Posted on 12/05/2010 3:06:48 PM PST by floridavoter2
"...If the Prop 8 backers can't convince them that they have standing to appeal Walker's decision, the ruling striking down Prop 8 will stand - and marriages between gay couples will resume."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
So all that really matters in determining how we have to live in this country is the ideology of the judiciary, not the law itself and certainly not the will of the people. Enough of this!
Congress needs to assert its Constitutional powers and rein in the courts. Maybe after 2012, certainly not gonna happen before.
The vote
YEA 7,001,084 voters
NAY 6,401,482 voters, 4 judges, 2 CA attorneys general
The nays win. The yeas don't even get a chance to make their case in court.
I don’t get it. How can the courts rule on whether a constitutional amendment is acceptable? I will never understand that.
It's an amendment to the Constitution of the State of California.
It cannot be challenged in a State of California court. It can be challenged in a United States court as being in violation of the United States Constitution. That is the grounds for the lawsuit.
This lawsuit will pave the way for 50 state homosexual marriage.
The reason this is a key test case is because 30 other states have state constitutional amendments defining marriage. If the state of California is not allowed to have a constitutional amendment defining marriage, and that having same violates federal law, then presumeably every other state with such definition of marriage violates federal law.
The big irony here is that federal law defines marriage in exactly the same way as does the California and all other state constitutional amendments. Yet a state definition of marriage which agrees with federal law somehow violates federal law.
Liberals don’t care about the above legal contraditions, buecasue they want homosexual marriage and they want it now. I hope that any of you out there who are sympathetic with the gay agenda will be intellectually honest enough to admit that the process by which we’re seeing homosexual marriage imposed on America turns the law on its head, and completely disregards the will of the people, and, established legal procedures.
The left would never admit that, because the left wants what it wants, when it wants it, and would even see the destruction of legal processes which protect leftists in other contexts, just to get what they want in this particular case.
Florida isn't far behind. Our moonbat lefty supreme court regularly tosses amendments and referenda off the ballot before elections.
Neither of you are exactly correct.
Before Prop 8, gay marriage became legal in CA because the California Supreme Court ruled that there was a right to gay marriage under the CA Constitution.
Then Prop 8 passed, which was an amendment to the California Constitution.
This recent court case was brought in U.S. District Court, challenging Prop 8 validity under the U.S. Constitution. Judge Walker struck down Prop 8, pending appeal to the 9th Circuit (which may not proceed if the Prop 8 proponents don’t have standing)
However, Prop 8 could actually have been challenged in California courts as violating the U.S. Constitution. State courts have concurrent jurisdiction with federal courts on federal questions. Once the CA Supreme Court ruled, it could have been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Rocky, I meant to tag GreenLanternCorps on that instead of you.
I haven’t read the briefs. A waste of time. Equal protection is already afforded homosexuals. They do not have a constitutional right to change the meaning of the word marriage.
First off, I think this is a bad, bad path for the courts to go down. I don’t get too exercised about gay marriage myself, but if the Court imposes it, I think it could be seen as another Roe. Far from settling the matter, it could drive a wedge that will last decades.
That said, to respond to you: the judicial approach does completely disregard the will of the majority of people. (After all, the other 48% or so who voted against Prop 8 are “the people” too).
But I’m not sure I agree that it “turns the law on its head” or disregards established legal procedures.
We live in a country where, for example, a Wyoming citizen has 45 times the representation in the Senate as a Texas citizen.
Similarly, A citizen of Vermont more than three times the representation in the Electoral College as a citizen of California.
Given that 60 senators can block any bill, in theory 10% of the population could block any piece of legislation the other 90% were in favor of. For a Constitutional amendment, the percentages could be even more lopsided, since you need 67 Senators or 2/3 of the state legislatures. That means the least populous 17 states (or 7.4% of the population) can block a constitutional amendment the other 92.6% are in favor of.
The winner-takes-all system results in two milquetoast parties that everyone is perennially dissatisfied with. “Radical” views are neutered and subsumed into an interest-group bargaining system that spits out nothing but inaccessible pablum.
And, yes, on top of that, five unelected Justices have the power to upend our entire culture. This is ironic, because the Supreme Court has no army or direct enforcement power. Just as money is only valuable because people believe it is valuable, the Supreme Court is only powerful because of the reverence “we the people” bestow upon it.
Surveys show, year after year, that the Supreme Court is one of the most highly approved institutions in the nation. This despite the fact that it has been striking down democratically elected laws for nigh on 200 years now.
The Court, from the days of McCulloch v. Maryland, has been imposing the values of a law-trained elite on this country.
In the Lochner Era, it read economic due process rights (i.e. Laissez-Faire) into the Fourteenth Amendment, overriding State and Federal attempts to improve conditions for workers, end child labor, regulate food safety, etc. Many balked, but the elites were adamant.
In the New Deal, it dismantled all of that, giving the Federal government a blank check to regulate the economic realm at a whim, a power that it has never really retreated from. Many balk, but the elites are adamant.
In Brown, it imposed integration on vast swaths of the country that weren’t ready for it. In later cases, it enforced integration through busing, exacerbating “white flight” and urban decay. Many opposed it, but the elites were adamant.
Having abandoned economic substantive due process, the Court’s trigger finger got itchy, and it soon discovered in Griswold and Roe a right to privacy in matters of marriage, sexuality, and reproduction. This was subsumed into a generalized liberty right in Casey, which was extended to homosexual sex in Lawrence. Through all of this, the elites were adamant.
Of course, Lawrence doesn’t just stand for the proposition that there is a constitutional right to gay sex. It actually stands for the proposition that we all have a constitutional right to have sex with whoever we want to, absent a legitimate government interest in stopping us. AND, the court said, history, morality, and tradition, are NOT legitimate government interests without something more (by implication, something “real.”) They trot out the old Holmes quote: “It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV.” The elite marches on.
And so, here we are. As Justice Scalia said in his Lawrence dissent, “’preserving the traditional institution of marriage’ is just a kinder way of describing the State’s moral disapproval of same-sex couples.” His point was that if, per Lawrence, moral judgments are not a legitimate state interest, than little justification remains keeping marriage only between men and women.
This is all to say that our system is not built to “regard the will of the people.”
I got sort of caught up and forgot to respond to your actual point. So far, this is only a decision by a District Court, involving only Prop 8. If the Prop 8 proponents cannot appeal, the ruling will only apply to California. If they can, and the 9th Circuit upholds the ruling, and the Supreme Court denied certiorari (which it would never do), it would mandate gay marriage in the entire 9th Circuit.
If the Supreme Court strikes down Prop 8, it would also be striking down all of the other State marriage laws/amendments. DOMA would follow soon thereafter.
“In Brown, it imposed integration on vast swaths of the country that weren’t ready for it.”
You lost me on this example.
Exactly my point. If the state of California cannot define marriage as a man and a woman, then how can any other state, or the federal government, define marriage in that manner?
Another interesting point is that, after Prop. 8 passed, the activists appealed to the California Supreme Court. The same Supreme Court which had ruled for same-sex marriage in California decided that it was legal and proper to amend the constitution of the state to define marriage. Even though the Prop. 8 vote overturned their opinion, the judges on the Supreme Court said it was legal to do so.
So, then the activists decided to appeal in federal court, since the state court affirmed Prop. 8.
And I can’t get away from the fact that these judges are saying that as a matter of federal law, a state can’t define marriage as a man and a woman, when federal law itself so defines marriage. This is Alice in Wonderland or Orwell’s 1984 territory. And to liberals, it’s all ok as long as done in pursuit of a liberal cause.
It was an example of the law profession’s views trumping the views of large swaths of the country. In that example, it was probably for the best, but you can hardly call it democratic.
I’m just arguing that that’s what the Court always does; imposes preferred, standardized values on the country. And right now, the values the Supreme Court are standardizing are those on sex and morality, including homosexuality.
Well... judges don’t generally address laws that aren’t implicated in the case before them. The couples who went before Judge Walker sued for the right to marry in CA, not for joint filing on their tax returns.
Just because they don’t mention DOMA doesn’t mean they wouldn’t strike that law down too if it were before them.
Still a chance that Roe v Wade gets overturned. I don’t know why the legal thrust has never focused on the fraud involved in the original case—that there was no gang rape as the appelant Roe claimed.
Right now it would probably be Alito, Thomas, Scalia and Roberts to overturn. Kagan, Soto, Breyer and Ginsburg naysayers, and, Kennedy gets to decide the fate of millions of unborn children.
Yes, I agree, the court has overstepped it’s boundaries for far too long.
I like what the Michigan State Supreme Court did in response to the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Michigan State v Sitz, allowing roadblocks to investigate a crime for which there was no probable cause to suspect those stopped.
They said “Fine, you can’t find the protection in the US Constitution, we find it in ours and to hell with your decision.” I suspect more state supreme courts could do this in various cases if they had the cajones.
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