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

[ian-tiberius.livejournal.com]

Actually, sexual orientation is considered a suspect classification in the State of California, which should factor into the Boies/Olson challenge against Prop 8.

I don't see that being relevant at all - the Boies/Olson challenge is in federal court, not California court, so they must be challenging this on U.S. Constitution grounds, on which California's classifications have no bearing. Am I missing something?

Gender discrimination is easily dismissed. Each gender has the right to marry someone of the opposite sex, therefore they have parity. Next issue.

I don't see the due process argument either. In Lawrence v. Texas that basically boiled down to saying that whether or not people should be having gay sex, the government doesn't have the right to do the investigation necessary to find out or prove it. Marriage is a public act, recorded by the government by definition, so I don't see how you could apply the same logic.

And tactically, if the ACLU thinks the Boies/Olson lawsuit is dumb and will backfire, I'm disinclined to second-guess them.

Re: 2012

[jedifreac.livejournal.com]

Not everyone in the ACLU thinks it will fail. I've talked to people in the ACLU on this suit and there are a lot of varying opinions.

Here's Boies's take on the lawsuit. Feel free to hack it to bits.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/opinion/20091101_Yes__It_is_a_fundamental_right_under_the_U_S__Constitution_.html

Re: 2012

[ian-tiberius.livejournal.com]

Certainly the ACLU is not a monolith, but according to this the organization as a whole opposes the Boies/Olson suit.

As for Boies' opinion piece, he essentially makes two arguments:

First, "The Supreme Court repeatedly has held that the right to marry the person of your choice is a fundamental human right guaranteed by the equal-protection and due-process clauses of the Constitution". He then cites four cases. One (Loving) is one I've addressed elsewhere. Two pertain to laws that restricted the freedom to marry based on criminal status, which seem irrelevant to me; those cases overruled laws which removed existing freedoms, rather than creating a new right not previously held to exist. The fourth is Lawrence v. Texas, and I've already gone into why that decision had nothing to do with equal protection and everything to do with due process (the government having no right to stick its nose into private affairs, whereas marriage is by definition a publicly recorded act.) Boies has the moral high ground, in my opinion, but I don't find any of this convincing as a matter of law.

Then he presents and counters five arguments against gay marriage. I will ignore the first four because I agree with him. His fifth is that "it has "always" been true that gays and lesbians have been prohibited from marrying". (He doesn't really engage this argument, instead stating 'nuh uh' without supporting it and then quoting Justice Kennedy from Lawrence v. Texas, an irrelevant case.) Anyway, I agree that you can't point to "always been so" as a justification, otherwise we'd still have slaves and women couldn't vote. But you can point to it and say "this has always been the way the law has been interpreted, therefore if we want a different interpretation we should change the law."