CA Voters - What you can do to repeal Prop 8 in 2010

[essentialsaltes]

Sign the Petition to get it on the ballot. Even if all you can do is to print out the PDF, sign it yourself, and mail it to their offices, that's a stamp well spent.

Comments

Re: 2012

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

As for why race is a suspect class and sexual orientation isn't: it's because the people who passed the Fourteenth Amendment understood and intended it to apply to race and not to sexual orientation. You can't simply extrapolate a principle and extend it to encompass somebody else simply because you feel it ought to.

My ignorance is fairly profound here, but [plays with wiki for a minute] isn't your statement assuming that "original intent" is *the* way to interpret the Constitution? Rather than, say, a textualist interpretation that suggests that when the 14th Amendment says "any person" it means "any person".

Okay, okay, yes there is significant precedent behind the concept of "suspect classes" and who the Supremes have put in that category. But, in the end, they get to make that decision, not the people of 1868, right?

Re: 2012

[ian-tiberius.livejournal.com]

Sure. But if there are two ways to interpret the law, SCOTUS usually tries to go with legislative intent.

The principle here is simple: it's never been the case under the law that a person could marry another person of the same gender, so if you want that to be the law now, then it should happen through the recognized process of amending the law, rather than the judiciary "discovering" a new right.

If the ideological balance of the Court swings (farther) away from my own beliefs, I don't want them suddenly discovering new rights for those I disagree with. (Like organized prayer in schools, for example.) So I can't in good conscience support this just because I happen to agree with the goal. Our system of government is designed to fundamentally resistant to change, and this is a virtue, not a failing.

Re: 2012

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

The principle here is simple: it's never been the case under the law that a person could marry another person of the same gender.

It is the case in a few states, and was briefly the case in California. How does this differ from interracial marriage at the time of Loving when it was legal in some states but not others?

Re: 2012

[ian-tiberius.livejournal.com]

Loving isn't the issue, the underlying law (in this case, the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment) is. At the time that the Fourteenth Amendment was written, gay marriage had never been legal or recognized. Interracial marriage, however, was legal (or at least not explicitly illegal) in most states.

The fundamental question when it comes to authorial intent is "did the authors consider this?" We can safely assume, I think, that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment were aware of interracial marriage. We can't assume the same about gay marriage. Therefore it's legitimate to interpret the amendment as implicitly endorsing one, but not the other.