Necrotic Obsession

Gay people can't get married in CA! Now we can work on some of the less important stuff like wars and stuff!

I don't feel strongly about this either way. But the court did the right thing in not over turning what the people decided.

If what "the people decided" is something that allows a flagrant withholding of civil rights for a specific group of people.....no, the courts did not do the right thing.

Yes that's the mantra. They overstate the hell out of it. But I don't think getting married is a basic human right. This is nothing like the civil rights of black people.

It's funny how when Democracy doesn't go to the left that they want to ignore it and impose with the courts. A soceity of celebrities, professors and courts.

I don't mind if gay poeople get married. But as usual the arrogant approach of the left is annoying as hell. I have to sepertate the issue from them to even remember what I think about it.

Actually, after reading more about the case I think the court did the right thing in this case, not because the "will of the people" was upheld, because that's not what the case was about. The specific challenge was regarding whether the people have the right to vote to amend the Constitution of the State of California. The court also did the right thing in allowing the 18,000 gay people already married to stay married which will set up a US Supreme Court challenge to Prop. 8 under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Lucid, the reason we have a Supreme Court with justices appointed for life is to protect minorities against the tyranny of the majority. You wrote that you don't think marriage is a civil right. I can't think of a more fundamental one. First, the Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." While that may not guarantee someone marriage, I think it certainly guarantees someone the right to the pursuit of it. Second, marriage is a license granted by the government that imparts certain privileges in both the public and private sectors with regards to taxes, insurance plans, pension benefits, etc. By banning gay people the right to get married what the government is doing is specifically banning a class of people from participating in a fundamental human institution that confers privileges and rights to everyone else which seems to me to deny them "equal protection under the law."

I think the anti-gay marriage crowd may very soon rue the day that prop 8 passed and that the California Supreme Court upheld the people's right to amend their Constitution. When this gets to the Supreme Court I wouldn't be surprised to see gay people filing for marriage licenses in Texas.

There is all kinds of regulation on who can marry. This is no different. The people themselves should have some say on what those regulations are. Pursuit of happiness for some people may be to marry 3 women . There is no objective reason not to allow that. It is all just a matter of what the people have collectively decided. The media bashed the hell out of Mormans who marry more than one women.

No there's not. The only regulation seems to be you have to be human and you can't be gay. There is also a limit on the number of people who can enter into a marriage contract, but that same regulation doesn't care who those two people are as long as they're people and they're not gay. I would argue that maybe there shouldn't be a limit to the number of people who can enter into a marriage contract, but by limiting it you are not discriminating against a class of people because any two people, no matter who they are, can enter into a marriage contract - again, unless they're gay. Multiple child molesting felons on death row can get married. Cheating politicians who try to get blow jobs at airport bathrooms can get married. Preachers who get caught on camera with prostitutes can get married. You can beat the crap out of your children and get married. You can kill one spouse and marry another. You can do all of this and get married as long as you're not gay.

It might be about that for some people who have to vicariously assume pet outrages, but I think you're being really ignorant to assume that everyone who wants the measure overturned is doing so out of arrogance and political posturing.

This is a question of civil rights. It wasn't that long ago that people were getting away with viciously beating the fuck out gays, or even killing them, on top of denying them employment, housing, loans, health care coverage, right to medical attorney, ect, ect ect. To say that marriage is not inclusive in the basic foundation of "life, liberty, pursuit of happiness" is to say that there are different implications and limitations of that statement for various groups of people. That is the spitting definition of discrimination. It also implies that we as a whole believe gays have integrated into a comfortable enough distance into our society to fix a cap on their right to lead a "normal life"

The idea that homosexual marriages can be brought up in the same argument for rights to polygamy, beastiality, marriage of minors to adults, ect is crude and stupid.

It's not illegal (in states with any semblance of sanity) to be gay.

It is, however illegal to rape animals and children, and a legal grounds for dissolution of marriage to cheat on your spouse, or enter into more than one recognized partnership.

personally i dont believe marriage is a "civil right". when you are born its not a "right" that you will eventually get married and have a partner. that is something responsible persons capable of maintaining that union in a household for 2 and more.

a "right" is me being able to have free speech and the expression of opinions. if you think about it a "right" is a persons ability to perform actions, such as speech, doing shit that makes you happy, and to treat and be treated with equal respect.

perhaps the term for a union between two persons needs amending. that whatever religion recognizes marriage being one thing like a man and woman, but the state would recognize civil unions between two people or life partners or whatever you want to call it. just like there are multiple types of custody in cases concerning child custody, there should not be one standard to judge the basis of what allows two people to be together, live together, file taxes and get them returned the same way a married man and woman would, or any of those things.

plain and simple "marriage" is a christian, or monothesic term, and they recognize it as the union of a man and woman, no other way. the state needs to coin a term for the equivalent union between two men or two women. now i realize that isolates that group by them needing their own term, but it seems common sense to me.


just my two cents.

No, you are not guaranteed a marriage. As I stated, it's the pursuit of marriage that is a fundamental right. If you can't find someone to marry that's your problem - or not as the case may be - but you should have the right to do it.



Except that the government has no problem granting the right to marry to people who are multiple convicted felons, child abusers, murderers, rapists, tax cheats, the poor, the sick, the desperate, high school drop outs, drug addicts, thieves, pimps, prostitutes, beggars, the homeless, the retarded, fat people, skinny people, people with extremely small genitalia, people who have been photographed having sex with dogs, people who have bought tickets in Mexico to watch women have sex with donkeys, Pee Wee Herman, Paris Hilton, Brittney Spears, anyone anywhere no matter what they have done and no matter what they believe has the right to get married in the United States except gay people. So, what do you mean, "Responsible persons capable of maintaining that union in a household for 2 and more?"

In what way is marriage exclusive to Christianity? And all this time I assumed the Hindu couple that runs my favorite Indian restaurant were actually married!

What you are promoting is the concept of a separate, but equal institution...which is one gigantic rerun of US segregation laws. Did we not learn the first time that you cannot sanely expect equality when you tell one group of people they can have the same kind of cake, but not from the same baker?

what i meant when i said "monothesic" were religions with a Primary God like Allah, Jehovah, God, or whoever. they classify marriage as the union of man and woman, or multiple partners.

and what the fuck is this cake crap? something from the 60's? the civil rights movement was long ago, racism is supposed to be extinct, men and women are supposed to be equal, and people of different sexual orientations are supposed to be the same as you or me.

like i said, marriage is for the people that believe what their religion teaches them. come up with something to fit the new bill so that everyone is happy, no need to discriminate about it either.

Hindus do not believe in one god, they believe in many - in a sort of different way than you're accustomed to. In any case, I'm an atheist so should I not be allowed to get married? Marriage is practiced in one form or another in every culture I'm aware of and the US recognizes marriage in all of them including civil marriages between non-religious people - unless they're gay. In fact, there are only four things that I can think of that will prevent the US from recognizing a marriage.

1. One or more of the participants is not human.
2. The marriage is between more than two people.
3. The marriage involves one or more participants that are not of an age that the US considers legal.
4. You are gay.

Hindus can get married. Satanists can get married. Animists, pagans, believers in Voodoo and Santeria can get married. You can make up your own religion - on the spot - and open a church that professes it and get married in it. You can worship the flying spaghetti monster and get married - as long as you're not gay.

I'd also like to point out something that has been ignored up until now. It is one thing to take away people's rights based on their behavior. For example, we do not allow convicted felons to own fire arms or to vote. So it used to be that maybe you could say that gay marriage should be banned because it is based on a behavior that is a choice. That would still be dubious to me because your religion is also a choice and we don't prohibit people from getting married based on that, but you could at least make that argument. However, at this point I think the science is pretty clear that homosexuality is a sexual orientation that a person is born with just as you are born with your race and your gender.

Whatever you're trying to get across completely dodges the main point. Who cares what one sect of Christianity, or Islam, or Judaism defines as a marriage in their own ceremony....it should have no bearing on whether two other people who are abiding by the legal tenet of marriage that anyone else can follow, can be married by someone who is legally ordained to administer wedding vows. Do you not understand the basic concepts of our Constitution that are in place to prevent discrimination? It's not there to provide a series of loopholes and exclusions for religious groups to assume the power to revoke other peoples freedoms and claim that they themselves are being intruded on by the state.

No one is, at the moment, saying the Sixth Baptist congregation of Wichita Falls should have to wed a homosexual couple. What is being said is that they should back the fuck off and accept that another institution, be it a Progressive Jewish synagogue, and Unitarian church, or the justice of the peace is going to wed gay people and it's going to be called "a marriage"





1. "long ago" is a relative term considering I was born only ten years after MLK was shot.

2. This argument is weak and stupid. If you really think we've done enough to be at the point where people should get over racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination, you probably live in tiny isolated little world where you never actually have to believe that it still exists. Further, you should also have no problem understanding how this is actually a modern form of the same story.

on the topic of the first point let me ask you this. who is it in most cases that performs the marriage ceremony? when i think of it 8 times out of 10 its a priest from a religion who follows that religion and what it believes in. the other times, its a judge or at a courthouse, quick and clean.

and you are completely wrong on the second point. this is the second house where i have lived with a family of another ethnicity, both being african americans, and from being around them i know that racism does still exist. from hanging out with me, they are completely fine, and then later with their chugathug friends they turn into flaming racists. its a double standard and its stupid and discriminatory, it doesent happen all the time either, however it still provides a good example of how things really work.

what i was trying to say above is that because of the civil rights movements, womens rights, and more recently gay and lesbian rights is the concept that we are all supposed to be treated equally, be it at the store, at work, or in a court case. we are supposed to have equality, yet in cases like the one in california, or wherever, discrimination does still exist.