03/14/2005
Judge finds California's marriage law unconstitutional. Ruling, if upheld on appeal, would pave way for California to follow Massachusetts in allowing same-sex couples to wed. Judge: "It appears that no rational purpose exists for limiting marriage in this state to opposite-sex partners."
Posted 3:21 PM EST by Andy Towle in Elsewhere | Permalink
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Gay Marriage for Some...little American flags for others!
Posted by: David | Mar 14, 2005 5:02:33 PM
Yeah! Now we'll have a gay marriage ban amendment come before the people of California this November where blacks, hispanics and the far right will vote overwhelmingly for an amendment. The last time California voted on gay marriage they defeated it by a 23% margin. It will easily pass, as it has in every other state and then judges and legislature won't be able to touch the issue and we'll be set back decades because it'll be codified in the state constitution.
Thanks Gavin. Thanks so much for your help.
Posted by: Mitch | Mar 14, 2005 7:33:07 PM
Mitch, you couldn't eat Gavin's shit. You'd like to, but you couldn't. And, you, or anyone else, spare us Barney Pig's self-serving ANALysis of Gavin's courage. The Massachusetts lisping one wouldn't be in office if he weren't representing a tres liberal district, yet he has the gall and balls to demean Gavin for acting from San Francisco. Anyone who blames George II's actions or right wing fucks in California on Gavin gets their understand of current events from comic books. Blame Talks-Out-Of-Both-Sides-Of-His-Mouth Bush and his diabolical butt monkey Rove. They would have exploited us regardless of Gavin or Massachusetts or HRC or fill-in-the-blank. We are the new Jews, the new Communists, the new Black Menace, the latest pawns in their chess game for power.
Posted by: Leland | Mar 14, 2005 10:59:34 PM
So that will be gay marriage for me 'n' Leland, then; and a little American flag for Mitch?
Posted by: David | Mar 14, 2005 11:03:14 PM
Mitch, you couldn't eat Gavin's shit. You'd like to, but you couldn't. And, you, or anyone else, please spare us Barney Pig's self-serving ANALysis of Gavin's courage. The Massachusetts lisping one wouldn't be in office if he weren't representing a tres liberal district, yet he has the gall and balls to attempt to dismiss Gavin for acting from San Francisco. Barney, you'd like to eat his shit but you can't. Anyone who blames George II's actions or right wing fucks in California on Gavin gets their understanding of current events from Fox TV or comic books. Blame Talks-Out-Of-Both-Sides-Of-His-Mouth Bush and his diabolical butt monkey Rove. They would have exploited us regardless of Gavin or Massachusetts or HRC or fill-in-the-blank. We are the new Jews, the new Communists, the new Black Menace. Those Right Wing dogs don't hunt anymore, but they used us in the 50s and they used us in the 70s and we're still ripe for the plucking. You're attacking the wrong side, you fool.
Posted by: Leland | Mar 14, 2005 11:06:02 PM
Just remember guys... Massachusetts isn't out of the hot water yet. We still have a Constitutional Convention coming up where they could pass an amendment to ban gay marriage; that ban would be up for a vote by the people in November 2006. The good news is that we have more pro-marriage advocates in our state legislature than last year AND recent polls are showing that MA residents don't want to see it on the ballot. We're making progress and California is headed in the right direction along with New York and Washington states. **fingers crossed**
Posted by: Gary | Mar 15, 2005 12:05:46 AM
Leland, look at the spew of hatred and psychosis that came out of you! Please rationally refute any of the thoughts I put forth.
Newsom broke the law and a chain reaction has been set in motion that will culminate in an amendment to our state constitution being passed overwhelmingly by Democrats, just as Prop. 22 was, which will set us back decades. None of that is refutable by rational fact, but you just keep hurling your hatred. Now even Barney Frank, who is smart enough to see what's coming, isn't left wing enough for the likes of you.
This is not about being right, this is about winning and we have systematically gone about it the wrong way. The right holds the power in this country now and attacking them, usually with psychotic hatred, moves us farther from the goal line not closer.
You have become your own worse enemy and you're so blinded by anger or hatred or something that you can't even see it anymore.
Posted by: Mitch | Mar 15, 2005 12:12:03 AM
Oh and Leland, Prop. 22, California's DOMA, was passed by 23% of Californians long before George W. Bush ever entered the picture.
Posted by: Mitch | Mar 15, 2005 12:16:40 AM
Talk about dogs that wont hunt anymore...how about liberals getting their leftist judges to impose gay marriage on an electorate that roundly doesnt want it. Such edicts from the bench will continue to make the blue states redder and the red states redder.
Bush/Rove/Congress are simply responding to the demands of their constituents. Bush wont get FMA unless judges keep imposing their will on the people.
Bush's agenda holds so much opportunity for us. Estate tax reform (so you can leave your assets to whomever, regardless of relationship).....private accounts for social security (leave your retirement account to your partner !!)...and erradicating terrorists is about as pro-gay as an issue can get. Islamofascists would gladly kill us all.
Stick with the "Rove exploits us" whine and watch the GOP deepen its control in Congress. Conservatives didnt scream exploitation when Daschle, Boxer, Kerry, Rather, HRC & Michael Moore et al demagogued Bush and Republicans last year.
Yapping about being exploited is nothing more than an excuse for not doing the hard work of changing pubic opinion.
Posted by: JW | Mar 15, 2005 12:37:23 AM
Mitch. The opinion you share with the rabid dogs of the Right that Newsom broke the law might be technically correct. Similarly:
The American colonists broke the law.
Slaves who ran away from their masters broke the law.
Operators of the “underground railroad” broke the law.
Some suffragettes broke the law.
Gandhi broke the law.
Rosa Parks broke the law.
Blacks who sat at Whites Only lunch counters, swam in Whites Only pools, and drank from Whites Only fountains broke the law.
Martin Luther King, Jr. broke the law.
Interracial couples cohabitating or attempting to get married broke the law.
The rebels at the Stonewall Inn broke the law.
Gay Activist Alliance “zappers” of multiple events in thte 70s broke the law.
Gay protestors invading American Psychiatric Association conventions and presentations promoting electroshock aversion therapy broke the law.
Conscientious objectors who refused to go to Vietnam broke the law.
AIDS activists in myriad places from drug companies to the gates of the White House broke the law.
Ad infinitum. Comments?
Refutation of your other remarks begins with separating water and oil. You may well be rational to PREDICT that there will be an amendment to the CA constitution, but it is not yet fact. More disturbingly, you so easily confuse the logical fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc, specifically, “after Newsom therefore because of Newsom” with actual cause and effect because your historical perspective seems only to begin with the passage of Prop. 22 in 2000, and, even then, has gaps the size of black holes into which your absurd statement “long before George W. Bush ever entered the picture” falls.
But before addressing your ignorance about that period, understanding it adequately requires our going back a little farther.
You may have recently heard of the secret tapes a Bush friend recorded starting in 1998:
“Mr. Bush had already identified one gay-rights issue where he found common ground with conservative Christians: same-sex marriage. ‘Gay marriage, I am against that. Special rights, I am against that,’ Mr. Bush told Mr. Wead, five years before a Massachusetts court brought the issue to national attention." - The New York Times, February 20, 2005 (and six years before Newsom “broke the law”)
Despite the quaint lip service he pays to fairness in those tapes, his other opinions and actions when Texas governor spoke louder:
Bush opposes gays in Boy Scouts. (Aug 1999); Bush says hate-crime rules don’t apply to gays. (Jul 1999)
-http://www.ontheissues.org/George_W__Bush.htm#Gay_Rights
Bush said he would veto any attempt by the Texas legislature to repeal an antiquated state law that criminalizes private homosexual activity, calling it "a symbolic gesture of traditional values." - The Advocate, June 1999
Bush has supported a Texas law that allows the state to take adopted children from gay and lesbian couples to place the kids with straight couples. - Salon, 10/12/00.
Many reporters and voters reacted to his gay baiting/bashing in 2004 as if it was as fresh and pure as winter’s first snow. However, those familiar with his campaign against Governor Ann Richards were more like Claude Rains in “Casablanca.” “I'm shocked, shocked to find that Republican dirty tricks are going on in here!”
“The Bush family has never been racist. So it was unlikely that George W. would have agreed to play the race card. The queer card is another matter. That’s the card the Bush campaign played when a highly regarded Republican whom Karl Rove had helped elect to the state Senate spoke out about the sexual orientation of some women close to Governor Richards. ‘It’s simply not part of their culture, and frankly not part of mine,’ the senator said of his East Texas constituents, ‘that [homosexuality] is something we encourage, reward, or acknowledge as an acceptable situation.’ On the other side of the state’s Pine Curtain, the suggestion that the governor had gay associates was enough to create real doubts among voters. A whispering campaign that raised questions about Richards’ sexual orientation closed the deal.
- LA Weekly, September 17, 2004
Returning to the issue of Bush and Prop. 22, while campaigning in California for the Republican presidential nomination in 1999, when the proposed law was in the news, he said he was against gay marriage. He continued riding that horse up to and including his nomination and nominee campaign.
Gov. George Bush: I’m going to appoint conservative people in the Cabinet. It’s none of my business what somebody’s — now when somebody makes it my business, like on gay marriage, I’m going to stand up and say I don’t support gay marriage. I support marriage between men and women.
Larry King: So if a state were voting on gay marriage, you would suggest to that state not to approve it?
Bush: The state can do what they want to do. Don't try to trap me in this state's
issue like you're trying to get me into. ......In my state of Texas, if we tried to have gay marriage, I would campaign against it. - Republican Presidential Debate, Columbia, S.C., Feb. 15, 2000
BUSH: I’m not for gay marriage. I think marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman. - Bush-Gore debate, Wake Forest University, Oct. 11, 2000
In short, George Bush was a negative influencer on the regional and national scene regarding all aspects of gay rights, including gay marriage, before anyone outside of San Francisco had every heard of Gavin Newsom. His political playbook involved exploiting homophobia from his earliest days, only becoming more refined, more far reaching, and more shameless as the years passed. Faced with beating a popular governor, his henchman played the gay card. Faced with a massive deficit, a fractured economy, a war he had declared won revealed as very much not yet over, he played the full deck. Massachusetts and San Francisco were merely late-added poker chips in the game he would have played regardless.
As for Barney Frank. Like Bush, he tries to have it both ways. To hear him tell it, Newsom’s “illegal action” caused Bush’s 2004 campaign gay bashing. Is he also ignorant of Bush’s history or ignoring it to suit his other claim that the action months earlier by the Massachusetts’ court didn’t influence Bush? Attention Barney: Bush, hoping no one will call him on his historical position, says both. The only reason Barney Blowhard is keeping the valve wide open on his Newsom hissy fit, what REALLY melts the tracks in his blowzy boxers is he believes gay marriage (“SF gay marriage” not “MA gay marriage”) cost Kerry the election which cost Barney the opportunity to run for Kerry's Senate seat. These pages in the diary of Barney Frank he will someday regret writing.
Again, his intellectual/moral consistency is far too similar to Mr. Bush who now rejects the states’ rights avenue that he claimed to endorse in 2000. Republicans historically support states rights until a state does something they don’t like. Just like they believe in the utmost sovereignty of the individual until an individual, even in private, does something they don’t like. Again, “activist judges” who act in ways they like are patriots, most exceptionally in their Supreme act of going against their history of states’ rights decisions when they installed George in the White house, while judges who disagree with them are raping American values. In other words, if you don’t like the way the game is going—change the rules.
You are right about one thing. I hate bigots. Not just the sin but the sinner. I also hate stupidity, and people who would choose economic advantage over civil liberties for themselves and others. The 21st century Quislings and Kapos. Which brings me to JW. Much of the documentation I've presented will bounce off him, in as much as, despite what he claims, it is the tail (Bush/Rove/Congress) that first wagged this dog (their constituents). Such idiocy can only be explained by an identification with, a belief in, that canine's ass. A plague on your house.
Posted by: Leland | Mar 15, 2005 5:07:24 AM
The only plagued house here seems to be Leland's...offering little more than vitriolic blather.
Hell you're still plagued by Florida 2000. I was grossly disappointed that the US Supremes involved themselves in that dispute--despite the FL Supremes having blatenly ignored the very State constitution they swore to uphold. I'm a strict constructionist and you wont find any inconsistancies in my approach on that issue. Moreover any Constitutional scholar knows that had the US Supremes stayed out of FL 2000, the FL Legislature would have ultimately chosen electors who would have chosen Bush (per the process defined by their Constitution) . Even your likeminded brothers and sisters at the NY Times, LA Times and the WaPo all concluded Bush won in their exhaustive post-2000 reviews.
Again a fine attempt you made Leland with your "Newsom is Rosa Parks" moral equivalency play. Nice try. A significant difference is that there is no discrimination because you have the same fundamental right to marry (a woman) that a hetero male does. I acknowledge this is a fine point that is lost on pro-gay marriage forces.
A defining characteristic of a representative democracy is its ability to learn. The very court system you look to to hand you gay marriage has also made reprehensable decisions like Dred Scott and Plessy v Ferguson. Courts and jurists screw up. We learn and change for the better....among the many reasons we are the greatest democracy on the planet.
If you want gay marriage, having it imposed by courts will only escalate the reaction from the anti-gay marriage movement. Changing broad public opinion wont garner such a reaction. Its as simple as that.
As for personal economics vs civil liberties, I consider economic freedom and property rights to be the foundation of liberty (note how its at odds with failed communist and socialist approaches). Its also a value constantly under assault by liberals who cannot win on the merits of their ideas/belief systems so they use the power of the bench and big government to persue their agenda.
Posted by: JW | Mar 15, 2005 9:27:01 AM
This is great news for the Republicans, who scare the public on the gay marriage issue to win elections, then go on to try to cut Social Security benefits, thwart funding for education and health care, impose a global ban on embryonic stem cell research, eliminate the estate tax, criminalize abortion, drill for oil in the Alaska Wildlife Refuge, attain a filibuster-proof lock on all three branches of government, and so on. The longer gay arriage can be kept in the news, the better for Republicans.
But what are judges to do? Conclude that a couple of 51 years should be entitled to equal protection under the law – but then rule otherwise?
It is a dilemma. Yet attitudes are changing. Soon, I hope that a majority of Americans decides it’s just not that important to them if gays get drivers’ licenses, marriage licenses, liquor licenses, or any of the other civil stuff law-abiding citizens get.
Posted by: Stosine | Mar 15, 2005 9:43:39 AM
Documentation, quotations, transcripts, names, numbers, dates = "vitriolic blather" when they don't come out of JW's mouth. Does it strain your back kissing your own ass? And how do you see to type with your head so far up it?
The WORLD is plagued by Florida 2000. Don't trust me--ask THEM, save for the Coalition of the Whatever They're Being Called This Week. Let me see: Lesser Britain, Poland, Kennebunkport, Crawford, and Selma, Alabama.
"Even your likeminded brothers and sisters at the NY Times, LA Times and the WaPo all concluded Bush won in their exhaustive post-2000 reviews."
Ignoring your predictable generalization fallacy> Bullshit! They must have exhausted you before you understood them. Bush would have won ONLY in those precincts that Gore stupidly chose to challenge--experts concluded he would have won if ALL precincts had fairly been allowed to vote/be counted. Regardless of what the numbers were--I WOULD have respected Bush more if he had actually won in Florida not in the Supreme Court. But he didn't, Blanche, he didn't. In some countries that's called a "bloodless coup d'etat."
"A significant difference is that there is no discrimination because you have the same fundamental right to marry (a woman) that a hetero male does."
You cretin! I am NOT a hetero male. And what are you? Do YOU kiss boys? Or are you one of those ideologues with too much time much time and too little brains on his hands who TROLLS the Net looking for "liberal" places to infect. And if you are a fellow sodomite, it can't, alas, be for all the dick pix along Towleroad because there rarely are any.
"A defining characteristic of a representative democracy is its ability to learn. The very court system you look to to hand you gay marriage has also made reprehensable decisions like Dred Scott and Plessy v Ferguson. Courts and jurists screw up. We learn and change for the better....among the many reasons we are the greatest democracy on the planet....I consider economic freedom and property rights to be the foundation of liberty (note how its at odds with failed communist and socialist approaches). "
Christ of the Andes! The Commie Card. Admit it, Sticky Fingers: what you really beat off to is reciting such recycled, self-justifying, sanctimonious neo John Birch Society propaganda. Your "don't scare the horses" argument was the same one used against the black civil rights movement whose more extreme extralegal and illegal actions were what finally "taught" later judges and legislatures to overturn such decisions and laws. The logical extension of your "let public opinion decide" argument is eliminating civil courts entirely. Now THAT's democratic of you! Outlawing slavery must STILL piss you off because you could be so much better off economically with all that free labor.
Invincible right wing ignorance: "From the people who brought you Vietnam."
Posted by: Leland | Mar 15, 2005 2:55:48 PM
Vietnam? Kennedy started it, the great societies LBJ expanded it.
Nixon ended it.
JW: "As for personal economics vs civil liberties, I consider economic freedom and property rights to be the foundation of liberty (note how its at odds with failed communist and socialist approaches). Its also a value constantly under assault by liberals who cannot win on the merits of their ideas/belief systems so they use the power of the bench and big government to persue their agenda."
Leland: "Florida! Fox News! KARL ROVE!"
Posted by: Mitch | Mar 16, 2005 2:12:39 AM