The anti-gay marriage movement IS homophobic

blatham wrote:

Quote:
Olympia, Wash. -- A state Senate bill that would have banned discrimination against gays and lesbians in housing, insurance and jobs was rejected Thursday by a single vote.

The legislation appeared dead earlier this month when it was sent to a committee. But the Senate on Thursday allowed the measure to come up for a vote, and it was narrowly rejected 25-24.

Sen. Jim Hargrove, a Democrat, said he opposed the measure for religious reasons.

"I believe adultery is wrong; I believe sex outside marriage is wrong; I believe homosexuality is wrong," he said. "I cannot give government protection to this behavior."

link

Let's rephrase it as follows:
"A state Senate bill that would have banned discrimination against blacks and chinese in housing, insurance and jobs was rejected Thursday by a single vote."

See Article VI, United States Constitution:

Quote:

. . . This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

Upon taking office, Washington State Senator Hargrove was bound by oath or affirmation to support the United States Constitution.

The DUTY to support the Constitution has nothing to do with one's religion (no religious tests required).

The Constitution clearly states:

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

When Senator Hargrove refused to support legislation to ban discrimination against gays and lesbians in housing, insurance and jobs based on his personal "religious reasons," he violated his oath of office.

"I believe adultery is wrong; I believe sex outside marriage is wrong; I believe homosexuality is wrong," Senator Hargrove said. "I cannot give government protection to this behavior."

He is a moron, plain and simple. How does it form a more perfect union to discriminate against homosexuals? How does it establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, or promote the general welfare to discriminate against homosexuals? More importantly:

How does it SECURE the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our progeny to discriminate against others when a government official casts a vote intended to deprive others of liberty simply because of his moral disapporval of them (based on religious reasons)?

The Supreme Court recognizes that the majority of people may disapprove of homosexuality based on their religion. The Supreme Court has stated the issue: Whether the majority may use the power of the state to impose their views on others. The ANSWER is NO. Moral disapproval alone is NEVER a sufficient reason to discriminate against homosexuals or homosexuality.

The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the states from denying any persons within its jurisdiction from the equal protection of the laws. Senator Hargrove's moral disapproval of homosexuality does not justify his refusal to extend equal protection under the laws to homosexuals. Senator Hargrove violated his OATH to uphold and support the Constitution.

IMPEACH SENATOR HARGROVE.

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Debra

Danged activist constitution!

There's a very bright piece by Thomas Frank at the link following - not directly related to constitutional law nor the gay rights issue but deeply relevant to political strategies which underlie what we are witnessing...
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17982

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I agree that those who have religious issue that conflict with current laws (if they are in a public office) they should put the constitution first or if they can't do that, they should resign their position.

At the present time I don't think it is so clear cut what the law regarding gay marriages is.

Also, congress is in the position to change those laws if they see fit.

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As race and interracial marriage analogies have arisen here numerous times, let's add this information for clarity...

Quote:

At least 41 states at one time had laws banning interracial marriage. A 1958 poll found that 96 percent of whites disapproved of marriages between blacks and whites.

That same year, in North Carolina, two black boys, a 7-year-old named Fuzzy Simpson and a 9-year-old named Hanover Thompson, were arrested after a white girl kissed Hanover. The two boys were convicted of attempted rape. As Randall Kennedy notes in his book "Interracial Intimacies," Fuzzy was sentenced to 12 years, and Hanover to 14 years. Pressure from President Dwight Eisenhower eventually secured the boys' release.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/opinion/24kristof.html

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No sign of homophobia here...

Quote:

April 25, 2005 | On Feb. 16, 2000, Matthew Limon gave his boyfriend a blow job and got himself a 17-year prison sentence. The boys were residents at the Lakemary Center, a school for developmentally delayed youngsters in Paola, Kan. It's generous, perhaps, to call them boyfriends. What they did was more akin to sexual experimentation, two boys in a dormitory at night, messing around. Matthew had just turned 18 the week before, and his partner was just shy of his 15th birthday. The younger boy, identified only as M.A.R., consented to the sex, but changed his mind. As soon as he asked Matthew to stop, Matthew did, and M.A.R. has always been steadfast in his statement that what happened was consensual. How the police were brought in, why they were called, isn't clear. Someone from the center complained and the trial was based on stipulated facts -- one paragraph stating that on that night in February, the boys engaged in consensual oral sex. That single paragraph was the basis for the 17-year sentence.

Kansas' statutory rape law prohibits "criminal sodomy" (including oral sex) with teenagers younger than 16. If the object of Matthew's affection had been female, however, Kansas would have afforded him the benefit of its romantically named "Romeo and Juliet" statute, designed precisely for kids like him, kids who have consensual sex with other kids. In Kansas, and in many other states, when two teenagers have heterosexual sex, even the dreaded sodomy, the penalties are relatively mild. If Matthew had had consensual sex with a girl, and the state had prosecuted him at all, the longest sentence they could have given him was 15 months. Instead, because Matthew had sex with another boy, and only because he had sex with another boy, he has spent the past five years in Ellsworth Correctional Facility in central Kansas.

http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/waldman/2005/04/25/limon/index.html

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Nor here...("iniquitous" probably means something like "peachy" in the Italian.)

Quote:

Vatican condemns Spain gay bill
The Vatican, under the new leadership of Pope Benedict XVI, has condemned a Spanish government bill allowing marriage between homosexuals.
The bill, passed by parliament's Socialist-dominated lower house, also allows gay couples to adopt.

A senior Vatican official described the bill - which is likely to become law within a few months - as iniquitous.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4473001.stm

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Blatham, you can quote examples of discrimination against gays from now until doomsday. Those who don't want homosexual activity to exist will continue to say such laws and actions are not discriminatory.

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flyboy

I know. But a functioning and just democracy will not prevail if we remain silent and cowering witness to the proliferation of idocies geared to scapegoat classes of citizens.

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Better to speak and speak and speak and speak and speak....

until they cannot ignore you any longer

Cycloptichorn

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and, for the sake of music, a little Tom Waits

When you walk through the garden
you gotta watch your back
well I beg your pardon
walk the straight and narrow track
if you walk with Jesus
he's gonna save your soul
you gotta keep the devil
way down in the hole
he's got the fire and the fury
at his command
well you don't have to worry
if you hold on to Jesus hand
we'll all be safe from Satan
when the thunder rolls
just gotta help me keep the devil
way down in the hole
All the angels sing about Jesus' mighty sword
and they'll shield you with their wings
and keep you close to the lord
don't pay heed to temptation
for his hands are so cold
you gotta help me keep the devil
way down in the hole

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I have become a bit weary of this thread, but also feel I should sum up my opinion about the issue before I get out.

1) Same-sex marriage is fine with me, and making it unconstitutional would be bad politics.

2) Still, there is a case against same-sex marriage that reasonable people can make, and can believe in. It does not depend on homophobia, and enough people subscribe to it to make "the anti-gay marriage IS homophobic" a slander by over-generalization.

3) If the abovementioned case is valid, the state would have a compelling interest in keeping marriage heterosexual, so the Fourteenth Amendment prohibition against depriving people of life, liberty and property without due process of law does not apply, and neither does this amendment's prohibition against depriving any person the equal protection of the law. This means supporters of same sex marriage have to argue the merits of their case. They cannot take the short cut of declaring the its proscription to be unconstitutional on its face.

I recently ran across a description of that by David Friedman, a professor of law and economics (and my favorite poster on Usenet). So I'll just quote his summary here.

David Friedman wrote:

The argument is

1. Marriage as an institution for producing and rearing children is a very important part of a society.

2. The institution is potentially unstable in a number of directions.

3. Part of what stabilizes it is a clear social expectation of what marriage is supposed to consist of--which means that people who fail to live up to that expectation suffer various penalties, ranging from their own feeling of failure to the perception of other people that they have failed in that very important endeavor, and so are likely to fail in others.

4. The more common and accepted models of marriage outside that social expectation become, the less well that stabilizing mechanism works.

Let me give a real life example from my own experience, having to do with divorce, not same sex marriage.

At the point when my first marriage ended, one of my initial feelings was shame at having strikingly failed at an important endeavor. That feeling was greatly weakened as I discovered how large a fraction of my colleagues were themselves divorced. The more divorce is considered a common and normal outcome, the less the pressures to avoid it.

That may or may not be a good thing--I'm glad I live in a society where divorce is possible. But it certainly represents a change in the institution of marriage, and one that some people might reasonably see as a harm. Similarly for the widespread acceptance of any model of marriage which doesn't center on a partnership for producing and rearing
children and treat other marriages as in some serious sense defective.

Source

As I said, I'm not quoting this argument because I altogether subscribe to it. I am quoting it as a defense against the contention that opposition to same sex marriage implies homophobia, and that proscribing it by law is necessarily unconstitutional

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Mr. Friedman's core assumption--that marriage is instituted to further procreation--is a false assumption, negating his argument at the outset. The vast majority of people who were born since the institution of marriage was conceived of, have been bastards. Marriage has not been common throughout society for more than two centuries at most, and likely not that long.

Marriage is and always has been about rights in property. It confers no magical blessing on those who wish to procreate. It is a denial of basic rights not to allow two consenting adults to secure their rights in property in this manner simply because their sexual practice is offensive to people steeped in religious prejudices.

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Setanta wrote:

Mr. Friedman's core assumption--that marriage is instituted to further procreation--is a false assumption, negating his argument at the outset.

Just for the record, the core assumption isn't Mr. Friedman's. I am quoting him because he summarized the religious right's core assumption better than I would have, not because he believes it, which he doesn't. As to the second part of your contention, Encyclopedia Britannica's "Marriage" entry disagrees with it, for whatever that's worth.

Britannica.com wrote:

Marriage: a legally and socially sanctioned union, usually between a man and a woman, that is regulated by laws, rules, customs, beliefs, and attitudes that prescribe the rights and duties of the partners and accords status to their offspring (if any). The universality of marriage within different societies and cultures is attributed to the many basic social and personal functions for which it provides structure, such as sexual gratification and regulation, division of labour between the sexes, economic production and consumption, and satisfaction of personal needs for affection, status, and companionship; perhaps its strongest function concerns procreation, the care of children and their education and socialization, and regulation of lines of descent. (Emphasis mine, T.)

Again, I'm not saying that this makes the proscription of same sex marriage a good idea. But it does establish that regulating sexuality and procreation has always been among the universal functions of marriage. One can disagree with the premise of the case against same sex marriage, but it simply isn't true that it is false from the outset.

Setanta wrote:

Marriage is and always has been about rights in property. It confers no magical blessing on those who wish to procreate.

Both of these sentences are true. But while it "confers no magical blessing", it does confer a token of social support and approval on those who wish to procreate, and has done so for pretty much all of America's legal history, and the British legal history that preceded the founding of America. Throughout those 1000 years of history, the marriage has been denied for all kinds of reasons, all boiling down to social approval in one way or another.

Setanta wrote:

It is a denial of basic rights not to allow two consenting adults to secure their rights in property in this manner simply because their sexual practice is offensive to people steeped in religious prejudices.

Yes -- but according to the Supreme Court's interpretation of the constitution, the state can deny basic rights if it has a compelling interest in doing so, and the Religious Right is arguing that it has. Moreover, your argument only applies as long as the contract between the two consenting grown-ups does not confer any obligation upon the rest of society. As soon as it does -- and my understanding is that America's marriage laws do -- the rest of society has a right to decide which terms of the contract it finds acceptable. This is true even if society is stupid and bigot about deciding what it finds acceptable.

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That the Britannica so defines marriage comes as no surprise to me, in a society dominated by christian prejudices. However, the historical record clearly shows that marriage has always been used as a means of securing rights in property. The evidence is that the poor rarely married, one might almost be justified in saying never. The poor have a procreational habit second only, legendarily, to rabbits. That they co-habited and produced offspring in abundance is not evidence of a lack of approval of society in their activities, but rather a lack of interest of society in those with no property at stake.

There is no blanket principle adduced by the Supremes to the effect that states may deny basic rights if able to show a compelling interest. In fact, the Supremes have moved, time and again, to limit the power of states, and to void legislation, which restricted basic rights precisely because states could not argue that they had a compelling interest in denying anyone's rights. The Supremes have found that states have a right to limit the exercise of one's rights if they can show a compelling interest. So, for example, states may regulate abortion, but not outlaw it. The statement you make that my argument only applies as long as the contract entered into does not confer obligation upon the rest of society does not fly--as it obligates society to extend to heterosexual couples the benefits of marriage and rights in property, so it is a case of denying equal protection under the law to exclude an entire class--i.e., homosexuals. If we are not to allow homosexuals to wed because of the possibility that this will obligate society, then heterosexuals should be denied the right on the same basis.

I want my money back . . .

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Quote:

Just for the record, the core assumption isn't Mr. Friedman's. I am quoting him because he summarized the religious right's core assumption

That is hardly the religious right's core assumption, thomas. It is an argument advanced (here, by george alone, I think) but it is not the 'evangelical' position which is the one relevant to the US and this administration, and it is not even the Catholic position. Both hold as a core theological assumption that homosexuality is immoral as it violates a scriptural injunction.

Quote:

it does establish that regulating sexuality and procreation has always been a traditional and universal function of marriage.

How 'marriage' is defined and strictured is variable and reflects more than notions of sexuality or procreation. Even married couples were not allowed, until recently, to engage in anal or oral sex in certain states. And as infertile couples (or those planning no children) and America's miscegenation laws demonstrate, procreative capacity has nothing to do with these injunctions.

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Setanta wrote:

If we are not to allow homosexuals to wed because of the possibility that this will obligate society, then heterosexuals should be denied the right on the same basis.

... unless society, as represented by its elected representatives, chooses to accept some obligations but not others.

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blatham wrote:

Even married couples were not allowed, until recently, to engage in anal or oral sex in certain states. And as infertile couples (or those planning no children) and America's miscegenation laws demonstrate, procreative capacity has nothing to do with these injunctions.

For what it's worth, the Federal Republic of Germany, whose constitution contains an equal protection clause similar to America's, has sometimes denied marriage to old people until the 1960s, on the grounds that they were infertile. The practice was abandoned because people came to think it was a bad idea; to my knowledge, nobody ever claimed a violation of our equal protection clause. The point is, even if society doesn't excercise its right to deny its support to some sort of unions, it can still have this right.

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I agree with both of you, I agree with Thomas that not everyone who believes in one man and one woman marriages are homophobic (in the common sense that most understand) and that as is right now the laws are not clear cut enough to say either way. Both sides have to make their cases.

I also agree with Setanta about everything else including mostly the stance most likely the supreme court will have to take when it comes down to it. Because there is not a legal case to be made for them not to be able to marry.

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Thomas wrote:

Setanta wrote:
If we are not to allow homosexuals to wed because of the possibility that this will obligate society, then heterosexuals should be denied the right on the same basis.

... unless society, as represented by its elected representatives, chooses to accept some obligations but not others.

Can't be done without major emmendation of the constitution--prohibiting the exercise of a right by one class of people, while extending it to another clearly denies equal protection under the law. You seriously mistake how the constitution functions if you think that simple legislation can void the application of the constitution.

For whatever it may be worth, i think the Supremes will dodge this one as long as they can. The case against prohibiting homosexual marriage is clear-cut and obvious; but the Supremes, especially the Rhenquist court, have shown an habitual, servile respect for widely held social prejudices.

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blatham wrote:

How 'marriage' is defined and strictured is variable and reflects more than notions of sexuality or procreation.

Yes, but those notions were always part of the definition. That's why I said their imposition on couples are "a" function of marriage, and why I edited the "a" into "among the" in the hopes of increasing clarity.

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The anti-gay marriage movement IS homophobic

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