New judicial ruling on gay marriage ban
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld, by a vote of 2-1, a judge’s lower court ruling that California’s “Proposition 8 ”” a response to an earlier state court decision that legalized gay marriage ”” was a violation of the civil rights of gays and lesbians.”
The case will almost undoubtedly end up in the Supreme Court, so these rulings are in the nature of preliminary skirmishes on a front in a larger war. The current ruling was very narrow, and applies only to a right that had been given (gay marriage in California, which was judicially given) and then taken away (by the people, in voting for Proposition 8).
So it’s not just a fight between advocates of gay marriage and those who oppose it. It’s also a fight between the judicial branch and the people’s ability to legislate—or, rather, to overrule the ability of the judiciary branch to make decisions for it. In other words, a power struggle.
[NOTE: I wrote about previous rulings in the case here, here, and here.]
As was said a year or so ago about another issue like this, “Why don’t we cut the crap and save the time and just ask Justice Kennedy what he thinks?”
Ah, yes. The most-overturned court in the land strikes again.
On a separate note, neo, as a Kennedy admirer, I’m surprised you missed this new story regarding an old predator:
Teen mistress addresses relationship, pol’s Cold War fears in memoir
What a filthy, wicked court – even judicial system – there is no holding back the immoral forces of perversity: it is no longer considered just to hold to a body of law that implements a basic moral system; unless that system is really the perverse system of progressivism.
Yep, it’s a battle between a very few, lifetime-tenured, and the vast numbers of the hoi polloi who need to be made to do that to which they have in their millions objected.
It is the critical struggle of our times. Perhaps bigger than the power of POTUS issue.
We should simply legislate the 9th circuit permanently away. It has nothing to do with America or our Constitution.
Thing is, they *are* representative of plenty of people. The 9th didn’t just happen overnight. They are, like Obama, a symptom, not a disease in themselves.
Couple of years ago on another blog, going around on the subject.
I had heard of, had actually heard, some feminists and other progressives fiercely opposing marriage and wishing to overthrow it. Some said gay marriage would be a useful tool.
I said as much and was challenged most vilely. While wondering if it was worth my time to go looking, somebody else did and posted the stuff.
Made no difference, except for the usual folks who misrepresent what you say and give you a hard time for what they claim you said. They had more stuff to misrepresent.
LAG: I didn’t miss it. I ignored it.
I know that reports are that Kennedy did a lot of fooling around. And I assume where there’s smoke there’s fire. But I also know that, when everyone involved is dead, and in this day and age when papers don’t seem to care about fact-checking and neither do book publishers, that anyone who was around a famous person back then can say anything and everything he/she wants, and it will be published merely for the sensationalism and the chance to do more smearing.
Hey, let’s all pile on! His wife is dead, his son is dead, his brothers are dead, most of his aides are dead—no one left to clear his name but Caroline, who was a mere child and wouldn’t know anyway. I think these kiss and tell (only it’s not kissing) books and authors are vampires sucking the blood of the dead.
Could be the lady’s 401k tanked. Got to do something.
It might be an exaggeration to say that, from Dred Scott (or Marbury) on, the history of America has been the unfolding story of one power grab after another by the black-robed laywers. But maybe not such an exaggeration, really.
I am more or less (much more more than less) happily married for almost 40 years to the same woman. As a libertarian (note the lower case l) I am mystified why anyone is concerned what 2 consenting adults choose to do with their bodies. I am mystified why anyone is concerned what 1 man and 12 women or 12 women and 1 man choose to do. What consenting adults choose to do is not my business, its not the business of the courts, nor the business of the legislators, or anyone else.
If you want to be free from the courts and legislators you have to tolerate choices that other consenting adults make about how they choose to live their lives. Otherwise, you are merely saying that your suppressive dictator is more wise and benevolent than someone else’s suppressive dictator.
“I’m the one that has to die when its my time to die, so let me live my life the way I want to.” JH
Parker: I’m totally with you – everyone should be able to do whatever they want with any or all other consenting adults, even if many others object to it. Provided – that all the parties involved are completely responsible for all of the consequences, foreseen and unforeseen, of their actions, including the cost of their health care. Further, those who object to the behavior should not be required to hire, rent to, or otherwise associate with the participants.
Capn Rusty says, “Further, those who object to the behavior should not be required to hire, rent to, or otherwise associate with the participants.”
I’m a bit Goldwater. I encourage anyone to put a sign on their business, apartment building, or whatever that says: No kikes, no queers, no jungle bunnies, no greasers, no wops, no towel heads, no whatever; that is their right. Likewise it is my right to refuse to patronize their restaurants, taverns, hotels, etc. I want to see it all up front. If, in my POV you are a bigot, I want to know up front so I know where to spend my greenbacks.
If you want to live free, allow others the same, and back it up with you bucks or your 357. 😉
@ Parker. You are mystified by your straw man: nobody is objecting to what consenting adults do with their bodies but to the “progressive” attempt to change the definition of an immemorial fundamental social institution. You can approve, disapprove, or have no opinion at all about that attempt or the resistance to it, but that is the issue, not the one that so conveniently mystifies you. (I am, by the way, most certainly not agreeing with your sheer assertion about what is and is not anybody’s business.)
As a libertarian (note the lower case l) I am mystified why anyone is concerned what 2 consenting adults choose to do with their bodies.
So … no problem with drunk drivers? With tweakers, junkies, or huffers?
This is not a desiccated forensic point. Marriage and the nuclear family are bedrocks of a stable society. Making a joke out of them, as this bids fair to do, undermines society. (Think the Folsom Street Fair set will treat marriage with respect? Think again.) Undermining the present social structure is, of course, why leftists support such measures.
Look at how the inner city black community has fared from the 1950s (poor, but stable) to today (poorer, wildly unstable, and crime- and drug-ridden) to see the effect of destroying marriage and nuclear family.
The Ozzie and Harriet model might have been the subject of leftist scorn, but it produced healthy, stable families and a correspondingly sound nation. The “Heather has two mommies” rubbish … not so much.
Marriage is not just a religious issue. It is also necessary for the government and society to have in place to determine property, paternity, and other legal rights. Society in the form of the government has an interest in producing new, responsible citizens who can carry on the work of building the society and making it a desirable place to live. Children born out of wedlock, poorly parented children, juvenile delinquency, and failure to educate chilldren are all things that society hopes to prevent through encouraging strong marriages and family life. We tax payers pay for the care of those chilldren that aren’t properly parented. Instead of thriving, productive, contributing citizens they become a financial and moral drag on society.
Thus society must take an interest in family and marriage if we care about the future. Gay marriages are not formed primarily for procreation because, as far as I know, it is a biological impossibility. Yes, they can adopt and use surrogates, but it is far from clear that such “families” are the ideal setting for child rearing. Before the AIDs epidemic most gays wanted no part of marriage or commitment. It cramped their promiscous life style. It was only when the uninsured lovers were unable to get health care benefits of their partners that they began to see that being legally recognized as something other than lovers was a good idea. As time has passed, the NOW crowd began to realize that this was an issue they could get behind because it would further disrupt the traditional marriage contract and destroy the traditional family that they hate. It has taken many years to get to this point, but they are slowly succeeding with the help of the men in black robes.
Just another reason why this election is so important. The executive appoints judges.
ELC,
You or the 9th circuit or the members of the 112th congress or the SCOTUS or Pope or the 12TH Iman or whom or whatever can decide what you or they may wish about an “immemorial fundamental social institution”, but frankly I don’t give damn because it is not an “immemorial fundamental social institution”. My maternal great, great grandfather had 5 wives. This I learned from my maternal grandmother. You seek to pass judgement on others that came before your f*&^ing immemorial time but IMO you are standing on shaky ground.
What do you fear about what others choose to do with their private lives? How do their choices diminish your choice? Marriage is a religious institution. Religious entities can decide who can or can not enter into the thing we label ‘marriage’. IMO this is and should be separate from what the state (government) recognizes as the legal choice made by free individuals.
If you, in your personal life, want to be free you can not be free if you do not allow others to make their own choices about how they live their lives as long as they are not harming others. What are you afraid of? Are you afraid of others do not walk in your shoes and talk your talk? If so, you are no better than the mindless running dog lackeys of BHO, Inc.
Occam,
“So … no problem with drunk drivers? With tweakers, junkies, or huffers?”
I am most disappointed because I expect better from you! Do consenting adults, deciding how they may choose to live their lives, automatically become drunk drivers causing harm/death to others or junkies robbing or killing others for a fix? This question/comment is totally ridiculous. See the definition of non sequitur.
I must reiterate, what harm is caused to others if (consenting adults only) 2 men or 2 women or 12 men and 1 woman or 12 women and 1 man decide they are ‘married’ and/or want to become sexually involved? If you are honest you must admit that your objection is specious at best and totalitarian at worst.
I ask you the same question I asked ELC, WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF? Freedom to chose how you live your life as an individual is for everyone or it is NOT inherent to anyone, including you. Choose! We are all, as individuals, free to choose how we live our lives (as long as we are not directly harming others) or else no one is free.
Choose! You are either willing to respect the right of others to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness or you seek to decide what is the correct definition of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for others; and to enforce your definition you are willing to use the power of the state to point the muzzle at all who are outside your definition of political/social correctness.
Choose!
Excuse me, but I forgot to add to ELC & Occam;
Both of you have a definition of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that is very limited IMO. That does not make us enemies. It means you both have a ways to go before you understand the wisdom of my opinions. :-:
Parker,
Your last paragraph illustrates the problem: your definition of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is completely me oriented. Gays and lesbians only become parents when they make extraordinary efforts. The emphasis is on the me. For heterosexual partners, children are a possibility that must be taken into account. The responsibilities for children are so great that societies developed rules, rites, and rituals to ensure that children were nourished and cared for by both parents. Even when the rules are violated, society remains aware of their existence; a standard remains.
When same sex couples cannot even acknowlege the need for such standards, they will seek to destroy them whenever they become inconvenient. Same sex couple simply do not produce the same biological responses to childbirth and children that biological parents experience. We can pretend that the situations are the same, but they are not. A new father holding his child for the first time is intimately connected to the mother and the sex act that produced the child. We denigrate this experience at our society’s peril.
I would like you to look at To Kill a Mockingbird, the scene where Atticus is sitting on the porch listening through the window to his kids talking about their dead mother. You see sadness at his own loss, sadness that his kids didn’t get to know their mother, and the enormous weight of having to care for his kids in a way that honors her memory. It is way beyond what feels about surrogates or sperm donors. And as Occam said, it is way beyond anything that the Folsom Street crowd can begin to understand, much less honor. We can not allow these people to set our standards.
Parker,
What do they need the official stamp of “Married” for? Is it not enough that they’re allowed to do their peculiar stuff behind closed doors? Your point about being against personal liberty would only apply to those who advocated banning homosexuality even from the private sphere. I don’t see anything of this kind here. All I see is an objection to homosexuals appropriating a traditionally heterosexual institution.
Thanks, anyway, for reminding me why I’m not a libertarian. Somehow the freedom to drill holes in the floor of one’s sailing ship doesn’t appeal to me.
Do consenting adults, deciding how they may choose to live their lives, automatically become drunk drivers causing harm/death to others or junkies robbing or killing others for a fix?
Do drunk drivers automatically cause harm/death to others? Do junkies automatically rob or kill others for a fix? Your argument cuts two ways.
My point was that certain behaviors ultimately undermine the stability of society. Perhaps not in every case, perhaps not immediately, but eventually, perniciously, they do just that.
And to answer your question, THAT’S what I’m afraid of.
As an aside, I’ll add that in my now rampant geezerhood I’ve heard the same type of superficially plausible arguments made for any number of things that in the event turned out to be lousy ideas, as was foreseen by those disparaged as fuddy-duddies. As a consequence, I’ve become allergic to that sort of sophistry.
To take a non-emotive example, consider the argument 40 years ago to lower the drinking age. Proponents earnestly bleated that “An 18 year old can give his life for his country, but can’t buy a beer.” They advanced arguments for why this was iniquitous, and how lowering the drinking age would have all manner of beneficial effects, dogs and cats would get along, etc.
So many states lowered the drinking age to 18. Then the number of 18-21 year olds killed in drunk driving accidents skyrocketed, to the point that some states changed the drinking age back to 21. Turns out that the distilled (?) wisdom of society was sound, and that those sticks in the mud who opposed lowering the age had had a valid point all along. But who are we to decide what an 18 year old does with his own body, eh?
Other examples:
Welfare did and does encourage a culture of dependency, contra those who argued that it wouldn’t, and that providing welfare was the compassionate thing to do. It would help families without a male breadwinner, they argued. Result: destruction of the black family.
Social Security was originally sold as just going to be a top-up, a little something to sweeten a worker’s retirement savings. Workers would never come consider it their sole source of support, no way. Yet here we are.
Destigmatizing illegitimacy was similarly a matter of compassion and reason. It wouldn’t lead to an explosion of illegitimacy, that was the crazy talk of curmudgeons.
Liberalizing attitudes toward drugs – a hardy perennial among libertarians – is another example. It wouldn’t lead to more drug use, and attendant problems. Of course not. It would decrease drug use, by removing the aura of mystery and danger and romance attaching to it. Except it didn’t. Heroin and then crack destroyed inner cities, while cocaine addiction became a problem even in upscale neighborhoods.
Mainstreaming homosexuality is in the same category. The unenlightened resisted this for various reasons, including public health considerations. How could anyone be so backward? Homosexuals just want to show their love. No cultural or public health threat there. Next stop: Folsom Street Fair, bathhouses, hepatitis B, then AIDS.
So I take a jaundiced view of earnest, superficially plausible “rational” arguments for changing standards of long-standing, because many such standards exist – or used to exist – for a very good reason. And the law of unintended consequences was never repealed.
OB, you have explained the issues and why they matter quite nicely. From one geezer to another, “Thanks.”
Thanks, JJ.
The homosexual who advocates for homosexual “marriage” is in the same position as the Afrikaner advocating for apartheid: it is easy to see how the arrangement will benefit homosexuals; it is not clear how the invention of new forms of “marriage” will benefit anyone else. Homosexual “marriage” is a perversion of marriage as race laws (whether those of Nuremberg, Jim Crow, Apartheid, Hindu castes, affirmative action, studies programs, or set-asides) are a perversion of human equality. The advocates hatred of human decency and the traditions and customs formed by history reveal their true political and moral allegiances.
The libertarian who supports homosexual “marriage” believes he advocates for freedom from oppressive moral codes, but actually repudiates his own morality. Without the abolition of laws compelling the recognition of marriage as uniting two persons in one, the creation of homosexual “marriage” will coerce and compel people who do not believe in perverse and corrupt forms of “marriage” to obey and been seen to obey laws at war with their own mores, morals, traditions, religions, and customs. They will be unfree, and made unfree by phony “libertarians” who use true libertarians as fellow-travelers and dupes to achieve their totalitarian ends.
These impostors seek only obedience, not freedom. To coerce and compel citizens who fail to follow state-imposed morality is a repudiation of liberty, not its essence. The libertarian who supports homosexual “marriage” receives the same thrill from the violation of his own beliefs–the thrill of compelling those whom he hates to kowtow before his superiority–as the homosexual receives from his perversions of his reproductive desires. No libertarian can support homosexual “marriage” and claim to be or remain a libertarian until he first advocates and achieves the abolition of laws which compel the recognition of marriage itself: an anti-human goal that will never occur and should never occur.
I am not a Kantian. I do not believe anyone may legislate for the human race, nor even for their neighbors without their consent. Though I believe “homosexual marriage” is an impossible term similar to “unicorn ivory,” if people wish to pretend that “homosexual marriage” is like marriage good and true, let them; as long as no person by word, thought, or deed, including policy or commerce, is intimidated, coerced, or compelled to pretend that “homosexual marriage” is real. Then let there be polygamist, pedophile, bigamist, bestialist, voyeurist, sadist, masochist, rapist, polyamorist,dominatrix marriages et. al.; let all forms of human sexuality write their own form of marriage into law; but let no one be compelled by it.
Libertarians like Parker and his ilk should consider seriously the consequences of their ideals, if enacted. Polygamy, as only one example, is extremely bad for a society. Few men taking multiple wives leave many young, poor men without mates. What is worse than bands of young, frustrated, unmated men roving the countryside? Societies that allow polygamy are sick and backwards. Just look around. there are many examples.
Well, my ‘ilk’ understand that if you leave people to their own choices and demand that they live by the consequences of their actions you get a freer and more responsible society in the long run. Seriously, many of you express a desire for a society that represses the choices of others (who do not live your lifestyle or follow your religion or philosophy) to a degree uncomfortably close to that imposed in Islamic societies. Its either your way or the highway. To me, this smells of fear, not individual liberty. It smells of fear, not equality under the rule of law.
I find it amusing that I, who has been with the same woman in a strictly monogamous relationship for decades, am somehow a pariah to some of you for advocating that other consenting adults are free to choose, as I and my wife have done, how they wish to live their lives.
“We live in a rainbow of chaos.” – Paul Cezanne
Get used to it.