Kansas voters approve gay marriage ban

TOPEKA, Kan. - It seems a can’t-lose proposition: Ask voters to ban same-sex marriages and they consistently endorse the idea, from the South to the West.

Kansas on Tuesday became the 18th and latest state to pass a constitutional amendment barring gay marriage. With conservatives pushing to define marriage as between a man and woman throughout the country, similar proposals are on the ballot in three other states next year and more than a dozen are considering them.

New England has been the major holdout; there, legislators and judges have strengthened rights for gays and lesbians. The Connecticut Senate on Wednesday voted to legalize civil unions. If the bill becomes law, Connecticut would be the only state to do so without a court order demanding lawmakers act.

Kansas voted by a more than 2-to-1 margin Tuesday to ban gay marriages and civil unions, and voters also ousted the lone gay city council member in Topeka, Tiffany Muller, who had defeated an emphatically anti-gay opponent in the primary...........

...Yale law Professor William Eskridge, a constitutional scholar active in support of gay rights issues, said that, in the end, New England won’t be the lone holdout, and expects resistance to the bans across the Northeast and the West Coast.

But much of the rest of the country would likely back a ban, he said, predicting as many as 40 states would adopt them. Ultimately, the dispute will be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court....

I didn't see this posted yet, and it was this part that got to me;

"But much of the rest of the country would likely back a ban, he said, predicting as many as 40 states would adopt them. Ultimately, the dispute will be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court."

That is the problem in a nutshell, that we have allowed the Courts to usurp so much power that they may very well have the final say, that the other supposedly 'co-equal' branches will just bend over and take it.

Of course if the Sup Court has the final say, then the Left is guaranteed eventual victory. Our current Court would probably give them gay marriage with the word 'marriage', but at a minimum would impose civil unions. And despite what national polls say, actual votes like this one in Kansas, and in 10 states last year (including the closedly divided battleground states of Michigan and Ohio) prove that when given a choice the people will opt to ban both gay marriage and its euphemistic substitutes like civil unions. So even the linguistically less-threatening civil unions would represent a major victory for the left, since it would convey to same-sex couples the concept and institution of marriage, if not the title, and because it would trample upon most state laws and constitutions.

But even if this Court, or one with a few good Bush nominees, upheld the rights of states to set their own policy, it would likely prove only a temporary victory for conservatives. We've seen with state sodomy and capital punishment laws that what the Court deemed 'Constitutional' not even 20 years ago, are now suddenly 'unconstitutional.'

The only way to win this is to make it so that the final say does not reside with any Court.

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