Tom Hanks:"Mormon Supporters of Proposition 8 'Un-American'"

[_Droopy]

It's a weak argument, in my opinion. That would be like telling interracial couples who could not marry each other that there was no discrimination because they COULD marry within their race. How ridiculous does that sound now??

What is stunningly weak scottie, is the idea that homosexuality (a behavior, culture, and lifestyle) is analogous to race (an inherent biological characteristic).

Neither apples nor oranges were ever sweeter.

[_Droopy]

How can you dispute that in California, the ruling by the Supreme Court of that state in fact established as constitutional law in that state that gays had the right to marry?

Apparently the other Pro-8 people didn't have the same trouble as you understanding this, since they undertook to change the state's constitution specifically to void that ruling and specifically forbid it, thus un-establishing it.

Now that its settled that the Founders established this country as a judicial oligarchy, and not, as so many of us have always thought, a constituting republic, we can all sleep easier tonight having this finally resolved in our minds.

The Ninth Circus, all three rings of it, is on the job, even as we speak, as Seth has reminded us yet again.

[_Droopy]

And you believe that, while congressional decisions can be overturned and decisions of the state legislature upended by state referenda and legislators removed from office by ordinary majority vote, and while presidents and governors can be voted out of office in routine elections, both the U.S. Constitution and the California Constitution were intended to create regimes of judicial supremacy in which even one-vote court decisions can never be altered and in which the people, in principle, surrender all of their rights of self-governance to judges who can only be removed from office with considerable difficulty (e.g., on the federal level, only through impeachment

Yes, so long as the outcome is acceptable to the Left, this is what Rollo and Tom Hanks believe.

[Guest]

I never said they couldn't be altered. But amending a state constitution for the sole purpose of taking away from a specific segment of society a recognized and established constitutional right (which the rest of society gets to keep, by the way) is as un-American as it gets.

If the "right" in question was always "fundamental and recognized" as Rollo insists, prop 8 would have been a redundancy. This little morsel of sophistry is clearly intended to show, yet again, that homosexuality and heterosexuality are fundamantally the same thing with genders rearranged, and hence, marriage for one becomes, by definition, marriage for all. And yet, anyone who knows anything about the homosexual subculture, or who has observed it at any length knows perfectly well that, in point of fact, what mainstream homosexuality actually is is a hyperaggressive version of the worst aspects of the heterosexual sexual revolution mixed with a renunciation of the entire judeo-Christian paradigm of human sexuality through, not just the celebration of sexual promiscuity, but by decoupling sex from domestic life and responsibilities by decoupling it from heterosexual relations themselves.

This was, indeed, Gay "liberation", and it was celebrated as such...until the 1980s.

The right to marry a person of one's choice has long been recognized as a fundamental constitutional right of citizens, and Prop. H8te was aimed to take that right away from just one part of society.

More puffy legalistic sophistry. Marriage is not a constitutional right at all, for heterosexuals or homosexuals, and the framing of marriage as such does nothing if not further atomize individuals and their relationships within society as distinct from the moral and social fabric of the culture around them.

Marriage and family is the fundamental core of civil society, and it is not a right, but a responsibility and a privilege given to those mature and capable of entering into it.

Marriage is never mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, just as many other things are not, because if rights, they are contingent rights, not the unalienable sort actually found in the Constitution itself.

But this all dances around the really issue in all of this, which is the redefinition and reconceptualization of gender, marriage, and family as concepts, a project so extreme and unprecedented that only the utter destruction of substantial portions of the constitution as a legal document could possibly circumscribe its true scope.

[_Droopy]

The CA supeme court found it to be just such a fundamental law under the CA state constitution's equal protection clause -- it is the CA supreme court's job to so interpret the CA state constitution.

You see, "The CA supreme court found, the CA supreme court found etc." Really fascinating the manner in which virtually the entire modern Left has abandoned the very concept of accountable representative legislatures. They just don't work very well so much of the time.

That damn hoi polloi, those great, ever so un-PC unwashed masses never able to unite in one lumpen organism, so riddled with false consciousness are they, and overcome by their pitchfork waving bigotry.

What would we do without the progressive, enlightened few like Rollo to lead us into a better world?

[_Gazelam]

Maybe Tom can make a new "Big" movie, only this time he can grow morally and ethically instead of physically.

I like the guy, but hes spent too much time amongst the "artistically" minded who choose to excercise their freedom in innappropriate ways.

[_JohnStuartMill]

You don't know what a right is if you're making this statement. Saying "group X should have right X" is tantamount to saying "group X has right X".

Fine, fine. So who decides those rights--you, the Mormons, the Supreme Court, or the one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater?

Or are you saying that those rights are axiomatic and accessable to all just like the axioms of mathematics (setting aside questions about the axiom of choice)? Somehow, that doesn't appear to be the case (even though one can find many similarities in fundamentals of various moral and ethical codes throughout history).

Traditionally, the court system has been the branch of government thought of as protecting minority rights, which are deducible from the Constitution and its amendments. I admit that these rights are merely civil, but it has been clearly intended since the Founders' time for these civil rights to reflect natural rights, and I don't see a good reason to end that conception now.

[_JohnStuartMill]

It's a weak argument, in my opinion. That would be like telling interracial couples who could not marry each other that there was no discrimination because they COULD marry within their race. How ridiculous does that sound now??

What is stunningly weak scottie, is the idea that homosexuality (a behavior, culture, and lifestyle) is analogous to race (an inherent biological characteristic).

Neither apples nor oranges were ever sweeter.

Race is a social construct. If anything, homosexuality is much more of an inherent biological characteristic. I wouldn't expect you to know that, though.

[_cinepro]

You see, "The CA supreme court found, the CA supreme court found etc." Really fascinating the manner in which virtually the entire modern Left has abandoned the very concept of accountable representative legislatures. They just don't work very well so much of the time.

What the heck are you talking about? If anything, the "representative legislature" of California is far to the left of the CA Supreme Court. Prop 8 was "direct democracy" using California's ballot initiative process; it totally bypassed the "representative legislature", and it was brought by the conservative base.

[_JohnStuartMill]

I'd add that the Proposition 8 campaign used outright deception to achieve its victory. It said that the proposition's failure could lead to mandatory acceptance of gay marriage, that churches could be sued for their beliefs, etc., which are obviously untrue. Ironically, the reactionary measure piggybacked on California's social libertarian streak. I don't know what's more pathetic: that the No on 8 campaign couldn't fight back effectively against Yes on 8's propaganda, or that Yes on 8 won by using what should have been No on 8's core arguments.