California....Vanguard of Civil Rights
 

If you dont count Mass...

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1

That's accurate, especially if you count Earl Warren. Good for California. I'm not surprised. This makes it easier to take the Lakers' return.

I really wish the church wouldn't fight this so hard, because honestly, I'm not sure how two gay people being married affects the sanctity of my marriage or family AT ALL.

BUT,
for the attorneys out there, how is limiting marriage to a man and a woman unconstitutional? What constitutional right is this limit violating?

I'm just curious what the line of reasoning is.

I've never read the California Constitution. On the West Coast most state constitutions grant more liberty than the federal one, and of course no state's can grant less or it violates the federal, including the supremacy clause.

But the federal constitution is so general and maleable and archaic in much of its language that there 's a lot of room for lawyers and judges to maneuver whatever Justice Scalia says, god bless him. You could argue that it violates Equal Protection, Right to Privacy, right of free association (a penumbra of the First Amendment), maybe even the Establishment Clause. There's lots to work with.

This is my rationale, as well.

Heterosexual marriage is not harmed if homosexuals can get married.

My guess is that, politically speaking, it is in the Church's best interest to keep gay marriage illegal. Once it becomes legal, the Church faces heavier scrutiny for condemining it.

From an operational standpoint, legalized gay marriage does not impede the Church one bit, any more than legalized alcohol, abortions, or stores being open on Sunday. The Church and its members will still go about their business as before.

While I am not a huge anti-gay-marriage opponent, I REALLY HATE IT when courts decide this issue.

When the courts overstep, there is going to be a backlash.

We will see if there will be backlash in the form of the proposal to change the state constitution. CA already had gay marriage. It just wasn't called that. And now they will pay.

The founder of our company came into my office and asked if I'd heard the news from California. I said no, I hadn't. He said, laughing, "They're going to let the queers marry." I stared at him blankly until he left.

He's a Penn State alum, for what it's worth.

Do you hate Brown v. Board of Education? Did you hate it when federal courts enjoined Governor Wallace's brownshirts from obstructing blacks from the University of Alabama? Sometimes the courts have to intervene when the majority infringes basic liberties. That's their most important function and why federal judges are appointed and not elected. Not a perfect system, though, grant you. But it's the best there is and history shows could possibly be.

In our democracy of checks and balances, the CA Supreme Court did not change any laws today or give same-sex couples the right to marry. Rather, they interpreted the constitutions in a manner that indicates the current CA marital statutes are illegal. So now the state legislature has the prerogative of deciding what to do about it, and they don't have to conform to the court. As SU alluded to, language is so ambiguous (remember Bill Clinton testifying "that depends on what your definition of "is" is"), that the legislature can challenge the court's interpretation, and modify the language of the statutes however they want.

So this is far from over.

says the person who thinks polygamy is evil.