It was certainly a stirring image, the President-elect giving his acceptance speech in front of more than one hundred thousand in Chicago’s Grant Park. Amid the euphoria and the sense of renewal, however, we saw some of the politics as usual of the past in the use of ballot initiatives to curtail individual rights. In four states voters passed gay marriage bans and other anti-gay measures dealing with foster care and adoption. In California the ballot measure was an attack on a state Supreme Court decision invalidating of a previous gay marriage ban. Take that activist judges!
Those who favor these ballot initiatives see nothing wrong with the notion of citizens voting on the rights of others, especially when the others are gay and lesbian Americans. Gays are not seen as a group experiencing discrimination, and they should never be compared to the traditional minority groups lest the legitimate yearnings of those groups be somehow debased. In an ironic twist, the Bible is used to justify these votes, while the collective memory blocks out the use of the very same book in the Southern United States to justify slavery, as well as its use to subjugate women.
There are obviously many people who don’t think that gays and lesbians deserve the same civil rights as others, that our difference is a choice we freely made as opposed to some kind of genetic marker, as if genetics should determine whether civil rights are extended or not. However, we do live in a constitutional republic, one in which the rights of minorities are supposed to be protected from the tyranny of the majority. Judges are there to protect those rights. As one of the lawyers in a suit filed today against the California marriage ban notes: “Equal protection is supposed to prevent the targeting and subjugation of a minority group by a simple majority vote.”
So while you may be disgusted, or disturbed, or frightened by homosexuals, it is beyond time to stop using these petition-based ballot initiatives with their biblical underpinnings as a cudgel to wield against one group of individuals. Finally, without the decisions of so-called activist judges, does anyone really believe that we would be greeting a President-Elect Barack Obama?
I get it, majority rules only apply when the liberal intelligentsia concur. The fact that millions of people prefer to see marriage defined according to millennial traditions is insignificant when the liberal intelligentsia decree otherwise. I thought you people were for tolerance and freedom of expression. Oh, forgot, only for liberal intelligentsia.
In response to pj Says reply to your post, we have rarely had a “majority” rule in these vast past few miserable years. Rather it has been more akin to the rolling over of the majority, by those whom by the simple increased volumn of their voices, consider themsleves a majority. Wielding a cloak of deceipt and threatening us with a long handled hammer of fear, they chose to ignore the rules steal elections, lock up our own citizens, and even wrongfully fire attorneys who didn’t quite agree with them, popular vote be damned.
Tolerance and freedom of expression, certainly we stand for that. We also however believe in fairness, and equality, and the idea that all were created equal. I believe this can still be found in our constitution, which has been mangled by the current administration, to the point of being almost unrecognizable as the document it was meant to be, and should be.
Perhaps the resounding ringing of voices has not come through to you somehow, and you are clinging to the California vote against gay marriage to salve the wounds created by the losses suffered by the current controlling party. Fair enough, after all, everyone needs a reason to get up in the morning.
While I am satisfied with the outcome of the elections, my favored candidates did not even make it to the final rounds. However, looking at the bigger picture, it seems quite clear to most, if not your majority, that more of the country has spoken this time, than in my lifetime, and most likely yours. The voices raised in unison this time, and not just along racial or party lines I might add, have sang out loud and clear.
We are tired of it!! Tired of division, tired of the lies, tired of deceipt, tired of inequality, and oh so tired of business as usual! We have one country, one planet, and truthfully, we are one people, and we MUST find a way to make it work. The time for discrimination, wether it’s race, gender, party, and yes, even sexulaity or religious discrimination, the time for it has passed.
California, and you, should get over it. Other states have, other countries have, and they are the better for it. Civilization has not come to an end for them, but it WILL for us, if people like those who voted to continue discrimination in California, and continue to push the idea that division and discrimination works better than people coming together, continue to discriminate. With all the suffering I see around me, after all this time, and all the damage that has been done, I for one am looking forward to coming together. If this election has taught us nothing else, we should take that to heart. Yes we can, yes we have, and yes we will! Anything else, just sounds like sour grapes to me.
PJ equates the ability of some to foist their idea of the “millenial tradition” of marriage on the public through a ballot initiative with gays and lesbians seeking the same marriage rights as everyone else. That’s how the hypocritical “liberal intelligentsia” (a group apparently made up of anyone in favor of gay marriage rights) and its opposition to the gay marriage ban becomes an infringement on the civil rights of fundamentalists. I think that’s a real stretch. Maybe if the “liberal intelligentsia” wrote a ballot initiative seeking to ban PJ’s ability to worship in whatever church he/she chooses, or perhaps one to ban religious marriage ceremonies altogether, then we could talk about liberal majority rule.
to S. Bear. Perhaps you have forgotten that the current administration, like the incoming one, was elected by a majority of the voters or does that only count when your side wins? We are also tired of the lies and deceit are just as righteously angry that you refuse to acknowledge the validity of any position but your own. You commit the same crime when you tell us how our opinions are so totally wrong that we should not be heard. Where is the tolerance and respect for free speech?
I for one don’t care what two people do with each other so long as both are consenting adults. Further, I support anyone’s right to make create a family that supports and nurtures its members. What I also respect is the tradition of marriage as a bonding between two people for the purposes of natural procreation. That definition precludes same sex couples from using the term marriage to describe their family unit.
Every family, traditional or otherwise has the same rights under the law, especially under our constitution. To my mind there is no legal or moral distinction between traditional and non traditional family units. I do want to preserve the traditional marriage definition but recognize that as a matter of rights and law there can be no discrimination under law against non traditional families. I don’t know what legal name such families should have but, in my opinion marriage is not the correct term.
If that sentiment makes me a hateful figure, then hateful I am. But, I think your response says more about the degree of your hatred of traditional values and people who espouse them than about what we feel towards you. With the degree of hatred and ill will posted in your reply there can be no reconciliation, which I think is your point. You refuse to accept that any view other than your own has merit. Which, I believe was my original point. Try living up to your liberal principles and accept that others have equally valid principles.
to Ames 58: You miss the point completely. No one is trying to infringe upon gay civil rights. You seem determined to infringe on my civil rights by silencing my speech. If your concept of liberal majority rule is suppression of the right of conscience, freedom of assembly and free expression then we have a serious problem that will lead to far more than name calling in blogs. As for marriage being a religious ceremony, it was always that. Even among the most primitive societies marriage has a religious and spiritual connotation.
PJ, nobody is suggesting that we violate the First Amendment here. I was simply trying to indicate that what the California ballot initiative has done, taking rights away from a group of people by encoding a discriminatory definition of marriage into a state constitution would be similar to a referendum to, oh, make a certain faith tradition second-class under the law and subject to rules not governing other belief systems.
All I am saying is that your right to worship if you choose to, and my right to marry should not be subject to the whims of the majority. So yes, in that respect, if you see putting an end to ballot measures which seek to limit the civil rights of individuals as an infringement of your free speech, well so be it.
To honor our principles we must accept that others have the same rights because they do have the same rights. If I can’t put up a ballot initiative, neither can you. We both lose. Jeffersonian democracy has that flaw, the tyranny of the majority of voters. That flaw becomes a great strength when people who lose a round answer the bell for the next.
If you feel that strongly, organize, put up your own ballot initiative. You have that right. No one who understands these issues is trying to take your rights. But I think we have a profound difference of opinion as to what those rights are. To my mind marriage is but one expression of essential human rights but it is not a right in and of itself. My view is that the contractual aspect of marriage is applicable to any combination of people who want to enter the contract. I have no objection to you or anyone else joining together to form a family, that is your right as a human being.
As you say, Ames, this is a Constitutional Republic. A pure Democracy is a dictatorship of the majority, a mob rule. You can’t vote away people’s rights. Etc. We know this.
Question…Do I HAVE to be nice to the homophobic bigoted sicko, above?
Lastly:
“My husband, Martin Luther King Jr., once said, ‘We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny…an inescapable network of mutuality.… I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be.’ Therefore, I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.” …Coretta Scott King
Jeffrey Lee