them creating an exception for same sex couples because for some reason they should have special rights just for them. California’s government is quickly choosing a state religion, secularism. If things like this ruling continue to occur the ability to freely practice religion will be a thing of the pass. The exact thing the exact thing my descedants fled England for.
Civil rights are the only issue here, what isn’t at issue is your ability to practice religion. Before this ruling, In California, Marriage was for only men and women… homosexual couples had access to nothing, even civil unions didnt provide even the same legal benefits as marriage, and that says nothing about the emotional and spiritual benefits a marriage provides that “civil unions” don’t.
This ruling didn’t make any special rules for homosexuals it simply stated they have the same rights and privileges as heterosexuals… sounds like a civil rights case to me… stop trying to mask your homophobic hate speech in something it isn’t!
Technically speaking, homosexuals are men and women, and have access to “marriage” just like anyone else, depending upon how you define marriage. Gays have often gotten married, though I can’t say I think that was necessarily the right way to handle things. I can’t say it isn’t either though. It probably depends on the person and their circumstances.
As was pointed out in the majority opinion in “Marriage Cases”, (hereafter referred to as “the Decision”) the California Constitution defined marriage as being a union of a man and a woman (Section III-A of the Decision). What gays wanted then was not their right to marry, but to have the legal definition of marriage changed. Rather than using the legal definition of marriage, the authors of the Decision used a kind of bait and switch maneuver and swapped in their own definition (which I presume most closely matches the one you are using). They defined marriage as being a union with the one you love. (A dash of romantic nonsense mixed with a strong dose of idealism. The idealism can be good, but the romantic nonsense… not so much.)
The definition one uses for marriage necessarily is dependent upon one’s personal ideology, unless, of course one is working within a system which imposes a definition. As these four judges have readily admitted, they were working within a system that imposed a definition. Despite that fact, they chose to ignore the system they were ostensibly supposed to be using. Since these judges had to ignore a part of the California Constitution in order to impose their will on us, the reality is that Prop. 22 was not really unconstitutional, but was merely against their personal ideologies. In effect, when they declared the statutes in question unconstitutional, they lied.
I accept that you probably share their ideology and don’t mind the imposition, but it is a fallacy to suggest that this was a matter of simple interpretation of law. It was not. The law was definitively side-stepped, which should be a tragedy to everyone.
‘Technically speaking, homosexuals are men and women, and have access to “marriage” just like anyone else, depending upon how you define marriage.’
Actually no, that argument was also used to justify banning interracial marriage because blacks could still marry blacks and whites could still marry whites, so ‘technically speaking’ whites and blacks still had access to marriage even though interracial marriage was forbidden. That argument didn’t hold up to well when scrutinized regarding the civil rights of the matter obviously.
Plus there is the issue of a form of same-sex marriage that has completely gone under the radar of religious fanatics and that is involving transexuals. In California, if a couple is considered opposite-sex before marriage but same-sex after marriage, that marriage is still legal despite the fact that legally that couple would both be of the same-sex.
So even if you don’t agree with the interracial argument above, there is still a disparity of unequal treatment regarding same-sex marriage allowed for some people under certain circumstances and not for others despite the fact that the law bans the recognition of same-sex marriage itself.
Also, marriage was redefined legally when it prohibitied same-sex marriage from being recognized because LEGALLY before that change such marriages were recognized or could be, which is why the legal definition of marriage was changed to purposely exclude same-sex couples when same-sex couples started to get married in the united states a few decades ago when marriage laws didn’t explicitly state that marriage was only between one man and one woman. Such laws didn’t start cropping up until gay marriages started to happen and people wanted to stop them.
“Actually no, that argument was also used to justify banning interracial marriage because blacks could still marry blacks and whites could still marry whites, so ‘technically speaking’ whites and blacks still had access to marriage even though interracial marriage was forbidden. That argument didn’t hold up to well when scrutinized regarding the civil rights of the matter obviously.”
If you analyze a statement out of context like this it’s easy to miss the point, as you did. Technically speaking, there “was” no form of marriage which was denied to gays, while in cases such as you cite there was, in fact, a legal restriction on marriage. The dynamic is significantly different. It is the difference between wanting to remove restrictions on marriage, and wanting to redefine marriage to be less restrictive. What litigants wanted from Marriage Cases was something which, by legal definition up until that point, was not marriage. As I said, the legal definition was ignored and replaced with a preferred definition. It was not until the judges usurped the constitution with their own philosophical agenda that their analysis could be made tenable.
Unfortunately usurping the constitution should never be considered tenable.
(I should note also that even restrictions on marriage itself are not necessarily unwarranted. As one dissenting justice had noted, the cultural barriers that were jumped to bring about this redefinition of marriage are not any higher than those that must be jumped to bring about pedophilic marriage, polygamous marriage, and incestuous marriage.)
“Also, marriage was redefined legally when it prohibitied same-sex marriage from being recognized because LEGALLY before that change such marriages were recognized or could be, which is why the legal definition of marriage was changed to purposely exclude same-sex couples when same-sex couples started to get married in the united states a few decades ago when marriage laws didn’t explicitly state that marriage was only between one man and one woman. Such laws didn’t start cropping up until gay marriages started to happen and people wanted to stop them.”
Clearly you haven’t read the decision in marriage cases. (Though I also made the point that follows regarding the legal definition of marriage, so you didn’t even read *my* comments very well, which would seem to support my earlier comment that you were not considering the full context of my comments when criticizing them.) Independent of whether such marriages started happening, it is clear that all that was accomplished by such laws as you refer to, was the “clarification” of the definition of marriage. Even those liberal justices who usurped the constitution were honest enough to admit that the definition of marriage was legally only a union of a man and a woman, even before clarifications were deemed necessary.
Personally, I will also note that my own philosophy regarding gender ignores such issues as physical or psychological gender switching since, per my philosophy: “Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.”
Translation: “Gender is fundamentally part of our identities, and is such, at the the very least, on a spiritual level, but perhaps even at a more fundamental level. Hence physical alteration, deformities, and preferences are irrelevant in determining one’s actual gender identity.”
I know. That’s probably still rather foreign sounding, but hopefully you’ll understand why transgender issues such as have been brought up are not necessarily considered a fundamental challenge to me.
Nevertheless, they are issues that might cause some legal vexation, but since we’re still arguing over more fundamental points, I think the handling of that issue can be safely postponed. (I know how I feel about how such issues ought to be handled legally, but they’re highly marginal issues.)