On the Big Gay Marriage Cases
I was traveling when the California Supreme Court joined its Masshole counterpart in ruling that the drafters of their respective constitutions really meant to guarantee a right to gay marriage, even if none of them knew that, so I didn’t get a chance to blog about it until yesterday, and thought it best to say less rather than more until I’d had a chance to peruse the lengthy decision. Now, I have, so here goes.
My first thought upon hearing that the decision was 4-3 (also mirroring Massachusetts’s experience) was “Oh crap, I knew that that silver lining of Janice Rogers Brown going federal had a cloud attached to it somewhere.” That thought turned out to be (mostly) wrong, as the Governator’s sole appointee, Carol Corrigan was among the dissenters. Thus, Brown confirmation or no, the decision would have 4-3, regardless. However, it would have been a more solid 4-3 split than the case we actually got, which I would argue is more of a 5-2 split on the core issue of whether gays have a “constitutional” right to marry other gays, while only 4 of the prevailing 5 agree that it has to be called marriage. In other words, today’s CA is 4-3 in Massachusetts’s camp, but 5-2 in New Jersey’s.
One aspect of the majority opinion I found amusing was the part that went into detail about how it does not establish a right to “gay marriage” as such, just a right to marriage generally, which just happens to extend to gays but not to polygamists, cousin-humpers, or anyone else who lacks the legal ability to exercise his allegedly constitutional right to “join in marriage with the person of one’s choice.” Footnote 52 insists that this decision absolutely, positively will not lead to a new right to marry one’s brother, but offers no reasons to support this conclusion beyond the usual “ick” factors the Perez court might just as easily offered up against gay marriage.
Lastly, for whatever good it does, Thursday’s decision should put to rest once and for all the uncommonly silly theory that Proposition 22 only applied to out of state marriages. On that issue the ruling was 7-0.
May 17th, 2008 at 11:47 am
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May 17th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
California Overturns Gay Marriage Ban…
The California Supreme Court has overturned a ban on gay marriage, paving the way for California to …
May 17th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Charlotte,
Your post is right, but that was about all that was.
I agree everyone does have a right to marriage. I even agree that other combinations other than man+woman should have access to provisions and entitlements that are reserved for marriage.
Marriage is our social institution around our individual rights to combine in the capacity to create children. It also wraps in the rights of children to have access to their heritage, and be raised in a loving marriage by the two people who combined to create them.
Saying everyone has a right to something is not served by substituting it with something else. If we all have a right to free speech, we are not served by redefining free speech to mean “whatever the government wants you to say”, or any other re-definition. All the needy non-marriageable family combinations (of which Homosexuals are a vast minority) are not served by re-defining marriage. Neither are homosexuals, who are the chief purveyors and customers of the counterfeit.
May 18th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
The act of homosexuality is immoral, abominable, a crime against the common law, a crime against nature and of Nature’s God. No civil authority has the authority to call it a right. I suppose it will soon become a right to marry one’s dog or cow. Or maybe it will be acceptable to marry one’s own sibling or child? How perverted.