(no subject)

[browngirl]

Prop. 8 sponsors seek to nullify 18K gay marriages.

I wish I were surprised by this attempt to use the law to oppress people. I hope people are right that this won't be done because it would be a retroactive application of the law.

I do have two things to say, though:

1) People keep drawing parallels between the current fight for LGBT rights and the Civil Rights Movement. I believe in a lot of those parallels, and I wish someone smarter and more eloquent than I would take Dr. King's Why We Can't Wait as a springboard for explaining why we can't wait now.

2) I want to find all the people I saw say that those fighting for marriage equality are as bigoted (or worse OMGWTFBBQ) as those who support efforts like Proposition 8 and its ilk, and show this to them, and ask them if we are really morally worse than people trying to dismantle 18,000 families. I do not believe we are. I won't -- I would put friends in the middle of the ensuing fights -- but oh do I want to.

Comments

[worldmage.livejournal.com]

The argument I'd like to see attempted is that marriage is recognized as a fundamental right under the Equal Protection Clause, so restrictive classifications require strict scrutiny - and unlike some other states, California already recognized single-sex marriage, so they can't say that the fundamental right applies only to mixed marriage.

That's actually exactly what the court ruled when they overturned Prop 22 and gave us our marriage rights and is the basis of one of the arguments being put forward by the plaintiffs. In order for Prop 8 to go into effect it would have to change at least 2 parts of the state constitution: 1) Alter our (exceptionally strong) equal protection clause to exclude sexual orientation as a suspect class and thus no longer subject anti-gay laws to strict scrutiny. 2) Restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples. It's against the law to change two or more parts of the constitution with a single ballot initiative. That would require either a constitutional convention or two separate amendments.