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This meeting needs big time FReeping! If you can attend these meetings, make phone calls, etc.

More detailed info at website, talking points etc.

1 posted on 05/31/2004 11:00:22 AM PDT by Valpal1
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To: Valpal1

What you need is two brothers to apply for a marriage license to challenge the law.


2 posted on 05/31/2004 11:04:36 AM PDT by Cinnamon Girl
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To: Valpal1

What's important here is that the SJC CONCEDED that by definition marriage is (& always has been) between one man & one woman. They then went on and after citing Canadian law and the fact that they now construe marriage to be an "evolving paradigm" they proclaimed that marriage can occur between "two people".

But if they conceded, and they did concede, that marriage is between a man & a women they CHANGED & AMENDED the Mass Constitution and overstepped their authority because the word "marriage' appears in the Mass Constitution with its author John Quincy Adams intending it to mean between a man and a woman.

Here's the excerpt:

"We interpret statutes to carry out the Legislature's intent, determined by the words of a statute interpreted according to "the ordinary and approved usage of the language." Hanlon v. Rollins, 286 Mass. 444, 447 (1934). The everyday meaning of "marriage" is "the legal union of a man and woman as husband and wife," Black's Law Dictionary 986 (7th ed.1999), and the plaintiffs do not argue that the term "marriage" has ever had a different meaning under Massachusetts law. See, e.g., Milford v. Worcester, 7 Mass. 48, 52 (1810) (marriage "is an engagement, by which a single man and a single woman, of sufficient discretion, take each other for husband and wife"). This definition of marriage, as both the department and the Superior Court judge point out, derives from the common law. See Commonwealth v. Knowlton, 2 Mass. 530, 535 (1807) (Massachusetts common law derives from English common law except as otherwise altered by Massachusetts statutes and Constitution). See also Commonwealth v. Lane, 113 Mass. 458, 462-463 (1873) ("when the statutes are silent, questions of the validity of marriages are to be determined by the jus gentium, the common law of nations"); C.P. Kindregan, Jr., & M.L. Inker, Family Law and Practice § 1.2 (3d ed.2002). Far from being ambiguous, the undefined word "marriage," as used in G.L. c. 207, confirms the General Court's intent to hew to the term's common-law and quotidian meaning concerning the genders of the marriage partners."


For this to stand we must accept the fact that the SJC has the right to not only interpret the law but to now alter the Mass Constitution when it feels like it.


3 posted on 05/31/2004 11:41:41 AM PDT by Spanky the Yankee (Ense Petit Placidam Sub Libertate Quitem)
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To: Valpal1

Good luck, I hope you can get these anti-democratic left wing social-engineering jerks.


4 posted on 05/31/2004 11:57:53 AM PDT by Unam Sanctam
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