Friday, August 06, 2010

Now I've Been Crying Lately

This morning, this made me want to crash my head into the nearest firm surface.

This afternoon, this made my head all soppy and swollen with pride to share the name "American" with one WWII veteran from Maine:

Thursday, August 05, 2010

I'll Stand My Ground (And I) Won't Back Down

I've never attended law school, but I had to study and grasp how the U.S. Constitution works in high school, just like everyone else (I got out of U.S. history as an undergraduate. Oops). Of course, it's not like you hold a case and the Constitution up to a light bulb and then try to trace one upon the other. But to me, the ruling by Judge Walker makes complete sense. It was steeped, after all, in the most fundamental basis of scrutiny, rational basis review. Walker ruled that same-sex marriage cannot be legally distinguished from marriage between individuals of the opposite sex. See, it's a judgement call, and why should the government --or the government via the "will of the people," the "Props" of California, for instance -- be in the business of judging the fitness of citizens for marriage? If they were, shouldn't they not allow, I don't know, murderers to marry? Felons? Known abusers? People who are grumpy in the morning and should wake up alone?

“Moral disapproval alone is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and women,” Judge Walker wrote.

Supporters and admirers of Walker's decision have been falling over themselves to say that he has created a pretty damn watertight legal case that will be difficult to dissolve as it wends its way to the Supreme Court.

Walker quoted the legal precedent that “fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote.”

How can the right for two human beings to marry, no matter who they are or how many of the same kind of sexual organs are involved in the union, be anything but fundamental? What's being asked is access to what already exists:

"Plaintiffs do not seek recognition of a new right. To characterize plaintiffs’ objective as “the right to same-sex marriage” would suggest that plaintiffs seek something different from what opposite-sex couples across the state enjoy —— namely, marriage. Rather, plaintiffs ask California to recognize their relationships for what they are: marriages."