Proposition 8 was declared “unconstitutional” according to the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Ratified on July 9, 1868, the 14th Amendment which was originally passed to protect the citizenship rights of freed slaves. The part in question stems from Section 1, which says:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The Plaintiffs in the Perry v. Schwarzenegger case “allege that Proposition 8 deprives them of due process and of equal protection of the laws contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment”.
The Plaintiffs have made (deliberately) a glaring legal error.The opponents of Proposition 8 argue that homosexuals are a suspect class. But as every student of law and political science knows, homosexuals are not a suspect class. They are not even a quasisuspect class. Homosexuals are a nonsuspect class. This means that the court should only have to apply a minimum rationality standard of review.
The Plaintiffs have demanded a strict scrutiny standard of review, which is only supposed to legally apply to those who are discriminated against because of their inherent physical race, not because of their behavior. In order to get away with this, they have gravitated towards an easily manipulated parenthetical within the definition of suspect class: “when laws treat people differently due to race (or legislation that infringes on some fundamental rights)” (pg. 142, Keeping the Republic, 3rd Brief Edition by Christine Barbour and Gerald C. Wright).
Thus, the Plaintiffs argue that marriage is a fundamental right.
American Dictionary of the English Language by Noah Webster, 1828 (an edition that could have been used by ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment, by the way). -
MARRIAGE - The act of uniting a man and woman for life; wedlock; the legal union of a man and woman for life. Marriage is a contract both civil and religious, by which the parties engage to live together in mutual affection and fidelity, till death shall separate them. Marriage was instituted by God himself for the purpose of preventing promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, for promoting domestic felicity, and for securing the maintenance and education of children.
Webster’s New World Dictionary, Third College Edition -
MARRIAGE - the state of being married; relation between husband and wife; married life; wedlock; matrimony
Marriage is a covenantal union between a man and a woman - husband and wife - that has been recognized for millenia (there are also age and blood relative limitation standards to be met before acquiring a marriage license, so it isn’t necessarily an inalienable right). A homosexual couple cannot demand and acquire marriage anymore than a woman can demand and acquire a vasectomy. It has nothing to do with inequality of personhood or unequal treatment by the law. Rather, it simply cannot happen - unless, of course, some definitions are drastically changed.
The strategy employed by the Plaintiffs is very predictable. When one is losing a debate, the best chance of winning is to redefine the debate. They are not legally deprived of marriage - they don’t want what marriage really is. In order to make their lifestyle seem more normal and comprehensible to the public, they desire to call it “marriage”.
Imagine for a moment that a group of fifteen children are playing a game and two children enter the room demanding the game rules be changed to accommodate them because they have a different standard and insist they can’t do anything to change themselves. If the fifteen players refuse because they view the two others to be wrong, and those two then repeatedly harass them about it, who are the real bigots – those in the majority, or those in the minority?
