First, I want to give some credit to Karin Klein. On the LATimes.com opinion blog, she chides Monica Garcia, Los Angeles Unified School District Board President, who said this:
"And for the hundreds of thousands of LAUSD students, [the court's decision is] a lesson that reverberates in the home and through the hallways, where bullies teasing students over their sexual orientation will continue with impunity."Klein rightfully points out that Garcia already has the power and the duty to prevent bullying.
[Much more is below the fold if you care to read it.]
Here's the paper’s editorial.Yet the campaign supporting equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians is far from a total failure. It sparked a necessary if testy national conversation that almost certainly contributed to new marriage rights for same-sex couples in several other states over the last few months, and the possibility of laws that would do the same in three more, including New York.It is really convenient to ignore all of the other states who have passed, like California, marriage amendments. And again – everyone has equal marriage rights.
The court's decision invites supporters of equal marriage to try again, this time at the ballot box.Which is interesting, given that so many of them have said that "marriage" and "rights" can't be subject to a vote. Yet, that is exactly what they're going to do, and what they should have done in the first place.
The court's decision leaves California with a muddle of contradictory legalities. By upholding the marriages of the 18,000 same-sex couples who wed between June and November 2008, the justices deny the wording in Proposition 8 that asserts the state will recognize only heterosexual unions.Those licenses should never have been issued in the first place. It is not this decision that created contradictions, it was the court's decision on Prop 22 and their refusal to stay their decision.
The rest of the editorial is standard marriage neutering advocate regurgitation.
Tim Rutten fails to understand the nature of self-government, as demonstrated in this commentary.
In other words, gay and lesbian Californians can board the marital bus but must take seats at the rear.No, they can board the bus but they can't tell the rest of the riders that the wheels must be removed because they get motion sickness.
Moreover, denying an entire class of people the right to marry the partner of their choice is a "narrow exception" to the equal protection clause?It isn't an exception, no. The law applies equally to me, a straight man.
So, if a majority of Californians voted to "carve out a narrow exception" to California's right to privacy and applied it only to Jews, would it be constitutionally acceptable? If Native Americans were accorded all the protections of the law by a ballot proposition, except the right to marry a non-Indian, would that be legal?Were those things the norms throughout all of human history up until a court decision year ago? No.
Columnist Steve Lopez tries to win us over with compelling logic like this:
I've known these guys for eight years, ever since my wife and I bought their house, and they're among our closest friends.Well, heck, then – how can I deny their request to change marriage licensing for everyone, then? Watever they ask, the rest of us should agree to!
There's nobody at the forefront on this side," Jamie said. "Except for Ellen DeGeneres] . . . there isn't anyone out there who's a symbol."I wasn't aware that these guys lived in a cave. Perhaps they mean that nobody stands out because there are so many famous people tripping over each other trying to to the front of the advocacy pack?
We also get relevant information like this:
That's a span during which they've seen countless straight marriages dissolve and various nitwits speak out against gay unions, including Miss California, Carrie Prejean, whose parents, by the way, had a messy divorce.What does that have to do with anything?
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