Mormons Meddle and Destroy Marriage

"They just took marriage away from 20,000 couples and made their children bastards.”

How in the hell does children of gay couples be bastards? The biology just isn't matching up!

Adoption by a spouse in marriage renders an illegitimate child legitimate. Didn't you know this?

Many gay couples choose to raise children. Some of these children are conceived by a gay parent who is closeted and married to an opposite-sex spouse at the time that his or her child is born. Such children can never be illegitimate. However, some children raised by gay parents are deliberately conceived out of wedlock (e.g., by a woman using sperm donated by a gay male friend) and then adopted by the biological mother's same-sex spouse. Adoption by a spouse in marriage then renders the illegitimate child legitimate. Similarly, two gay men may adopt a child carried by a surrogate mother (who gives birth whilst not married to either man). The adoption by two married persons then renders the child legitimate.

You would have known this had you spent a few minutes reading about this...


PHILIP CHANDLER

Ultimately, though, we can only blame ourselves for poor organization and inconsistency. On the whole opposition to 8 was a spectacularly disorganized endeavor.

http://www.tips-q.com/content/we-start-pointing-fingers

Prop 8 would have gone down in defeat 51%-49%

It were "blacks" who voted for Prop 8 overwhelmingly at over 70%. How many of them are Mormon?

Don't make this a race issue. We failed to close the deal. We failed to appeal to the black and Latino communities.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Associate Professor of
Politics and African American Studies at Princeton
University points out that the arguments in opposition to
gay marriage by the religious right are virtually identical to the arguments used by the religious right in opposition to inter-racial marriage.

They were better persuaders than we were. Blacks understand that separate isn't equal. We just didn't get them to think in those terms.

It is true that seven out of 10 black voters approved Proposition 8. However, the black vote consists of about 12% of the overall vote. We were winning up until the last two or three weeks, which is when the pro-Proposition 8 forces pulled ahead of us. The bottom line is that, while it is certainly true that we failed to engage black voters, the Mormons flooded the state with their 19 million dollars, and put together a series of inflammatory and wildly inaccurate advertisements. The electorate responded to these advertisements by voting in favor of this grotesque proposition.

The question now is this -- what are we going to do about this? Three lawsuits have already been filed. From an analytical standpoint, there is no legal difference between banning gay marriages, and preventing Catholics or Asians from marrying. This analysis is predicated on the law of the case. The court held that gay persons comprise a suspect class, and that marriage is a fundamental right. So Proposition 8 worked to deprive a suspect class of a fundamental right. The analogy would be a proposition that selectively prohibits a racial or religious minority (both of which are suspect classes) from marrying. How will the California Supreme Court handle this mess?

Continued...

I believe that the state high court should hold that the constitutional carnage inflicted by Propositioni 8 cannot be performed using the initiative process -- if the people really want to inflict this damage on the gay community, they must invoke the constitutional revision process outlined in Article XVIII of the state constitution, as opposed to the constitutional amendment process. The constitutional revision process requires that a supermajority of the state legislature sign off on the proposed change (something that will never happen given the composition of the state legislature, which has voted to legalize gay marriage at least twice within the past few years).

I don't like seeing judges make law -- but the whole point of the equal protection provisions of the state constitution is to CHECK the will of the people, particularly when a suspect class is harmed.

PHILIP

As far as prop 8, the stats were quite interesting. Whites voted for gay marriage just barely, young voters under thirty voted for gay marriage. But the black vote was passed the ban. An overwhelming 70-30 against for ratio.Now I have many black friends, and I will say this. Most are liberal because the dems cater to them, they think that the republicans are racist. I got a few to understand, but the majority won't let that go. But when it comes to the family makeup, they are for traditional families overwhelmingly. There view of the family structure is very conservative, even though they admit not many live by the belief. But when it comes down to push and shove the family unit is one man and one woman.

The thing is prop 8 is a constitutional amendment to the California state constitution. When the voters approved the measure, do you think the judges in California's supreme court are going to throw out a ratified new piece of their constitution? If they do then you may as well say that the whole state constitution is worthless. I do not think the judges will do that. And because it is a state constitutional amendment it can go no farther. The US supreme court has no jurisdiction there. They cannot decide on a state constitution.

James writes: "And because it is a state constitutional amendment it can go no farther. The US supreme court has no jurisdiction there. They cannot decide on a state constitution."

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Response:
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No, this is incorrect. When the citizens of Colorado voted to amend their state constitution in 1992, to repeal existing measures that protected gay persons from discrimination and to prohibit any branch of the Colorado state government from ever again passing such measures, the Colorado Supreme Court threw out this amendment to the state constitution ("Amendment 2"), on the grounds that it violated the fundamental right of gay persons to equal participation in the political process under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The US Supreme Court granted certiorari, and AFFIRMED the judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court (Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996)). Although the US Supreme Court claimed that it affirmed the judgment of the state court employing a different rationale, scholars have pointed out that there really was no such difference (although the US Supreme Court claimed that Amendment 2 lacked a rational basis, the Court engaged in a more searching standard of review than mere rational basis review).

If a state constitutional amendment violates a privision of the US Constitution, then the US Supreme Court does have appellate jurisdiction.

Also, a state supreme court can hold that a new amendment to the state constitution violates other provisions of the state constitution. The state court then has to decide which provision to salvage, and which provision to strike down.

PHILIP

The old saying from the civil rights era was "If people needed to vote for me to vote - I would never get the right to vote."

It is the job of the courts to protect minorities from tyranny by majorities. As I see it, there are at least two avenues of attack:

1. Equal protection.
2. Separation of church and state.

Furthermore, Gov. Schwarzenegger made a very strong statement today. He may have been sending a message to the the judges that he appointed. We'll see.

Meanwhile, we must not allow the opposition to divide us:

http://www.tips-q.com/content/dont-allow-right-wing-divide- us