Posted on 11/30/2012 7:49:02 PM PST by SeekAndFind
The Supreme Court took no action on any of the 10 gay-marriage petitions before it Friday, despite expectations that the justices would finally announce their plans regarding challenges to three separate laws denying recognition to same-sex couples.
The court could add any of those cases to its docket as soon as Monday, but more likely the justices will continue discussing the matter at their next private conference, scheduled for Dec. 7.
Most attention has focused on challenges to the federal Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 statute denying federal benefits to lawfully married same-sex spouses. Federal appeals courts in Boston and New York have found the measure unconstitutional, finding that the government had insufficient justification to penalize gays and lesbians.
Separately, the Supreme Court has been weighing whether to review California’s Proposition 8, a 2008 voter initiative limiting marriage to a man and a woman. A federal appeals court in San Francisco found the measure unconstitutionally withdrew marriage rights from gays after the California Supreme Court ruled in May 2008 that those rights were protected by the state constitution.
Additionally, the court has before it an Arizona measure known as Section O that withdrew state employee benefits from domestic partners. Heterosexual couples could maintain such benefits by getting married, an option unavailable to gay couples who may not wed in Arizona.
A federal appeals court in Phoenix found Section O violated the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantee.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.wsj.com ...
Wasn’t Lopez in the 90s? It’s been almost 20 years.
Maybe I misunderstood your post, but you seemed to say there should be no civil marriage because those laws were originally intended to keep the races seperate. Which is absolutely false and ridiculous. That’s because you wrote “the laws” instead of, say, “some laws,” or something similar. Now you act as if I’ve never heard of miscegenation laws, which is absurd.
If all you were saying is there were laws against miscegenation, well, obviously. But that’s not any good reason why there shouldn’t be such a thing as civil marriage. Not if there’s a legitimate state interest in family law, which I believe there is. Any state power could and probably has been used against this or that race, or in the interest if white purity, but that doesn’t mean they are forever and in every situation illegitimate, unless you’re an anarchist. It’s interesting to learn, for instance, advocates of abortion and other forms of “planned parenthood” argued on the basis of controlling the lesser races. Does that mean diaphrams are racist? No, and neither is marriage. That’s just a footnote.
I’m not saying it’s imperative we have state sponsored marriage. More that racism somewhere in its history does not forever taint it. Kinda like hiw whites marrying blacks doesn’t taint either race. It could be like any other contract. That’s put all kinds of couples on an even field. But there’s still be men and women having babies, and we’d still wanna encourage them to be bound together, for a while anyway, so as to have less feral youth accosting us.
“I am merely pointing out that civil marriage...resulted from the attempts by individual states to prevent certain outcomes - marriage between whites and other races”
See, here’s the reasoning I was originally responding to. How can you possibly believe that? Even if it were originally racist legal marriage is from time out of mind, or time immemorial. There probably weren’t white people back then, though conceivably it could have been founded to keep tribe A from intermarrying with tribe B. More likely, it was simply an extension if the religious institution.
Your wish to segregate marriage as purely religious and protect it from the corruption of civil law is eccentric, to say the least. What about the criminal law, while we’re at it? Murder being wrong was a religious principle before it was a legal one. Ah, but it is the state’s place to prevent violence because governments are constituted amongst men to protect their rights, and blah, blah, blah. Since when isn’t the state interested in marriage? Why did that suddenly become not its business, or not anymore than any other voluntary association?
“Correct!
We call them ‘Jim Crow’ laws”
Jim Crow laws only covered one region (the Old South), and not uniformly, during one era (roughly from the 1890s to the civil rights movement), again not uniformly. What that has to do with the origin or appropriateness of civil marriage I have no idea.
That’s a bit underhanded, the seeking the permission of clergy part. The previous poster did say it was self-evident. This whole issue of the proper mixture between religion and politics confounds me, honestly. Religion, so far as you have it, infuses itself in every part of your life. Which doesn’t mean it should dominate every part of your life, but no one has any idea in general how much or little it should dominate. Unless we’re talking the establishment if an official national church, or something, in which case we pretty much all agree.
I don’t believe in God, which isn’t to say I have no effective religion. I went to church every Sunday when I was a kid, and gave had to listen to church talk off and on randomly arround me since. So I’m used to it, but that doesn’t mean certain people, Glenn Beck for instance, don’t suddenly sound like mullahs sometimes.
It’s a matter of taste and tone, more than anything. If I was a militant atheist the previous poster might make me wretch. If I were you, apparently, I’d draw inferences about his reliance on specific advice from clergy, rather than rank marriage amongst things on “that broad level of generailty” which it was okay for the Founders to declare God’s will.
If you listen to people in previous centuries, even the deists, they can sound like the biblethumpinist revival tent hellfire preaching ecstatic prophecying theocrats since Savonarola. That’s a matter of tone and taste. To a great extent they thought differently. To another extent that’s just how they talked.
Hey RL! I didn’t see you or I’d have given you a shout!
This is where I am coming from. I was born in 1956. I like to think I knew a better age in this country -and I did. And I absolutely DO Care.
After Bambi's election, I saw what all that caring did for me, for this country. nothing. The government will do as it will, no matter how I feel. No matter how At least 50% of us feel.
If I fight at all anymore, and that is yet do be decided, I'm going to choose the big one, the big battle. Whatever that turns out to be.
If this government, in all its friggin hubris, wants homos to marry - so be it! I know what I believe, I know what is right, I know that the government has no business messing with the Holy Sacrament of marriage. But they ARE going to do it. Let them and their supporters burn forever with that choice.
I have washed my hands of all the social fighting. Which does not mean, by any interpretation, that I have washed my hands of the fight.
This fight belongs to the CHURCH. When pastors and priests start fighting it, I'll be happy to join in. Until then, and I mean the majority of Churches, unafraid of losing their precious tax breaks, until then, me and my house will follow The Lord and the rest can go you know where.
United States V. Lopez, 514 US 549, decided 1995
The Gun Free School Zones Act of 1990, which makes it a crimi-nal offense to knowingly possess a firearm within a school zone, ex-ceeds congressional power under the Commerce Clause. It is ‘‘a crimi-nal statute that by its terms has nothing to do with ‘commerce’ or any
sort of economic enterprise.’’ Possession of a gun at or near a school
‘‘is in no sense an economic activity that might, through repetition
elsewhere, substantially affect any sort of interstate commerce.’’
Sometimes it does feel like the people who should speak and have the power, ie the churches, elected leaders and so on, are silent, or worse, and come around only when they need money or votes. Guess we have to keep an eye on things and “know when to walk away, know when to run.”
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I agree with much of what 101RD states above; but not all. No civil unions of homosexuals. They only want that as a wedge for the entire agenda; the stated goal of which is to destroy the natural aka "real" family and marriage, and have a social revolution. And get ahold of children, for both molesting them and turning them into homosexuals. First of all, every single federal law promoting, tolerating, givin special rights to, celebrating, recognizing as anything other than mental illness and immoral perversion, teaching and so on anything at all about "gayness" should be overturned. What is needed is going back to "homosexuals should not be in the military or in any sensitive professions where they might be blackmailed". And anyone who doesn't want to hire/rent/associate with etc homosexuals should be legally allowed to make such choices. Nor should any homosexuals be teachers, or foster or adoptive parents.
It is not too late. It will be a rough ride, but it has to be done. Allowing mentally ill sex perverts and their leftists buddes running the show will lead to absolute breakdown of civilization.
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I agree with much of what 101RD states above; but not all. No civil unions of homosexuals. They only want that as a wedge for the entire agenda; the stated goal of which is to destroy the natural aka "real" family and marriage, and have a social revolution. And get ahold of children, for both molesting them and turning them into homosexuals. First of all, every single federal law promoting, tolerating, givin special rights to, celebrating, recognizing as anything other than mental illness and immoral perversion, teaching and so on anything at all about "gayness" should be overturned. What is needed is going back to "homosexuals should not be in the military or in any sensitive professions where they might be blackmailed". And anyone who doesn't want to hire/rent/associate with etc homosexuals should be legally allowed to make such choices. Nor should any homosexuals be teachers, or foster or adoptive parents.
It is not too late. It will be a rough ride, but it has to be done. Allowing mentally ill sex perverts and their leftists buddes running the show will lead to absolute breakdown of civilization.
I understand that this government will do as it pleases.
The battle is in the spiritual realm.
Think of the garden, when the disciples would fight the Romans that came to take our Savior to the cross, did Jesus say in so many words, to fight? No. He did not. He was telling us that some things just need to be played out.
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