Cali Supreme Court ruling on legality of same-sex marriage ban

Who cares what he prefers? You're not a bigot for preference, you're a bigot for pushing your preference on other people. I don't particularly like gay marriage myself, but then, I have the freedom to not get involved in it. But, I don't have the right to insist that no one else get involved in it, and I don't have the right to demand that I be treated better because I'm not involved in it.I prefer marriage between a man and a woman, with child-bearing as an explicit part of it. So, I married a woman and we have a baby. I got what I wanted and thought I should have from marriage. That's good enough for me.

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I'm Thylacosmilus.Darwin loves you.

I got tired of that subtitle. I'm not sure I understand what the difference between a "marriage" and a "civil union" is, in the first place. Is there any difference in the rights afforded to somebody in a "marriage" versus somebody in a "civil union"? Wikipedia says civil unions don't require other parties to acknowledge the kinship of "married" homosexuals, and I also gather that there is no law saying states have to honor other states' civil unions. This seems to be the main concern. Are there others?Assuming that marriages and civil unions afford the same set of rights, do homosexuals object to the fact that they don't get to call their type of union a "marriage"? I can understand that there is a whole mess of legalese semantics to swim through if we call them different things, (e.g. laws that say "marriage" in the documentation inevitably do not apply to things that are not called "marriage"; and I suspect this may be the reason why they were given different names to begin with).I can also appreciate this as a "separate but equal" issue: nominally, Blacks had "equal" school facilities throughout the South, but that didn't stop the public administrations from rendering a semantic equality into a practical inequality (e.g., they gave the Black schools the same number of textbooks, but the books Blacks got were of lesser quality or were hand-me-downs), and, if same-sex relations are given a different name from man-woman relations, the potential for the same mistreatment exists.Well, I guess I've kind of worked this out on my own as I've typed, but I'll go ahead and post it anyway so everyone else can see it, with the following assessment:There is no reason to make a legal distinction between two entities except to render the two entities inherently unequal. The only reason I can think of for preserving the term "marriage" for man-woman unions is to set it apart from other types of unions, and there is no reason to set it apart from other types of unions unless you think it should be treated differently.So, the question becomes, why should they be treated differently? Iano suggested that the difference be the potential to raise children, but the distinction should then be between "union with an intention to have children" and "union with no intention to have children." While this aligns nicely with my personal convictions, and I consider myself duty-bound to honor my personal convictions, I cannot think of an objective reason why my personal convictions should be enforced upon somebody who is not me.I therefore have to side with California: there is no reason to legally recognize my personal convictions on a different standing from someone else's in this case. That's equality.Edited by Bluejay, : No reason given.

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Darwin loves you.

First, there is an "s" in his name, after the "blue" part.Second, you are the one assuming a single moral authority. You assume that all people should conform to a single standard (as in a specific, narrow definition of marriage, or as in forcing everyone to choose one of several different opinions), whereas subbie, Taz, bluescat, etc. are not assuming that any single opinion or person is the moral authority, and that everyone should be given an equal right to follow their own moral compass--gay or straight, black or white, etc.I'm rather glad, too: a simple majority vote would render many of the things I enjoy in my life illegal (evolutionary biology, Mormonism, speaking Chinese in public, listening to 80's music, etc.).

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Darwin loves you.

Um... I'm not sure this helps your cause, Hoot.

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Darwin loves you.

CS, you're arguing the authority of DOMA to people who don't think DOMA should be considered authoritative. They all know what it says and provides. They want you to come up with a reason why keeping DOMA is morally, ethically and Constitutionally superior to scrapping it.They know the legal reasons for enforcing DOMA, and they're good legal reasons. But, what is the ethical, moral and Constitutional reason for enforcing DOMA? If there isn't an ethical reason behind keeping DOMA, it implies that our laws are not based on ethics or morality. Are you okay with laws that do not have a moral reason behind them?Keep in mind that I am also opposed to gay marriage--I have said so in earlier posts--and I feel very icky and creepy about the whole thing. But, I have been unable to come up with a moral, ethical, Constitutional, or even biological reason as to why my view should be upheld over the views of other Americans.

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Darwin loves you.

I can see how this would turn into a boring conversation. Although I'm basically on your side in this, FO, I can't help but notice that you've switched roles a bit here: it used to be CS and his side of the debate hiding behind the "letter of the law." If there was a "legally-binding, Government-dictated definition" of marriage (as you've asked him to provide), would you even respect it? Wouldn't you just say it was unethical, anyway? My understanding is that your side of the debate is asking directly for just such a legally-binding, government-dictated definition to be overturned.I don't think it's very fair of you to ask CS to provide as evidence for his argument something that you're probably not going to honor anyway.And, he also didn't say the definition was legally-binding or government-dictated: it was a "spirit of the law" argument wherein a definition was always implicitly understood until somebody tried to push the envelope. So, he's actually right, although I don't know that I'd agree with using his logic to defend the DOMA definition as ethical, moral and Constitutional (because I don't think it is any of these).

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Darwin loves you.