Landmark gay marriage trial starts today in California

Stile writes:

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The trial is public, yes? That is, if I lived in the area and had the free time, I could walk into the court room and listen in on the proceedings, right?

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Good luck on that. While the trial is public, getting access to the court will be tightly controlled. Since this trial is of such great concern, they will want to make sure that access is given to what they consider the "appropriate" people such as members of the press, affected parties, etc. I'm sure there will be slots available for interested members of the public, but there won't be many and you may have to explain why you deserve it more than others.

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"Important" cases have been televised before, right? I think the OJ trial was televised? Have others been televised as well?

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Cameras in the court are extremely controversial. While the entire "CourtTV" cable channel was based upon having televised court cases (and the OJ Simpson trial certainly boosted their profile), courts have often been resistant to having cameras in the courtroom for fear of it affecting the trial. The defendant is entitled to a fair trial and while the affairs of the court are to be public, there is a difference between making it public and shouting it from the rooftops.As we saw in the OJ case, the lawyers became very aware of the cameras and played to them.With regard to the Prop 8 case, we see this playing out: Those wanting the trial publicized want to make sure that those defending the law have their bigotry exposed for all the world to see. Those that are demanding no cameras are claiming that by having the trial publicized, the witnesses will be intimidated (which plays to the plaintiff's point that the only basis for Prop 8 is animus toward gay people which is a violation of the 14th Amendment.)

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Is the precedent for this, basically, that "important" cases get more access to public venues?

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No, the precedent is basically whether or not the judge thinks he can keep control of the proceedings with cameras to deal with on top of the actual trial. Some cases are so controversial that having them played on the nightly news is problematic.The Supreme Court has never allowed cameras in the court. It was a huge deal when, during Bush v. Gore, they allowed an audiocast of the questioning. If I recall correctly, they have never allowed it since.The questioning regarding the arguing of Prop 8 before the California Supreme Court was broadcast.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

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Minds are like parachutes. Just because you've lost yours doesn't mean you can use mine.

NoNukes writes:

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It isn't all that unusual for children to express some early confusion regarding their gender, and to have that confusion resolved with help in part from a male role model in the house.

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Actually, it is quite unusual. Children don't have gender identity issues as a rule because there are no end of role models for them to see. This nonsensical idea CS raised that a child at three "doesn't know" is simply not borne out by any studies of actual children. On the contrary, children at that age know very well about the difference between boys and girls and are very adamant about it.The kid certainly wasn't "influenced" by his parents and if the kid's been pointing this out for eight years, it is hardly "just a phase."And if we have to point out the sexual orientation of the parents, then thank heaven this kid's being raised by gay parents. As we have found out, kids do better when the parents are gay than when the parents are straight. It's much more likely this kid will have supportive parents who will not judge than if the parents were not gay.

NoNukes responds to me:

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As we have found out, kids do better when the parents are gay than when the parents are straight.

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Really? Where is this revealed?

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It goes all the way back to Baher v. Miike, the Hawaii same-sex marriage case from the 90s. In trying to justify discrimination against gay people, the State argued that marriage should be disallowed to gay people because it would harm the children raised in such households. However, the State's own witnesses pointed out that no, children raised in households headed by gay parents were no worse off and on some measures better off than those raised by straight parents.And a recent University of California study found: The general consensus seems to be that children raised by gay parents tend to be more accepting of diversity than those raised by straight parents. This, on its face, isn't too surprising.But, of course, that's not really the concern, is it? No, the concern is that if a child is raised by gay parents, then the kid is likely to "become" gay, as if you could force anybody to be gay, as if being gay were some sort of disease. Everybody seems to ignore the fact that the overwhelming majority of gay people were raised by straight parents. The sexual orientation of the parents is not communicable to the children.There was really no need to mention the sexual orientation of the parents of this child. It is truly irrelevant.

Thanks, crash, and I enjoy our discussions, too, even the heated ones. But between work and me having fallen in love...though long distance and thus I'm often out of town every other weekend...I tend to have "better" things to do with my time. But I've noticed of late that the convos tend to be on topics I'm not all that versed on such as geology so I am content to sit back and watch. I'm a bit relieved that the never-ending agnosticism thread seems to have died.

Taz responds to me:

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Of course this got all the liberal commies all riled up. They called it racist and that you shouldn't make a statement like that.

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And most likely, they're right. Why? Because nobody says something like, "Asian people tend to eat rice," in the context of nutritional anthropology.Besides, given how pervasive rice-eating is, it is puzzling why one would make the point of singling out Asian people. Everybody tends to eat rice. It's one of the main staples of the human diet, third after corn (which technically isn't as impressive since a lot of corn isn't consumed by humans) and wheat. Those "Rice Krispies" everybody ate as kids? They're made of rice. The risotto you have at dinner? Rice. Rice-a-Roni may be a San Francisco treat that is made with pasta, but it's also made with rice. Somebody who would point out that Asians tend to eat rice would seemingly be ignoring all the rice non-Asians eat.It's funny you mentioned that because NPR had a story regarding how the rice market panicked recently: India noticed that wheat prices were going up and thus, to ensure it had enough food to feed its people, it enacted protectionist practices with regard to its rice crop, preventing any from being exported. That set off all the other countries and despite the fact that there was plenty of rice, the price of rice sky-rocketed because nobody was willing to sell any to anybody else. It took the US to ask Japan to release it's trade-agreement rice (the US, in an attempt to normalize trade levels with Japan, sells rice to Japan...who doesn't want it since they have plenty of their own. It just sits there and can't be sold outside of Japan.) No rice was actually sold out of this store, but the fact that it might be was sufficient to break the rice bubble.

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By hushing everyone who makes a statement like that, it suggests there's something wrong with the act of eating rice.

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Yes and no. It suggests that they don't just eat rice but that they eat rice beyond what is considered "normal" as if a Western diet is the standard to which all others must aspire.

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It is a fact that east asian people really do tend to eat rice just like we tend to eat our hamburgers and hotdogs.

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Factually true, but misleading. As mentioned above, Asian people do eat rice, but so does everybody else. Why would anybody think to make a point of this? What could possibly be the purpose of singling out a group of people for engaging in an activity that everybody does just as much?Let's not play dumb.

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To collectively hushing someone for making such an opinion is just wrong. This political correctness is getting ridiculous.

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Incorrect. Your right to your opinion does not come with a right to an audience nor does it make it a valid opinion. Your freedom of speech does not come with freedom of consequences and just as you had the right to express your opinion, other people have the right to express theirs and call you on your stupidity.This is typical conservative bullshit that feigns offense at getting pushback as if refusing to accept intolerance were some sort of intolerance.

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The point I'm trying to make is even if children raised by gay couples tend to become gay, it would still not be reason to stop gay people from raising children.

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Indeed. But the fact of the matter is that we still live in a world where being gay is considered a bad thing. They claim that if we accept the idea that there are people who aren't straight, then the entire species will go extinct ("If everybody were gay....") It's all fine and dandy for you and me to understand that the premise is nonsensical, but we're dealing with a system that starts with that premise and we are forced to tackle it on their terms.The bigots hold the power. They will not give it up easily.

Minnemooseus responds to me:

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The top 9 rice consuming countries are Asian.

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That's not what "Asian people tend to eat rice" implies, though. Just because rice is most commonly consumed in Asia doesn't mean Asians tend to eat it.Lutefisk is most commonly consumed by Americans (it's not that big of a thing in Scandanavia), but that doesn't mean Americans tend to eat lutefisk. Most lutefisk is eaten by Americans but most Americans have never even heard of it, let alone eaten it.And again, rice is one of the most common foods of the human species. More than a fifth of all calories consumed by humans are from rice. Yeah, the biggest rice-eating countries may be Asian, but that hardly indicates that non-Asian countries are slackers when it comes to the white stuff.

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"Asian people tend to eat rice", to me, qualifies as a good "general statements and stereotype". I have to side with Taz on this one.

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And you'd be wrong. Again, you're completely ignoring context.Let's assume that "Asians tend to eat rice" isn't a comment about Asians but rather a comment about rice. Such a statement might be understandable on an episode of Good Eats when Deb's on (she is, after all, a nutritional anthropologist), but you failed to respond to the underlying point:When was the last time you had a discussion of nutritional anthropology? Do you really think it's likely that "Asian people tend to eat rice" is going to be uttered by someone discussing the history of grains in the human diet?Or is it going to be some bigot making a point about how weird Asians are?Context is key.

Taz responds to me:

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Are you really going to argue that everybody eats rice just as often as asian people?

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I'm going to argue that you're playing dumb when I asked you very nicely not to.

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Again, are you seriously going to argue that western people eat rice just as often as east asian people?

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No, I'm going to argue that you're playing dumb when I asked you very nicely not to.

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So... let me get this straight. Since the bigots hold the power, we should cave into their demand and recognize that there is something wrong with being gay?

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Huh? Where did you get that?You seem to have a binary method of attacking the premise that there's something wrong with being gay. I, however, am arguing that there are multiple ways around it.Yeah, it'd be nice if we could get the powers that be to suddenly realize that being gay is of no concern and that if told that doing X would likely result in their kids being gay, they would shrug their shoulders. Where if asked what they thought if their kids were gay they'd respond, "If that's what makes them happy, then I'm happy."That ain't gonna happen, not now, not for a long time if ever.Therefore, what do we do here and now to help gay people? At the very least, what can we do to help us move along that road? Part of that process is showing that gay people don't have poor lives. That being around gay people doesn't cause problems. That accepting their existence and treating them the same as others doesn't cause anybody to do anything they don't want to do.After all, to accept your premise that the question is nonsensical, we have to establish that being gay is normative.

Percy writes:

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I was proposing two different types, one called a "union" (or any agreed upon label) and the other called a "marriage."

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Let's ignore the unconstitutional and patently offensive suggestion that "separate but equal" should be given to gay people. Let's actually go with it.OK: If there are people out there who cannot handle the concept of equality under the law, they are free to come up with a new word to describe their special friendships. I know! "Holy matrimony." It has lots of benefits: People already know the phrase, it points out their religious objection to equality, and it emphasizes the difference between the legal contract of marriage and the religious ceremony.Of course, there's the problem that "holy matrimony" has no legal meaning, no legal recognition, no legal significance, but that's the price those who cannot handle equality have to pay. They were the ones who decided to separate themselves from marriage. They will need to fight to justify their need for a "separate but equal" contract.Of course, there are plenty of churches that provide ceremonies for same-sex couples, so even "holy matrimony" will have some trouble.If this is truly a question of semantics, then it's the people who are confused about marriage who need to come up with a term to describe what it is they're in so that it can be distinguished from marriage. The term "marriage" is already in use and everybody knows what it means. That's why when Loving v. Virginia was decided, we didn't have this silliness of "interracial matrimony" to describe interracial couples. The law already understood what "marriage" meant and thus, no laws needed to be rewritten; not at the federal level, not at the state level, not at the local level, no treaties with other nations regarding reciprocity of the marriage contract. That's because the contract of marriage didn't change.The problem with a "separate but equal" contract is that by calling it something different, you necessarily declare that it is something different and thus it can be treated differently. We have seen this in every attempt to have a "separate but equal" contract of "civil union." Every single time, despite legal demands from the courts that the contracts had to be equivalent, the contracts were different: Different ages of consent, different rights and responsibilities (the case in California was decided on the fact that there were multiple distinctions between the contract of marriage and the contract of civil union despite the mandate that they be equivalent), and the simple fact that they don't go from state to state the way that marriages do.If there are two things that are supposed to be the same thing, then you call them the same thing. The only way to ensure that all contracts are equivalent is to have only one contract.It is naught but homophobic bigotry to insist that gay people have to be treated as second-class citizens in order to coddle the pwecious fee-fees of the bigots. We didn't do this when we let blacks get married. And I mean to each other. It used to be the case that blacks weren't allowed to get married at all. We didn't come up with "black union" when we realized that treating them equally didn't deny whites anything. We didn't come up with "interracial union" when we realized that interracial couples don't deny whites anything. Why do gays have to be the ones who have to just take it from the bigots?If it's a bogus argument when applied to race, why does it suddenly become legitimate when applied to sexual orientation?And to Faith's idea that "blacks find it offensive," I find it offensive that anybody would dare to deny the equivalency of the fight for civil rights based upon race with the fight for civil rights based upon sexual orientation. If we're going to go down that road, gays have it worse:You don't have to come out to your parents as black.Your parents won't kick you out of the house because you're black.It is illegal to lose your job because you're black, but legal if you're gay. The fight for marriage equality has made life very difficult for many gays: If you get married, you just declared yourself to be gay and your employer can fire you for it.It is illegal to be denied housing because you're black, but legal if you're gay.You don't have your children taken away from you because you're black.It is still legal in this country to torture gay people. It's called "reparative therapy" and often involves "treatments" such as hooking your genitals up to electrodes and being administered electric shocks while you are made to look at gay images. People are actually going to court to fight to be able to do this to minors because their parents have decided to send them to "treatment" in order to "cure the gay.'Are there differences between being black and being gay? Of course. But to pretend that it is somehow an offense for gay people to insist that we take the lessons that we learned from the Civil Rights movement and apply them to the Gay Rights movement is disingenuous at best.It's the last gasp of someone who knows that he's a bigot and is lashing out at being identified as such.

ramoss writes:

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How does a gay person getting married effect your marriage?

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Well, if you're marrying a gay person, then that gay person getting married "effects" your marriage since it has the "effect" of causing you to be married. I know...I know...spelling flame.

NoNukes responds to me:

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These are the kinds of comparisons that are probably counterproductive.

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In most cases, yes. Civil rights are civil rights and it really doesn't matter why someone is trying to deny them. It's wrong to deny them and it is evil to try and justify it as "sincerely held religious beliefs." It means your "religious beliefs" are that there are people who aren't worthy of the full respect you demand for yourself. At best, it means you are rude to them. More typically, you actively try to exterminate them from the world in ways subtle and gross.But are times where it's important to look at how people treat others based upon the specific trait because it shows us what we need to overcome. When you're gay, you're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. If you have an obvious trait such as being a woman or not white, then there is no "betrayal" to be had. The other person knew what you were from the very beginning. That doesn't stop them from being any less horrible, but you know right away what is going to happen because it's all up front.But if you have a trait that isn't obvious such as being gay, then you have to constantly decide if you're going to reveal it. After all, it often isn't relevant to the situation at hand. But if you don't, you always have to wonder what is going to happen when they find out. You have to keep everybody at a bit of a distance until you can determine whether or not it's safe to actually be who you are.And when they do find out, even if they're friendly, there's still a sense of betrayal. "Why didn't you trust me enough to tell me?" And if they're bigots, their hatred of you is intensified because suddenly it's your fault for "tricking" them. There's a reason that trans people suffer even worse than gay people when people find out. Hate crimes against gays are bad but trans people are more severely beaten and/or killed.The point behind this is that those who have obvious traits have a support system in their family that will stick with them. Our society, as imperfect as it is, at least pays lip service to the idea of the fundamental dignity of those who aren't white. Gays quite often don't have that. At the very least, gay people are raised by straight people. They are raised with the idea that they will be straight and have to find those who will accept them. The most common reason for homelessness for children, about half of all homeless children, is being kicked out of the house for being gay or trans. As imperfect as our legal system is with regard to race, there is still an understanding that you're not supposed to do that to those who aren't white. We aren't fighting all the way to the Supreme Court to try and find justifications for discriminating against black people.In Louisiana back in 2009, a JP denied an interracial couple a marriage license. Nobody came to his defense. Because of Kim Davis, the Republicans are trying to pass a "First Amendment Defense Act" which will prevent any prosecution of any government official for denying services to a gay couple because they don't want to accept them as married.That means your Social Security application might not be processed, the IRS agent can audit you because you filed your taxes "fraudulently" as a married couple, the clerk at the DMV can refuse your driver's license change of name when you get married, and on and on.So yeah, injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. But we cannot work to end bigotry without understanding how it manifests.Edited by Rrhain, : Dropped a "no" that changed the meaning of a sentence.Edited by Rrhain, : Fixing phrasing.

Percy,As NoNukes pointed out, you have it backwards: Marriage was a civil institution that religion attached itself to...but not surprising given how often church and state intertwine given they both concern themselves with power over others in a society.But there will always be a need for a governmental institution of "marriage": You suddenly take ill and are unable to make decisions for yourself. Who makes those decisions for you? In the Terry Schiavo case, there was a conflict between her parents and her husband. Who takes precedence? Or should your fate be in the hands of the government itself should you not have established directives beforehand with no other person of your choice ever being allowed to make those decisions for you?You die intestate. What happens to your property?Are you allowed to sponsor anybody for citizenship into your country?All of these things and more are a part of "marriage." You can simulate a lot of them through other contracts such as power of attorney, living wills, trusts, etc., but they are much more expensive, don't cover everything, and will require the assistance of a legal professional to make sure that you're doing everything that you want to do. Thus, we have the contract of "marriage" that puts it all together into a single package (and includes things that you simply cannot get through other contracts such as SSI survivor benefits).The simple fact is that people form families. They need the government to help them maintain those families. One of the ways governments do that is to provide a contract of "marriage" that helps people who have no other connection to each other have a legal recognition that they are a family.The problem is not that the government is "intruding" on the actions of the church. It's that the church thinks it is control of the state. There's a reason that the people who are complaining are the ones who insist that "America was founded on the Bible."