Posted on 02/20/2004 1:38:35 AM PST by CounterCounterCulture
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:45:49 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
San Francisco officials went on the attack Thursday in their fight over same-sex weddings, suing the state on the grounds that laws defining marriage as between a man and woman illegally discriminate against gays and lesbians.
In bringing the Superior Court suit, officials also tried to gain an edge over anti-gay marriage forces by naming as defendants the two groups that have sued the city, the Proposition 22 Legal Defense and Education Fund and Campaign for California Families.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Here's the website for REPENT AMERICA
And, no, that's not the same Bill Jones in the article that's running in the Senate primary to oust Barbara Boxer.
The article fails to mention that the judge involved, who refused to take action, is a homosexual. If he had an ounce of integrity he'd recuse himself.
With a stream of gay couples still lining up to get married, the three-ring circus, formerly known as City Hall, got a little wilder Thursday afternoon.
Two Christian gay-marriage protesters were arrested for trespassing in City Hall around the same time that Sheriff's Department officials stymied a Santa Cruz man from issuing a citizen's arrest on a volunteer performing same-sex unions.
Sheriff's Department spokeswoman Eileen Hearst said that two men, 18-year-old Nathaniel Engart and 24-year-old Michael Marcavage, were arrested, cited and released for trespassing at around 3 p.m. The two were part of a larger group of eight who entered the building at around 2:45 p.m. to protest the issuance of same-sex marriage licenses.
According to Deputy Assessor Rich Hillis, the group knelt in front of the County Clerk's office and started singing Christian hymns. Sheriffs asked them to leave, and while most complied, two stayed inside.
"Two of them announced that they wanted to be arrested on T.V.," Hearst said. "And while we couldn't accommodate their T.V. request, they were arrested."
While the young Christians were getting arrested, 37-year-old Jake Olthof was trying to make a citizen's arrest, after driving up with his family from Santa Cruz. The lucky target turned out to be 75-year-old Bill Jones, a volunteer, who said he had performed 30 to 50 same-sex marriage ceremonies per day since Monday.
Jones said Olthof observed him conduct a wedding between two men and even agreed to take a photograph of the wedding group after the ceremony was finished. Olthof then calmly told Jones that he was arresting him.
"We all started walking, and he said, 'I'm putting you under citizen's arrest,' and I started laughing, and he said 'no really, I'm going to arrest you,'" said Jones, who is gay. "And I said, 'Oh great, I love a man in a uniform, bring him on.'"
Olthof, who was waiting inside City Hall in order to get advice on conducting a citizen's arrest from the Sheriff's Department's attorney, confirmed Jones' story.
Olthof said he decided to take the law into his own hands after reading a newspaper story regarding The City's same-sex marriages and studying its legality in a law library. He stressed that he did not attempt to make the citizen's arrest for religious or homophobic reasons but because he thought state law should be respected.
"Civil disobedience is something somebody should do as an individual. If you break the law, you get arrested, you go into it knowing that ... [you should be] willing to sit in jail for what [you] believe in," he said. "But when the government says that we're not going to enforce the laws because we disagree with it for whatever reason, then I think that it's an assault on the rule of law."
Olthof said that he was bounced from the Sheriff's Department to the Police Department, with neither agency willing to take responsibility for dealing with a citizen's arrest.
Eventually, he ran into acting Police Chief Heather Fong, who informed him that such an arrest fell under the jurisdiction of the Sheriff's Department, which later confirmed that its position was that the marriages were legal.
It was a good thing for Jones, who said he started getting a little worried after he realized that Olthof was not joking.
"The guy was serious, I mean he was dead serious. I'm the one who was laughing him off," Jones said. "But the point is, I have tickets for the Lion King tonight and I didn't want to spend it in the whose cow [jail]."
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