Dog Trainer To Correct Big Gay Error?
Yesterday I blogged about a rather difficult exchange with L.A. Times Readers Rep Kent Zelas regarding the Times staff’s New Year’s boner on AB 849, the blatantly unconstitutional gay marriage bill vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger. I promised to keep you apprised of any changes, even while cautioning against the holding of breath. I received a followup today that gives reason for cautions optimism:
Thanks for your further thoughts. I believe I have a better understanding of your position and have taken it to the editors who oversaw that opinion piece.
Kent Zelas
Asst. Readers’ Rep.
At this point, if the paper doesn’t correct itself, we’ll have it, not the Readers Rep, to blame.
UPDATE: Patterico sez I’m tilting at windmills. Time will tell.
UPDATE x2: I’ve since been contacted by a senior editor, confirming that the message was indeed passed on to the editors. Apparently, their misunderstanding (which, alas they have yet to acknolwedge as such) was based on the Legislature’s self-serving statement that Prop 22 applies only to marriages conducted outside California. Were the courts to accept that hackneyed theory, then AB 845 could indeed have allowed same-sex marriages to be conducted inside California. It still wouldn’t have spared the courts anything, though; to accept that interpreation of the scope of Prop 22, the Supreme Court would have to rule on Prop 22, else the Court of Appeal precedent of Knight v. Superior Court stands, and Prop 22 applies to in-state and out-of-state marriages alike. Seeing as the tired “California Proposition 22 only applies to non-California marriages” meme apparently won’t die, perhaps a reader can explain the rationale behind it. It’s clear why Prop 22 opponents want to construe Prop 22 as narrowly as possible, but does anyone really think California voters intended to vote for a law that prohibits the state from recognizing same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, while recognizing same-sex marriages conducted in-state? If so, why on earth?
January 12th, 2007 at 8:53 am
They only said that so you would shut up about it. Good try though.
January 12th, 2007 at 9:39 am
You may be right, but if so, it’s not going to work. By alerting me to the fact that the editors themselves are aware of the error, they’ve set me up to identify the next “error” as an outright lie rather than the mere journalistic malpractice I assume this one was.
January 15th, 2007 at 10:43 pm
I remember reading somewhere – might be a case, can’t recall off the top of my head – that the voter info packs for prop 22 said that it would apply to marriages conducted outside of california because same-sex marriages weren’t currently allowed in california. That is the basis for the reasoning.
Personally, I’d rather they just put the whole thing to a vote again, gay marriage would probably pass.
January 16th, 2007 at 9:06 am
I’ve heard that argument before, but it’s bogus. For one thing, do we really want to open that huge can of worms and start re-defining every successful ballot initiative to mean not what it says, but what one elected official said it meant – or worse, what one high-profile ad campaign said it meant – prior to the vote? For another, even if we did interpret initiatives that way, the argument would be revisionist in the extreme as applied here. The only ostensibly neutral statement appearing on the voter pamphlet is the Analysis by the Legislative Analyst, which said zero/zip/nada about this initiative drawing any supposed distinction between in-state and out-of-state marriage. Further, Prop 22 opponents – the very same people who are now conveniently claiming Prop 22 only affects out of state marriages – drew no such distinctions in the argument against Prop 22, or the rebuttal to the argument in favor, and in fact made all sorts of doomsday predictions inconsistent with any such distinction. On the flip side, the argument for and the rebuttal to the argument against the initiative both raise the potential loophole of Section 308 as one of several reasons why they believed Prop 22 was necessary – neither said anything to the effect that preventing recognition of out of state marriages was all Prop 22 would do.
As to whether a gay marriage initiative would pass, I tend to think it would not. Surely Mark Leno agrees; else his bill would have repealed Prop 22 outright and gone for a popular vote, rather than attempting to dance around Prop 22 by “interpreting” it out of existence.
February 7th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
Call Ted Haggard. I’m sure he can get you a discount on the “tina” and hustlers you crave.