Bad optics. Alabama is still living down the last time its Governor told the Supreme Court to go to hell. You're begging for comparisons to Wallace's stand in the schoolhouse door.
Bad optics. Alabama is still living down the last time its Governor told the Supreme Court to go to hell. You're begging for comparisons to Wallace's stand in the schoolhouse door.
That is a valid point. But some state, any state, is going to have to draw a line in the sand. It’s getting to the point where we have nothing to lose..except what little we have left of our freedoms.
People got what they wanted out of that staged and prearranged event involving Governor Wallace and the Kennedy Administration.
Wallace got to make his speech and launch his national political career and JFK got to see the court ordered integration go forward in Alabama without the violence that had come down at Oxford, Mississippi that has hurt the Kennedy Administration.
Wallace backed down after he put on this show......it was all for show.
I suspect the Republicans in Alabama are putting on a show for now and will do the same thing in the end, back down.
But the situation is NOT analogous, Ted Olson’s arguments notwithstanding. It was, and is, wrong to discriminate against blacks, or any other group, based on the color of their skin because that is an immutable characteristic.
One’s sexual lifestyle is not an immutable characteristic, but a lifestyle CHOICE. There are many possible lifestyle choices — are we now going to posit that from now on, whatever sexual proclivities and actions certain individuals want to participate in are beyond the power of a state to prohibit? Where will it end?
Blacks don't choose to be black.
Another thing about your post.
You assume that LGBT activists are fighting for some sort of “equality” in our society.
I see bitter and angry people who want to marginalize those who differ with them for grievances real in some cases and imagined in others.
Opponents of gay marriage are being prosecuted and persecuted already with the actions against businesses and people being forced out of their jobs for believing that gay marriage is wrong.
The biggest case in point is that of Brendan Eich being forced out as CEO of Mozilla for giving money to support Prop 8 in California.
His treatment is reminiscent of when Jews were forced out of businesses in Germany in 1933.
The forces supporting gay marriage should be opposed because it is they who plan to impose a “Jim Crow” society on all of us with Americans who believe in traditional values being those who will be marginalized from society instead of African-Americans.
Bad optics.
If you fear the optics in this instance, then give up, you’re done. It ought to be done FOR the optics. The people, where they have voted, have stood with traditional mores.
The Wallace stand against the feds is not an equivalent circumstance at all to this.
The 14A gave the feds ONE area of valid interference with the states: prohibit state-sponsored segregation. So Wallace was out of line and the feds were on solid constitutional grounds.
This is entirely different. The feds have NO constitutional authority to interfere with marriage and their unconstitutional acts and decision must be nullified by Alabama and the other states.
Either the states and the people of this great country reassert the Constitution as the Law of the Land and the ONLY standard for valid federal government action or Marxist tyranny prevails.
This isn’t the same. Stop making ludicrous specious comparisons.
What’s wrong with that?
Seriously, either we believe in state rights and sovereignty or we don’t. Does our support for state rights evaporate when the states do things we don’t like? If it does, then that’s not support for state sovereignty - it’s support for particular policies.
I’ve been saying this for a while now. If you support the right of a state to set its own policies regarding marriage, then you necessarily oppose Loving v. Virginia - whether you think the Virginia law itself was good or bad.
This is like support for free speech. Do we support free speech only when it’s speech we agree with? Of course not. Do we support state sovereignty only when it results in our preferred outcome? I certainly hope not, because that’s expediency, not principle.
The day Wallace stepped aside was the day public education started going to hell. Hindsight is 2020.