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Friday, January 22, 2010

Proposition 8 Trial Plaintiff Has Been Married

Posted by The Playful Walrus
As was demonstrated in the federal trial over Proposition 8 today, one the plaintiffs, who currently identifies as a homosexual, has exercised access to state marriage lincensing in the past. So it is false to say that homosexual people are prevented from marrying.
Nielson also drew on pretrial testimony from plaintiff Sandy Stier, who is seeking the right to marry her female partner of 10 years. Stier said she had been married to a man for 12 years before she fell in love with a woman.

Nielson read from a transcript in which Stier said she had not always been interested in women and at one time was physically attracted to her ex-husband.

Of course, I get that the issue is whether or not she has the "right" to get a state-issued marriage license with her current partner - and the answer is no. Marriage licenses are issued to partnerships of one bride and one groom. For those of you who say this is unfair, what if Stier was in love with and living with two people, instead of just one? Why does fairness demand she be able to get a marriage license with one, but not both at the same time? What if her partner was currently married to a man? What if her partner was her first cousin - a relationship that some states will not license as marriage? Why does "fairness" demand a federal court step in and strike down a state constitutional amendment so that Stiers can get marriage license in one example but not the others?
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3 comments,:

  1. So much for "born that way, can't change".

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  2. OMG read the linked article! The headline says "Prop 8 trial witness: Being gay not a choice", yet when you read the details, Dr. Herek basically says that 12% of gay men and 32% of lesbians confirm that they DID have a choice in the matter.

    What a moron.

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  3. Marty, those percentages are probably underestimates, given the overt and multi-layered means of applying "community" (or identity group) pressure on individuals to mute such an admission.

    The other thing that this testimony keeps putting upfront: there is this notion of purity of gayness. They are analogizing that notion with racialist classifications. That has long been a theme in "Gay Pride" propaganda and political posturings. It is the reason for the hostility toward the ex-gay population.

    Ex-gay does not necessarily mean a complete purging of homosexually orientated feelings, as "ex-gay" people have attested to anyone who'd pause long enough to hear them speak of their experiences.

    The same theme runs through the oft-repeated derision of so-called "mixed orientation marriages". SSMers -- and even activists who are not pro-SSM -- denounced these marriages as shams; denounced the people in these marriages as self-hating and traitors to the identity group. The hostility is highly prejudicial and the deriders assume they know the marriages of these individuals better than the individuals know themselves. That in itself is an open contradiction of what the activists insist is of the utmost importance to themselves.

    As strongly suggested in the testimony of that particular expert witness.

    It is not clear how all of that could possibly help the argument that the CA marriage amendment runs afoul of the same US Constitution that has been interpreted as having repudiated the assertion of supremacy in the name of a racialist identity group.

    Maybe the anti-8 litigators are deluded by their own rhetoric, I dunno.

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