[Majin]

Use this thread for all random political discussions.

[innov8]

Phew, thanks Majin. I don't know what I would have done if I didn't know that you were voting for :laugh:

[Majin]

Phew, thanks Majin. I don't know what I would have done if I didn't know that you were voting for :laugh:

No problem :) :)

Probably the most important thing you guys need to vote for is NO on 1A. I'm kinda sad no leaders in Sac actually publicly stood up against 1A.

[Cynikal]

Just what we need, one more ignorant douche tell me how to vote.

:cheers:

[Fusey]

Majin, I really need to know your opinion on Proposition 2. It's the only way I'll be able to decide how to vote.

[BrianSac]

No problem :) :)

Probably the most important thing you guys need to vote for is NO on 1A. I'm kinda sad no leaders in Sac actually publicly stood up against 1A.

Yeah, where the heck were they. Sacramento can do better.

Personally, by far the most important Prop for me is voting NO on Prop 8. Please, Just say NO to discrimination, disenfranchisment, and Inequality. Please do not write discrimination into our Constitution. It may be Gays today; tomorrow it could be you.

[ltsmotorsport]

You really like prop 7 more than 10?

[austinjfox]

no on 7. its some loop hole for rich idiots to jack up taxes and get richer. Barr for president (yes, im willing to admit that), of course no on 8, YES on 1a! Why shouldn't it pass? People think its a waste of money, but i think its awesome, personally.

[Ryan@CU]

who's Barack Obama?

[innov8]

who's Barack Obama?

Also known as the messiah.

[innov8]

no on 7. its some loop hole for rich idiots to jack up taxes and get richer. Barr for president (yes, im willing to admit that), of course no on 8, YES on 1a! Why shouldn't it pass? People think its a waste of money, but i think its awesome, personally.

The State's budget deficit is currently $15 billion and the governor's thinking of
borrowing an additional $7 billion from the federal government, the State can't
afford any more big bond measures right now.

The California Legislature is still wanting for answers to its financial questions
concerning the HSR business plan that was due back on Sept. 1. At the rail
authoritys Oct. 1 meeting, the rail authority staff complained about
legislative pressure and indicated it would not comply. Lehman Bros., the rail
authority's financial adviser, is apparently out of business and unavailable
to write the business plan. How can taxpayers trust the rail authority with
first phase price tage of $10 billion, given this record?

Vote no on Prop. 1A

[snfenoc]

Also known as the messiah.


or Karl Marx.


(Before you libcialists get all pissy, MccAncient ain't that much better).


Vote Bob Barr!

Sorry, I am registered in Orangevale, so I have no say in the Mayor's race. Vote McClintock! - Good grief Charlie Brown! Stop hiding behind your military service, etc. You are no conservative. You'll just be another Pelosi Puppet. No, I'll take the libertarian leaning guy, whether he's Travelin' Tom or not.

No on 1A - Obvious reasons

No on 2 - Animals do not have rights. They are property. I will do what I want with my property, whether you like it or not.

No on 3 - Sigh! Bonds!

Yes on 4 - I saw an anti ad the other day telling me to get out of my little world or whatever. Ahhhhh! There's that liberal elitism I've come to know and hate. Well, 1 in 10 girls may get abused by their alcoholic fathers for whoring it up, but that's no reason to deny all parents the right to know.

No on 5 - Rehab?? Screw that! Just make drugs legal. Then they aren't a problem. Hooked? Oh well, they will be less expensive so you can support your habit without resorting to criminal activity. I can't wait for the day when I can go to the store and buy a big bag of pot, some rubbing alcohol and a Coke Zero for like $10 bucks. (Although with these artificially low interest rates and the government printing money out of no where, inflation may make that trip to the store cost about $1000 bucks.)

No on 6 - Again, just make drugs legal - it'll take care of a lot a gang issues.

No on 7 - Not a job for government. You wanna be green? Do it on YOUR own with YOUR own money. Plus, it's a bond!!!! I HATE BONDS!!!

Yes on 8 - I changed my mind. I hate to change the constitution, but I'll be darned if I'm gonna stand by and allow the state seal (which partially - One 37 millionth - belongs to me) to affirm a sham contract. (Let the flaming begin.) I love all my gay peeps, but I have a right as a citizen to decide which contracts I think are right and proper, and I just don't think gays should marry. Sorry. It does not hurt your freedom, you can still sign "partnership" contracts. You can still call yourself married. You can still have your relationship. Proposition 8 does nothing to affect that stuff. It's simply about recognition. In fact, I see voting for 8 as an exercise in my freedom - to decide which contracts I think are proper and which ones I think are crap. We would not have to do this, but some elitist judges decided to overturn the will of 60% of the voters. Evidently, they think they have a right to decide the constitutionality of laws. I don't (I know I'm alone on this one, but I don't care. The citizens should decided constitutionality with the mandate they give those they elect.)

No on 9 - Victims Bill of Rights? Mary's Law? Any time a new law is labeled as a "Bill of Rights" or it's named after someone, I vote No. It'll probably make us less free/give the government power it should not have.

No on 10 - Screw you T. Boone - I'm not falling for your money-stealing scheme. Again, this is not a job for government money. If you can't convince enough people to buy CNG vehicles, then too bad, so sad, you made marry mad. Plus it's a f**king bond.

Yes on 11 - I don't really like this, but I can just see the libs redrawing district after district to screw people like me, so it gets a Yes!

No on 12 - bonds. sigh.

[bigd]

I agree with you snfenoc on Bob Barr and have mostly libertarian values. However:

I really believe in animal rights, as a vegetarian. IMO, the problem with that bill is it is only effective in California. This will cause our ag industry to suffer. I wish the national govt could pass a bill like that. I am still undecided on prop 2.

I completely agree with you on legalizing drugs.

I also would definitely vote no on 8.

[Phillip]

Majin,

You and the Sacramento Union's Voter Guide agree on 4 of 12 propositions...maybe 5 or 6 if you develop an opinion on Props #2 and #9.

[innov8]

Majin,

You and the Sacramento Union's Voter Guide agree on 4 of 12 propositions...maybe 5 or 6 if you develop an opinion on Props #2 and #9.

:haha: :haha: :haha: Majin, you're 40% conservative and possibly 50% or
60%. That's okay, I think you'll still be accepted in most social groups ;)

[jsf8278]

Yes on 8 - I changed my mind. I hate to change the constitution, but I'll be darned if I'm gonna stand by and allow the state seal (which partially - One 37 millionth - belongs to me) to affirm a sham contract. (Let the flaming begin.) I love all my gay peeps, but I have a right as a citizen to decide which contracts I think are right and proper, and I just don't think gays should marry. Sorry. It does not hurt your freedom, you can still sign "partnership" contracts. You can still call yourself married. You can still have your relationship. Proposition 8 does nothing to affect that stuff. It's simply about recognition. In fact, I see voting for 8 as an exercise in my freedom - to decide which contracts I think are proper and which ones I think are crap. We would not have to do this, but some elitist judges decided to overturn the will of 60% of the voters. Evidently, they think they have a right to decide the constitutionality of laws. I don't (I know I'm alone on this one, but I don't care. The citizens should decided constitutionality with the mandate they give those they elect.)

In general, you as a citizen have NO RIGHT to decide which contracts are proper. Did you vote on the rental agreement I entered into last month? You have a RIGHT to enter into which contracts you deem fit. The courts then have the RIGHT to decide if those contracts are in accord with many things, one being public policy and another the CA Constitution.

Your ideology and irrational thinking is in accord with those that used to say "its just a contract," and "the state has the right to decide which relationships it will recognize." Those were the arguments used to deny interracial couples the right to marry marrying. Congrats, you're a bigot.

I could go on and on about how wrong you are legally, but I'm sure you don't care. The crap you spill on this forum sounds like you've been reading old Harry Browne Libertarian books. As such, you apparently feel like you know something about the law. Trust me, you don't.

[snfenoc]

In general, you as a citizen have NO RIGHT to decide which contracts are proper. Did you vote on the rental agreement I entered into last month? You have a RIGHT to enter into which contracts you deem fit. The courts then have the RIGHT to decide if those contracts are in accord with many things, one being public policy and another the CA Constitution.

Your ideology and irrational thinking is in accord with those that used to say "its just a contract," and "the state has the right to decide which relationships it will recognize." Those were the arguments used to deny interracial couples the right to marry marrying. Congrats, you're a bigot.

I could go on and on about how wrong you are legally, but I'm sure you don't care. The crap you spill on this forum sounds like you've been reading old Harry Browne Libertarian books. As such, you apparently feel like you know something about the law. Trust me, you don't.


Ahhhh more of that liberal elitism I've come to know and hate.

What's wrong with being a libertarian?

Look, just because you went to law school does not mean much to me. You're nothing special, buddy. I ain't scared of you.

Irrational? I think not. I've thought about my view a lot. You may not accept them, but your acceptance does not determine rationality.

Am I a bigot? Yes, I am. I am also a racist. But from what I've seen, everyone fits these molds. We are all slaves to our experience, and we tend to prefer those who look like us and think like us. Is that good? Well, yes and no - it depends. Is it common? Absolutely - and YOU are not immune. Your hateful, angry, stereotyping posts are evidence of this.

Do I think it's proper NOT to recognize interracial marriage? No. Would I vote for a constitutional amendment or change in the law to make interracial marriages illegal? No. Race and sex are two different things. Do I need to explain? Do I think same sex marriage isn't marriage and should not be recognized by my state? Yes. Does that make me a bigot? Depends on your definition. But I don't care what your definition of Bigot is.

You are right. I don't give a crap about your opinion of the law. Heck, I don't agree with most of our laws, and I dislike much of our legal system. So, I understand I am at odds with what is accepted. But I have the right to seek and vote for a change (e.g., voting for Bob Barr, voting Yes on Props 4, 8 & 11 and voting No on the rest). You see, in the State of California the public has the RIGHT to directly vote on certain laws and bonds - we call these things propositions. A number of years ago we were given the option to decide whether or not we want to recognize (affirm/normalize) a gay marriage. 60% of the voters decided to define marriage as between a man and a woman (damn, what a strange concept). A while later, the state Supreme Court overturned the will of the voters, saying it was unconstitutional. (I will not go into my anti supreme court ruling on constitutionality views again. You libs tend to go apoplectic when I do this - supreme court opinions and interpretations are the only way you've been able to force your morally void, baby killing ways on the public). Since the Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional, we have to change the Constitution, no big deal. Don't agree? Vote No. Think marriage is between a man and a woman? Vote Yes. If I am out voted, I will accept the outcome. However, when all is said and done, I want to feel confident I stood for my ideals. They are important to me. They may not be important to you, again, I don't care what you think.

Want the best solution? Let's stop all marriage recognition. Marriage is between the people involved, their families and their church. It's not a state function.

By the way, I did vote for the people who vote on laws governing your rental agreement. So in a way, I do/can affect your contract - unless you want the state Supes to overturn my vote.

[BrianSac]

In general, you as a citizen have NO RIGHT to decide which contracts are proper. Did you vote on the rental agreement I entered into last month? You have a RIGHT to enter into which contracts you deem fit. The courts then have the RIGHT to decide if those contracts are in accord with many things, one being public policy and another the CA Constitution.

Your ideology and irrational thinking is in accord with those that used to say "its just a contract," and "the state has the right to decide which relationships it will recognize." Those were the arguments used to deny interracial couples the right to marry marrying. Congrats, you're a bigot.

I could go on and on about how wrong you are legally, but I'm sure you don't care. The crap you spill on this forum sounds like you've been reading old Harry Browne Libertarian books. As such, you apparently feel like you know something about the law. Trust me, you don't.

jsf,
There is no reasoning with someone like that. It’s one thing to simply not like someone just because they are not like you or because their sexual orientation is in the minority. But its another thing to make laws against them singaling them out for discrimination and inequality. It’s blatant and it goes against everything America stands for regarding individual freedom.

By the way he talks, I personally believe, he is on a power trip. It gives him some type of sick satisfaction to discriminate against a group of people. It’s a way of saying no matter how successful you Gays become or how much good you do to contribute to society you will never be equal to me because me and my majority says you will never be equal to me.

These bigots and homophobes figure they will codify discrimination into the highest law of the land, just to make sure that everyone knows no matter how committed and how good gay relationships can be they will never be as "good as ours". Its clearly un-American and hateful.

You would think they would respect what is good about marriage and how it can foster stable relationships of all kinds weather they are homosexual or heterosexual relationships. We all know that stable committed relationships foster healthy happy families of all types. So why not let Gays fully participate in creating healthy happy relationships that are natural to them.

An unjust law is no law at all in my opinion. I am praying that the majority sees what is just, right, and equal and that they see what is discriminatory, wrong and unequal therefore casting a NO vote on Prop 8.

[Quest]

jsf,
There is no reasoning with someone like that. It’s one thing to simply not like someone just because they are not like you or because their sexual orientation is in the minority. But its another thing to make laws against them singaling them out for discrimination and inequality. It’s blatant and it goes against everything America stands for regarding individual freedom.

By the way he talks, I personally believe, he is on a power trip. It gives him some type of sick satisfaction to discriminate against a group of people. It’s a way of saying no matter how successful you Gays become or how much good you do to contribute to society you will never be equal to me because me and my majority says you will never be equal to me.

These bigots and homophobes figure they will codify discrimination into the highest law of the land, just to make sure that everyone knows no matter how committed and how good gay relationships can be they will never be as "good as ours". Its clearly un-American and hateful.

You would think they would respect what is good about marriage and how it can foster stable relationships of all kinds weather they are homosexual or heterosexual relationships. We all know that stable committed relationships foster healthy happy families of all types. So why not let Gays fully participate in creating healthy happy relationships that are natural to them.

An unjust law is no law at all in my opinion. I am praying that the majority sees what is just, right, and equal and that they see what is discriminatory, wrong and unequal therefore casting a NO vote on Prop 8.


What's next, it's normal to sleep with dogs? BIG YES ON Prop8 and NO on pervets...

[jsf8278]

What's next, it's normal to sleep with dogs? BIG YES ON Prop8 and NO on pervets...

Yes, the natural progression from allowing two persons of the same sex to marry is for society to recognize that it's normal to have sex with animals. Its sad that there are people in America stupid enough believe that. What's ironic is that they themselves are the ones that typically engage in that type of behavior.

[NatomasLarry]

What's next, it's normal to sleep with dogs? BIG YES ON Prop8 and NO on pervets...

See #3 below regarding the above statement:

The Top Ten Reasons Why Gay Marriage is Wrong

1. Homosexuality is not natural. Real people always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.
2. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
3. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
4. Heterosexual marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are still property, blacks still aren’t supposed to marry whites.
5. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if homosexual marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Brittany Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.
6. Heterosexual marriages are valid because they produce children. Homosexual couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn’t be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren’t full yet, and the world needs more children.
7. Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
8. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in North America.
9. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.
10. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven’t adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.

[econgrad]

The Issue
California voters passed Proposition 22 in 2000 by more than 61%, saying that a marriage in California is between a man and a woman. Earlier this year, four activist judges based in San Francisco wrongly overturned the people's vote, legalizing same-sex marriage.
The Consequences
The Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage did not just overturn the will of California voters; it also redefined marriage for the rest of society, without ever asking the people themselves to accept this decision. This decision has far-reaching consequences. For example, because public schools are already required to teach the role of marriage in society as part of the curriculum, schools will now be required to teach students that gay marriage is the same as traditional marriage, starting with kindergarteners. By saying that a marriage is between “any two persons” rather than between a man and a woman, the Court decision has opened the door to any kind of “marriage.” This undermines the value of marriage altogether at a time when we should be restoring marriage, not undermining it.
The Solution
Vote YES on Proposition 8 to overturn the outrageous Supreme Court decision and restore the definition of marriage that was approved by over 61% of voters. Proposition 8 is NOT an attack on gay couples and does not take away the rights that same-sex couples already have under California’s domestic partner law. California law already grants domestic partners all the rights that a state can grant to a married couple. Gays have a right to their private lives, but not to change the definition of marriage for everyone else.

Passing Proposition 8 protects our children and places into the Constitution the simple definition that a marriage is between a man and a woman.

[BrianSac]

:previous:
Gay People Are Mothers, Fathers, Guardians, Teachers, Police Officers, Soldiers, And Protectors Of Children Just Like Most Other Law-Abiding People.

Children need to be protected from STRAIGHT(Heterosexual) MEN.
By far, the majority of sexual crimes against children and adults are committed by STRAIGHT(HETEROS) MEN.

[ltsmotorsport]

What's next, it's normal to sleep with dogs? BIG YES ON Prop8 and NO on pervets...

I really didn't think anyone so ignorant and bigoted was left in California. Gays and lesbians are perverts? Why? Cause they like to have sex? Guess what, so do us straits.

Now, I myself don't necessarily agree with everything about the gay lifestyle, but I also know that I have not right to tell people what they can or can't do, especially when I don't know them and it's none of my business.

[krudmonk]

or Karl Marx.


(Before you libcialists get all pissy, MccAncient ain't that much better).


Vote Bob Barr!

Sorry, I am registered in Orangevale, so I have no say in the Mayor's race. Vote McClintock! - Good grief Charlie Brown! Stop hiding behind your military service, etc. You are no conservative. You'll just be another Pelosi Puppet. No, I'll take the libertarian leaning guy, whether he's Travelin' Tom or not.

No on 1A - Obvious reasons

No on 2 - Animals do not have rights. They are property. I will do what I want with my property, whether you like it or not.

No on 3 - Sigh! Bonds!

Yes on 4 - I saw an anti ad the other day telling me to get out of my little world or whatever. Ahhhhh! There's that liberal elitism I've come to know and hate. Well, 1 in 10 girls may get abused by their alcoholic fathers for whoring it up, but that's no reason to deny all parents the right to know.

No on 5 - Rehab?? Screw that! Just make drugs legal. Then they aren't a problem. Hooked? Oh well, they will be less expensive so you can support your habit without resorting to criminal activity. I can't wait for the day when I can go to the store and buy a big bag of pot, some rubbing alcohol and a Coke Zero for like $10 bucks. (Although with these artificially low interest rates and the government printing money out of no where, inflation may make that trip to the store cost about $1000 bucks.)

No on 6 - Again, just make drugs legal - it'll take care of a lot a gang issues.

No on 7 - Not a job for government. You wanna be green? Do it on YOUR own with YOUR own money. Plus, it's a bond!!!! I HATE BONDS!!!

Yes on 8 - I changed my mind. I hate to change the constitution, but I'll be darned if I'm gonna stand by and allow the state seal (which partially - One 37 millionth - belongs to me) to affirm a sham contract. (Let the flaming begin.) I love all my gay peeps, but I have a right as a citizen to decide which contracts I think are right and proper, and I just don't think gays should marry. Sorry. It does not hurt your freedom, you can still sign "partnership" contracts. You can still call yourself married. You can still have your relationship. Proposition 8 does nothing to affect that stuff. It's simply about recognition. In fact, I see voting for 8 as an exercise in my freedom - to decide which contracts I think are proper and which ones I think are crap. We would not have to do this, but some elitist judges decided to overturn the will of 60% of the voters. Evidently, they think they have a right to decide the constitutionality of laws. I don't (I know I'm alone on this one, but I don't care. The citizens should decided constitutionality with the mandate they give those they elect.)

No on 9 - Victims Bill of Rights? Mary's Law? Any time a new law is labeled as a "Bill of Rights" or it's named after someone, I vote No. It'll probably make us less free/give the government power it should not have.

No on 10 - Screw you T. Boone - I'm not falling for your money-stealing scheme. Again, this is not a job for government money. If you can't convince enough people to buy CNG vehicles, then too bad, so sad, you made marry mad. Plus it's a f**king bond.

Yes on 11 - I don't really like this, but I can just see the libs redrawing district after district to screw people like me, so it gets a Yes!

No on 12 - bonds. sigh.
It's always best to vote out of rage and bitterness. Who are you picking for class president?

[snfenoc]

I don't know where you pick up rage and bitterness in that post. Aggressively stating your ideals is not the same as spewing rage and bitterness.....Wait a sec....Oh, I get it I have a different view of government than you, so you feel the need to make fun of me and be dismissive toward me. Even more of that liberal elitism I’ve come to know and hate. Your disapproval is an absolute assurance I am right. Thanks for the affirmation bud.


To Brian:
I am not a “homophobe” (I hate that pejorative) - Just trust me on this one.

My vote for Prop 8 does not make me a bigot (There are other things that make me a bigot, but this ain't one of them) - I'm actually fairly tolerant of gays. I accept their right to live and love how they wish. I understand their struggles and desires. I disagree with their lifestyle, but disagreement and intolerance are not the same thing. I'm not a God hates f*gs person. It's not my place to judge. Heck, I have my own issues; I don't need to take on yours. But Proposition 8 is not about intolerance and judgement (AT LEAST NOT FOR ME). It's about establishing a standard. Marriage is between a man and a woman - sorry, that's just a fact. I refuse to stand by and ignore an opportunity to prevent my government from affirming the sham that is gay marriage . Again, I would prefer my state not recognize marriage at all. If couples want legal status, they should become domestic partners. Marriage is religious; it should remain that way. However, my Utopian views are not the reality; I accept that. But a sham HAS become reality, and I won't allow my state to recognize it any longer; it's not marriage.

People say this is discriminatory. Yep, it is. So? People discriminate all the time. No big deal. Oh, and don't compare this to the historical discrimination against blacks, and the Japanese, and any other victim group you can think of. Apples and oranges.

FINALLY, you said (in reference to me) something like, jsf8278, you can't convince people like him. He's a blah, blah, blah... I'm offended by this. I truly am. I can be persuaded. I'm tuned in. I'm turned on. I look at the facts. I weigh the possibilities and consequences. But your statement makes it sound like I'm some bigoted, idiot puppet just waiting for orders from the religious right. Your statement is dismissive and marginalizing. Well, with nastiness like that, you probably can't convince me of anything. I'm not going to listen to a condescending jerk. I won't be shamed into voting against my conscience. Respect me. Give me something better than just anger and stupid emotional arguments. Re-read jsf8278's nasty post, would you be convinced by that? If I called you a bigot or a homophobe, would you be convinced? If I acted like elitist snob, would you be convinced. If I called your ideas and ideals irrational and silly, would you be convinced?

At the end of the day, what reasonable arguments you have probably won't convince me. But that's OK. We can agree to disagree. There is no need for you gays to be so nasty. Prop 8 won't stop your relationship. It won't prevent you from having sex. It won't even regulate how you have sex. Heck, you can call your sig other husband if you want. Prop 8 is about preventing my state from accepting a definition of marriage that has never been accepted before. It's about maintaining a tradition.

By the way, education has been a center of the Prop 8 debate for a few weeks now. I don't buy the claims of the liberal teacher's union. Gay marriage will eventually be taught in public schools. This is yet another reason why it’s time to get rid of public schools.

[krudmonk]

I don't know where you pick up rage and bitterness in that post. Aggressively stating your ideals is not the same as spewing rage and bitterness.....Wait a sec....Oh, I get it I have a different view of government than you, so you feel the need to make fun of me and be dismissive toward me. Even more of that liberal elitism I’ve come to know and hate. Your disapproval is an absolute assurance I am right. Thanks for the affirmation bud.
No, I said it because you use very angry words and have quite a persecution complex. You even admit that you hate "liberal elitism" as if it's everywhere and out to get you.

[snfenoc]

You might want to take some of what I say with a grain of salt - the problem with the internet is you can't see the twinkle in my eye. I'm not that angry of a person (I still think my post was more aggressive than anything else - it was meant to be provocative). Expressing hate or anger at one particular thing does not make me an angry person. A little perspective, please! I do hate dismissivness ("Your thoughts are irrational", "Don't even waste your time arguing with that guy..."); and I do hate pejoratives ("He's a homophobe", "He's a bigot"). I hate them because they don't really add to the debate. However, that hate does not determine how I will vote. My votes are based off of my idealology, not my mood.



By the way, I do not have a persecution complex.....now stop persecuting me!!!

[Majin]

It looks like prop 1A passed... we need to get some funds going start up some frivolous lawsuits to derail this thing. Anybody want to pitch in for a general fund? Maybe some fundraisers?

[BrianSac]

No, I said it because you use very angry words and have quite a persecution complex. You even admit that you hate "liberal elitism" as if it's everywhere and out to get you.

Yep, i agree tone down the angry words.

snfenoc,
I wasn’t trying to convince you of anything. I was responding to jts’s comments.

But, since you addressed me personally, I guess I have to respond. You have not convinced me of anything either.

I have principles and ideals too, and they don’t include singling out a group of people for civil discrimination, and using the constitution to do it is simply wrong and un-American, imho.

Some of what I said about people of your persuasion was based on your prior post which was rather harsh. Go back and read it.

I am not unreasonable and sometimes one needs to discriminate, but not regarding same sex marriage. For example, we discriminate against convicted killers for certain things, but those guys earned that type of discrimination.

But to discriminate against Gay people who are Mothers, Fathers, Teachers, Police Officers, Soldiers, Doctors, nurses, child care givers, and defenders of our country, and so many other law abiding contributors to our society is so wrong. In my opinion, equality regarding marriage applies to race and sexual orientation. There is no difference.

:rainbow: :rainbow: :rainbow: :rainbow: :rainbow:

[econgrad]

^
7 out of 10 Black voters who voted for Obama, voted yes on Prop 8. Please end the "Its discrimination" or "Civil Rights" argument. It is not. As for all the harsh words, I agree that is not necessary. Briansac, all the Mothers, Fathers, Teachers, Police Officers, Soldiers, Doctors, nurses, child care givers, and defenders of our country, and so many other law abiding contributors to our society who are Christian, Muslim, Mormon, Jewish, and many other people of faith and those who just believe in morality disagree with you. That is why it passed. I guess the debate will not be over anytime soon...

[kryptos]

^^ you got that right..ive heard that it will be back on the ballot in 2010..this time to overturn it...prop 8 barely passed, and the more time passes, the more people are ok with gays being allowed to marry...

this is nothing more than wacko right wing conservatives using GW BUSH fear tactics to scare the electorate into voting for a law that is no different from the fatwas made by right wing muslim fanatics we ridicule everyday and claim to be better than....

the taliban oppressed women
saddam oppressed freedom
and you oppressed equality

youre no different, no better

and for the record, im a christian, my father is a christian preacher for his church and california state prisons, im fiscally conservative and i voted for arnold, im hispanic and my fiance is catholic and was born in mexico city...and we all voted AGAINST prop 8...

because it IS discrimination

[BrianSac]

^^ you got that right..ive heard that it will be back on the ballot in 2010..this time to overturn it...prop 8 barely passed, and the more time passes, the more people are ok with gays being allowed to marry...

this is nothing more than wacko right wing conservatives using GW BUSH fear tactics to scare the electorate into voting for a law that is no different from the fatwas made by right wing muslim fanatics we ridicule everyday and claim to be better than....

the taliban oppressed women
saddam oppressed freedom
and you oppressed equality

youre no different, no better

and for the record, im a christian, my father is a christian preacher for his church and california state prisons, im fiscally conservative and i voted for arnold, im hispanic and my fiance is catholic and was born in mexico city...and we all voted AGAINST prop 8...

because it IS discrimination

Amen, thank you for voting No on Prop 8, its exactly people like you that Gays so desperately need to support us. We are a very small minority (10-15%) and we can't achieve equality without you. Thanks Again. :banana:

It is very refreshing and it gives me hope that this type of discrimination will end one day. Because right now, I feel completely disenfranchised. Although happy about the Obama win its bittersweet when the majority takes away a basic civil right.

[bennywah]

until people can fully realize that being gay is not a choice, those groups will continue to see this as not discrimination, and since heterosexuals don't choose to be gay unless there's some underground movement we don't know about I guess it'll take even more scientific evidence to prove this fact even though 99% of gay people will tell you they didn't choose this "lifestyle".

I hope that the trends will continue as they have will get to the point where we can let people be, respect our ideas and beliefs, but not allow those beliefs to take away rights from others, and gov't shouldn't be dealing in the love lives of anyone, even if a majority want to impose their idea of whats right, gay people are born they way they are, they are not freaks, and deserve equal rights, that is what the supreme court ruled, not that gay marrige was right or wrong but signaling out a group that is protected is discrimination.

I won't call people names or try to force a view on anyone but I ask that people put themselves into another persons shoes, and think what it would be like to be on the other side, and if you can do that then a discussion can occur which finds common ground, or allows someone to learn something new.

otherwise these back and forth fights involving money, and laws, and lawsuits will continue when its so un-needed, so lets take a deep breath, start a discussion and learn from one another and end discrimination!!

[TowerDistrict]

last night, i watched the country take one step forward, and the state take two steps back.

[BrianSac]

:previous: :cheers:

bennywah,
I could not have said it any better. I agree 100%.

[econgrad]

^^ you got that right..ive heard that it will be back on the ballot in 2010..this time to overturn it...prop 8 barely passed, and the more time passes, the more people are ok with gays being allowed to marry...

this is nothing more than wacko right wing conservatives using GW BUSH fear tactics to scare the electorate into voting for a law that is no different from the fatwas made by right wing muslim fanatics we ridicule everyday and claim to be better than....

the taliban oppressed women
saddam oppressed freedom
and you oppressed equality

youre no different, no better

and for the record, im a christian, my father is a christian preacher for his church and california state prisons, im fiscally conservative and i voted for arnold, im hispanic and my fiance is catholic and was born in mexico city...and we all voted AGAINST prop 8...

because it IS discrimination


Your fiance must be extremely ignorant on the Church's point of view. Does she know what the Catechism is? It is the book of Catholic belief that are the rules of the Church, that states that the practice of Homosexuality is an sin against the Church and God. If you claim you are a Catholic, you cannot in good conscious vote against Prop8. This means, you are really not a Catholic. 2357 of the Catechism, tell her and other ignorant Catholics to read it. If they disagree, they need to change religions.

[krudmonk]

^
7 out of 10 Black voters who voted for Obama, voted yes on Prop 8. Please end the "Its discrimination" or "Civil Rights" argument. It is not.
What? Just because former victims of hate are now the perpetrators, you think it's not a civil rights issue? That's like saying blacks cannot be racist, either.

[Majin]

Are we going to start talking about how we plan to derail HSR?

[krudmonk]

Are we going to start talking about how we plan to derail HSR?
Isn't that terrorism?

[Majin]

Isn't that terrorism?

Not if you use the courts :)

[BrianSac]

Your fiance must be extremely ignorant on the Church's point of view. Does she know what the Catechism is? It is the book of Catholic belief that are the rules of the Church, that states that the practice of Homosexuality is an sin against the Church and God. If you claim you are a Catholic, you cannot in good conscious vote against Prop8. This means, you are really not a Catholic. 2357 of the Catechism, tell her and other ignorant Catholics to read it. If they disagree, they need to change religions.

Maybe his fiance has got it right and the church has got it wrong. Not everything the Catholic church does is necessarly right nor within true Christian doctrine, same applies to the Mormon church or any other church.

[Cynikal]

And not every parish is the same. There is a world of difference between Holy Spirit (Land Park) and St. Francis (Mid-Town)

[Fusey]

Your fiance must be extremely ignorant on the Church's point of view. Does she know what the Catechism is? It is the book of Catholic belief that are the rules of the Church, that states that the practice of Homosexuality is an sin against the Church and God. If you claim you are a Catholic, you cannot in good conscious vote against Prop8. This means, you are really not a Catholic. 2357 of the Catechism, tell her and other ignorant Catholics to read it. If they disagree, they need to change religions.

I'm Catholic and just about every single one I know breaks some sort of rule (especially when it comes to birth control and sex before marriage). This means most Catholics are not really Catholic, so the Church's "true" followers are a small, select group who need to get laid.

[krudmonk]

I attended a Catholic high school that had a gay-straight alliance. Jesuits are more progressive, I guess.

[urban_encounter]

Your fiance must be extremely ignorant on the Church's point of view. Does she know what the Catechism is? It is the book of Catholic belief that are the rules of the Church, that states that the practice of Homosexuality is an sin against the Church and God. If you claim you are a Catholic, you cannot in good conscious vote against Prop8. This means, you are really not a Catholic. 2357 of the Catechism, tell her and other ignorant Catholics to read it. If they disagree, they need to change religions.


You have a good grasp on the catechism, but when you stand before God you might want to have a grasp of the Gospel; because there wont be a pop quiz on the CCC when you stand before Christ.


"God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him"--John

[urban_encounter]

Jesuits are more progressive, I guess.


Much..



St Ignatius is also a very welcoming community.

The Jesuit Priests there are wonderful people.

[kryptos]

Your fiance must be extremely ignorant on the Church's point of view. Does she know what the Catechism is? It is the book of Catholic belief that are the rules of the Church, that states that the practice of Homosexuality is an sin against the Church and God. If you claim you are a Catholic, you cannot in good conscious vote against Prop8. This means, you are really not a Catholic. 2357 of the Catechism, tell her and other ignorant Catholics to read it. If they disagree, they need to change religions.

first off, Im not Catholic, Im Christian. My fiance is Catholic, but if youre going to get into Catholics and sins, how about this question...why is that EVERY catholic nation is extremely violent and murderous? sounds to me like they sin ALOT...MEXICO, ITALY, COLOMBIA, EL SALVADOR, BRAZIL...the list goes on. A sin is a sin. It doesnt matter what it is, so if your going to speak out against sin, speak out against your fellow catholics that sin all day. If you live in Sacramento, go preach to the Catholic mexicans that live in Oak Park and Del Paso Heights and West Sac Broderick area about killing people and drive-by shootings and how its a sin against God and the Church. Or speak out against the Catholic Priests that molest children in their Church. Speak out against all sin, dont just pick and pull what sins fit your needs at the moment, BECAUSE IF YOU DO, YOURE NOT A TRUE CATHOLIC.

dont try to push your dogma on me, Im a Christian, I dont believe in Catholicism, infact I believe its a sin against god to hail mary or pray to saints or anyone that is not God himself, but I believe in freedom, and if I believe in freedom that means that while I disagree with your religion, and my fiances religion, I respect your right to practice whatever religion you want. Ill give my opinion, but I WOULD NEVER try to pass a law or discriminate against you. That being said, YOU ARE NOT GOD, quit trying to push your will and the will of your Church upon me and the rest of the population. Youre as bad as the Grand Ayatollah, trying to declare religious law over the land...

[kryptos]

Maybe his fiance has got it right and the church has got it wrong. Not everything the Catholic church does is necessarly right nor within true Christian doctrine, same applies to the Mormon church or any other church.

LDS mormons were bigtime bankrollers for Prop Hate (8)...

But for all the money they dumped into this prop, they still didnt completely undo gay marriage. there are still 18,000 gay marriages that will forever be valid, and are valid now, and cannot be overturned because laws are not retroactive. And the court will never make anything retroactive, because that opens a door they would never want to be opened. For instance, anyone arrested for marijuana posession before Prop 215 passed could then push to have their convictions overturned on the basis that it was for medicinal use. All laws would be subject to that precedent.

[krudmonk]

"God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him"--John
Shit, that is brilliant. It should have been the NO campaign.

[econgrad]

Maybe his fiance has got it right and the church has got it wrong. Not everything the Catholic church does is necessarly right nor within true Christian doctrine, same applies to the Mormon church or any other church.

Briansac, thank you for reading my post correctly. Your response here is a valid counter-point that continues are debate in a civil and logical fashion. We all know Prop 8 is going to the courts, lets see what happens. Thank you for the debate.

[econgrad]

first off, Im not Catholic, Im Christian. My fiance is Catholic, but if youre going to get into Catholics and sins, how about this question...why is that EVERY catholic nation is extremely violent and murderous? sounds to me like they sin ALOT...MEXICO, ITALY, COLOMBIA, EL SALVADOR, BRAZIL...the list goes on. A sin is a sin. It doesnt matter what it is, so if your going to speak out against sin, speak out against your fellow catholics that sin all day. If you live in Sacramento, go preach to the Catholic mexicans that live in Oak Park and Del Paso Heights and West Sac Broderick area about killing people and drive-by shootings and how its a sin against God and the Church. Or speak out against the Catholic Priests that molest children in their Church. Speak out against all sin, dont just pick and pull what sins fit your needs at the moment, BECAUSE IF YOU DO, YOURE NOT A TRUE CATHOLIC.

dont try to push your dogma on me, Im a Christian, I dont believe in Catholicism, infact I believe its a sin against god to hail mary or pray to saints or anyone that is not God himself, but I believe in freedom, and if I believe in freedom that means that while I disagree with your religion, and my fiances religion, I respect your right to practice whatever religion you want. Ill give my opinion, but I WOULD NEVER try to pass a law or discriminate against you. That being said, YOU ARE NOT GOD, quit trying to push your will and the will of your Church upon me and the rest of the population. Youre as bad as the Grand Ayatollah, trying to declare religious law over the land...

You sir, are a complete Baffoon. Did you read my post? Are you spouting this crap out in desperation? What does the official Catholic belief, that states that if you are Catholic, you must agree and obey everything in the Catechism. If you do not, you are not a Catholic. You supported your previous argument against Prop 8 stating that your fiance and her father were Catholics against Prop 8. Drive by shootings and poor countries and poor people in south Sacramento doing drive by shootings have nothing to do with your previous argument. Your mind is jumbled. I never stated I was God. Re-read my post, all I stated was official Catholic doctrine in order to educate people who call themselves Catholics about what their church really stands for, and it is the Church's official position that you are not a Catholic unless you agree, follow and live 100% with the Catechism. FYI: Everyone is a sinner, that does not mean we should not debate, or even fight for a more moral society. I never pushed any dogma on you at all. Re-read my post and try and keep your anger in check. God is love, remember?

Your statement about McCain also shows more ignorance. He fought for our country, chose to suffer when he had a privilege to be free but decided to stay with his men. He was tortured brutally for 4 years. Why? Because he loved his country and made a great sacrifice for it. Read and educate yourself more.

[L8 4 Tahoe]

I attended a Catholic high school that had a gay-straight alliance. Jesuits are more progressive, I guess.

I attended Jesuit High School here in Sacramento, the Jesuits are very progressive. We had the GSA too. They believe education is the way to find God. Even though Jesuit is an all boys school there was never one instance of gay violence while I was there. The most influential priest teacher I had was Father George Wanser. Homosexuality came up in his class and he put it the best: "God doesn't care about who you love, just as long as you don't hurt anyone with that love, God will accept you with open arms. The bible isn't supposed to be interpreted literally, if it was, women would be slaves."

The passing of prop 8 is creating the "separate but equal" idea again (cause that worked out so well last century). Shit, gays should have their own bathrooms, water fountains, seats in a theater, and hospitals. Go all in why don't we? The majority should NEVER be able to determine what governs the minority. I am ashamed of being a Californian today. I hope that all the people who voted yes on this hate law will be looked down upon by their children and grandchildren as hateful bigots.

[kryptos]

You sir, are a complete Baffoon. Did you read my post? Are you spouting this crap out in desperation? What does the official Catholic belief, that states that if you are Catholic, you must agree and obey everything in the Catechism. If you do not, you are not a Catholic. You supported your previous argument against Prop 8 stating that your fiance and her father were Catholics against Prop 8. Drive by shootings and poor countries and poor people in south Sacramento doing drive by shootings have nothing to do with your previous argument. Your mind is jumbled. I never stated I was God. Re-read my post, all I stated was official Catholic doctrine in order to educate people who call themselves Catholics about what their church really stands for, and it is the Church's official position that you are not a Catholic unless you agree, follow and live 100% with the Catechism. FYI: Everyone is a sinner, that does not mean we should not debate, or even fight for a more moral society. I never pushed any dogma on you at all. Re-read my post and try and keep your anger in check. God is love, remember?

Your statement about McCain also shows more ignorance. He fought for our country, chose to suffer when he had a privilege to be free but decided to stay with his men. He was tortured brutally for 4 years. Why? Because he loved his country and made a great sacrifice for it. Read and educate yourself more.


So then youre not a catholic? You say that if you do not obey the catechism 100%, youre not catholic, but then you said everyone is a sinner, so if anyone subscribed to that school of thought, the conclusion is that there are no catholics because nobody can obey 100%.

And if God is love, then how can you not treat and love everyone equally, regardless of whether or not they are gay? Judgement is mine, sayeth the Lord. So who the heck are you or the catholic church or the LDS church or any church to judge? You cannot decide which of God's teachings to follow to suit your arguments. You either follow his word OR YOU DONT.

About McCain, that statement wasnt mine, it was a quote from former SNL comedian Al Franken, who was telling a joke on Conan O'brien's show. He was making a point that the point of the war should have been to capture the other guy, and instead McCain got caught, so why do we call that a hero? Ignorant? no more ignorant than the architects of prop 8.

[Trantor]

first off, Im not Catholic, Im Christian. My fiance is Catholic, but if youre going to get into Catholics and sins, how about this question...why is that EVERY catholic nation is extremely violent and murderous? sounds to me like they sin ALOT...MEXICO, ITALY, COLOMBIA, EL SALVADOR, BRAZIL...the list goes on.

what about Uruguay, Argentina, Spain, Portugal?

come on, most catholic countries (in the west at least) are violent and dangerous because most of them are poor or at least have very high income inequality.

but you left out TOO MANY catholic countries, some of which are not violent.

and is Italy that violent really? Aside from the Sicilian Mafia?


what about the violence that protestant countries (actually, angle saxon ones) have been inflicting on the rest of the world in the last 2-3 centuries?

[kryptos]

^^ you missed the point...

probably because im an Obama supporter, so I must be elitist..someone pass the arugula:jester:

[bennywah]

According to some lawyers, prop 8 will probably be overturned by the court for at least 2 reasons, 1. the California constitution can't be "gutted" i.e changed to change fundamental rights to a protected class under the constitution, in order to change the constitution that far would require a constitution convention, and a 2/3rds vote. 2. that sexual orientation is proctected under california law so prop 8 even with voter approval is against the law, so the same court that ruled in favor of gay rights would almost certainly shoot this measure down as well.

which if this is going to be the cycle for years to come becuase its now clear that a 60% plus vote won't occur again, and in a normal turnout year probably would have failed anyway, isn't now the time to make an out reach and teach one another about regular gay life, and how people are born the way they are? This also happens to be why in Ma they haven't brought forth a ballot measure to overturn gay marriage there, the court won't allow it, it may come this time that the california supreme court should it overturn prop 8 also make certain that ballot measures also stop unless as said earlier they were to have a constitutional convention?

as far as the federal supreme court, the lawyers fighting 8 are writing the litigation to be state specific so it can't go that far, otherwise a supreme court decision would be almost like a roe-v-wade type of deal? All interesting scenarios for this explosive issue.

[econgrad]

ORANGEVALE, CA - The Sacramento County Sheriff's Department says they don't have any early leads on who spray paint-vandalized a Mormon church in Orangevale. The graffiti, sprayed sometime late Thursday or early Friday morning, was on the church's front sign and nearby sidewalks.

In red lettering, it read, "No on 8."

"Paint washes off and we're just thankful there was no major damage done," said LDS Church spokeswoman Lisa West.

For the church, the damage is more emotional than physical. They, along with other religious organizations, had encouraged followers to support Proposition 8.

"This is a very emotionally charged issue and we understand it goes to the core of people's lives," West said.

She said all they can do is let the vandalism go and move on. But moving on does not seem to be on the agenda for many No on 8 supporters.

"If you strip somebody of their rights, nobody's going to let go of that," said No on 8 protester Jason Word.

"It's more than just marriage for us. It's very personal for us in that we feel attacked," said Darnell Fray-Stephenson, also demonstrating for No on 8.

For the third night in a row, No on 8 protesters gathered at the State Capitol to voice their frustrations over the ban on gay marriage.

Some have taken it further.

A Bay Area group has started the Mormons Stole Our Rights Web site. It accuses the church of advocating for the Yes on 8 campaign, and says they should have their status as a religious organization stripped.

"The Church of Jesus Christ of LDS did not donate any money to Prop 8, but supported the measure, and encouraged members to go out and give up their time and their means," said West. "The (church) members themselves did donate."

At the Friday night Capitol protest, many of those in opposition to Prop 8 said they weren't familiar with the Web site. They also said they're outraged that someone vandalized a church on their behalf.

"We certainly don't agree with that," said Fray-Stephenson.

"I think that rallies we've been having here have been real peaceful," said Word, "I think that's the message we should use."

Many of the No on 8 protesters said they're looking ahead to Sunday afternoon, saying it's going to be their biggest rally yet. They say it could include protesters from across the state, convening at the Capitol.

The Sacramento Police are planning for a large crowd.
News10/KXTV

[econgrad]

QUEERLY BELOVED
'Gay' threats target Christians over same-sex 'marriage' ban
'Burn their f---ing churches, then tax charred timbers'
Posted: November 05, 2008
11:00 pm Eastern

© 2008 WorldNetDaily

Decisions by voters in Florida, Arizona and California to join residents of 27 other states with constitutional protections for traditional marriage have prompted threats of violence against Christians and their churches.

"Burn their f---ing churches to the ground, and then tax the charred timbers," wrote "World O Jeff" on the JoeMyGod blogspot today within hours of California officials declaring Proposition 8 had been approved by a margin of 52 percent to 48 percent. Confirmation on voter approval of amendments in Florida and Arizona came earlier.

The amendments in all three states essentially limit marriage to one man and one woman. In California, the measure states the only marriages "valid and recognized" in the state are those between one man and one woman.

Thirty states now have adopted marriage amendments. However, in California, the vitriol appeared especially high since the state Supreme Court in May created same-sex marriage for homosexuals. Proposition 8 overruled the court decision, readopting the marriage definition California votersadopted in 2000.

On a blog website, "Tread" wrote, "I hope the No on 8 people have a long list and long knives."

Another contributor to the JoeMyGod website said, "While financially I supported the Vote No, and was vocal to everyone and anyone who would listen, I have never considered being a violent radical extremist for our equal rights. But now I think maybe I should consider becoming one. Perhaps that is the only thing that will affect the change we so desperately need and deserve."

A contributor identifying himself as "Joe" said, "I swear, I'd murder people with my bare hands this morning."

Matt Barber, director of cultural affairs for Liberty Counsel, called the statements "hate crimes" for their intent to create violence against someone based on their beliefs.

"This is not just a matter of some people blowing off steam because they're not happy with a political outcome. This is criminal activity," he said. "The homosexual lobby is always calling for 'tolerance' and 'diversity' and playing the role of victim. They claim to deplore violence and 'hate.' Here we have homosexuals inciting, and directly threatening, violence against Christians."

On the "Queerty" website, "Stenar" asked, "Can someone in CA please go burn down the Mormon temples there, PLEASE. I mean seriously. DO IT."

"I'm going to give them something to be f---ing scared of. … I'm a radical who is now on a mission to make them all pay for what they've done," wrote "Jonathan."

Liberty Counsel's Barber said, "This is not free speech; these are 'hate crimes' under the existing definition. Imagine if Christian websites were advocating such violence against homosexuals. There'd be outrage, and rightfully so. It'd be national front-page news. Federal authorities should immediately investigate these threats and prosecute the perpetrators to the fullest extent of the law."

On yet another site, "Americablog," "scottinsf" wrote, "Trust me. I've got a big list of names of mormons and catholics that were big supporters of Prop 8. … As far as mormons and catholics … I warn them to watch their backs."

"I hope they all rot in hell, those servants of a lying, corrupt devil! BAN RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM," wrote Angelo.

One contributor went so far as to threaten to take out his frustrations on his own family.

"You want me to come back to Idaho for Christmas? Oh wait, my partner and I can't share the same bed? We can't show any affection or any outward sign of our love
for each other? Well sorry family ... no Uncle Adam and all his expensive gifts and delicious cooking for you. Your childrens' presents will now be donations in their name to the equal rights organization of my choosing. As will their and your birthday presents, wedding presents, graduation presents, and everything else I give going forward."

The writer continued, "Remember, I'm angry. And I'm strong from my years at the gym and really am ready to take my frustration out on someone or something."

Barber said the Human Rights Campaign, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and "other leaders within the homosexual lobby" should call immediately for an end to such threats.

There were suggestions of a different type of violence, too.

"Hope the gay waiters at their hotel p---ed in all the drinks they served these cretins," "Jake" wrote about protectors of traditional marriage.

"If you're planning a heterosexual wedding in California … be prepared for picketers. Designate someone to watch the parking lot … You're going to have lots of unexpected expenses. Add $500 to your budget for security. … Be prepared for the flowers not lasting to the reception or the tuxedos showing up two sizes too small or the music at the reception being a way too loud or the cake tasting a little funny," stated another threat. "Be afraid. Be very afraid. We are everywhere."

Another even listed addresses of Mormon facilities. Mormon, Catholic and other religious groups were active in supporting the marriage definition.

"I do not openly advocate firebombing or vandalism. What you do with the information is your own choice," wrote Jeremy.








*** And I am done with this discussion. Whoever is wrong or right, may the truth be exposed. Back to hoping Kevin Johnson speeds up development in Sacramento.

[austinjfox]

This is horibble! don't you people realize that supporters of no on 8 are no better than supporters for it now. no one should suffer prosecutuion because of their own personjal opinion. i feel like im living in a third worls country where war is happening. don't you people get it! we all have to live together, so there's no reason in fighting over such ridiculous issues. we should all just get along.

[kryptos]

@ econgrad...

nice try karl rove. whats next? are you going to claim the gays are going to squirt acid from their nipple ring holes at god fearing christians? we should all be afraid lol

and pushing that right wing propaganda from ultra conservative worldnet daily is not going to make youre point look any more credible...

youre not changing minds here so just go tune into sean hannity and limbaugh the pill popper hypocrite and tune out the majority of the people on this board who voted no on prop 8..

IT WILL BE OVERTURNED

[econgrad]

^
It won't be overturned. The People have spoken. Deal with it. Stop the hate and vandalism, and move-on-dot-org with your lives.

FYI: By the way, I have equal rights on this site just as you. Don't be a fascist and try and silence me. The majority like me is rising up again, we will never stop. "We shall overcome..." (Singing)

Oh, (edit) I actually laughed hard with your squirt acid from the nipple ring holes...kudos to that one! Post that again on some right wing site, that's a great one. Never lose your sense of humor. I won't.

[kryptos]

"we shall overcome" is what Obama said at his victory speech on the 4th, when he was quoting Dr. King. YES WE CAN

the people may have spoken, however they spoke on prop 187, that dealt with illegal immigrants, it was overturned...

they spoke on prop 22, the first gay marriage ban, and it was overturned as well...

having it passed doesnt mean it will stay...the architects of prop 8 probably forgot to read the California Constitution:

ARTICLE 1 DECLARATION OF RIGHTS


SEC. 7. (a) A person may not be deprived of life, liberty, or
property without due process of law or denied equal protection of the
laws

(b) A citizen or class of citizens may not be granted privileges
or immunities not granted on the same terms to all citizens

prop 8 will be overturned on appeal since it violates State constitution, then supporters of prop 8 will appeal to the US Supreme Court, where it will either be turned down for review, which will mean the lower court ruling stands, or it will vote, splitting along political lines 4-4 and independent Justice Kennedy will side with the liberals as usual and in a 5-4 vote declare that prop 8 is unconstitutional, which will then open the door to gay marriage in all states because of it being decided by a federal court...either way, the constituion protects us all, gay or straight...you will see

[krudmonk]

They'd have to amend the US Constitution and take out the equal rights and protection from a state religion. Good luck with that...

[econgrad]

Proposition 8 is simple and straightforward.
Proposition 8 contains the same 14 words that were previously approved in 2000 by over 61% of California voters: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” By putting these words directly into the state Constitution, the court cannot strike them down as unconstitutional.
Proposition 8 is about preserving marriage; it’s not an attack on the gay lifestyle.
Proposition 8 doesn’t take away any rights or benefits from gay or lesbian domestic partners. Under California law, “domestic partners shall have the same rights, protections and benefits” as married spouses. (Family Code §297.5.) There are no exceptions to this. Proposition 8 will not change this.
Proposition 8 protects our children.
Proposition 8 protects our children from being taught in public schools that same-sex marriage is the same as traditional marriage. In health education classes, state law requires teachers to instruct children as young as kindergarteners about marriage. (Education Code §51890.) If the same-sex marriage ruling is not overturned, teachers will be required to teach young children that there is no difference between gay marriage and traditional marriage.


Proposition 8 protects marriage as an essential institution of society.
Proposition 8 protects marriage and the important role of a traditional family. While death, divorce or other circumstances may prevent the ideal, the best situation for a child is to be raised by a married mother and father.
YES on Proposition 8 does three simple things.

It restores the definition of marriage to what the vast majority of California voters already approved and human history has understood marriage to be.

It overturns the outrageous decision of four activist Supreme Court judges who ignored the will of the people.

It protects our children from being taught in public schools that “same-sex marriage” is the same as traditional marriage.

[econgrad]

On July 16, 2008, the California Supreme Court denied, without comment, a petition calling for the removal of Proposition 8 from the November ballot on the grounds it was a constitutional revision that only the Legislature or a constitutional convention could place before voters. Opponents also argued that the petitions circulated to qualify the measure for the ballot inaccurately summarized its effect. The court denied the petition without comment.[48] As a general rule, it is improper for courts to adjudicate pre-election challenges to a measure's substantive validity. (Costa v. Superior Court (2006) 37 Cal.4th 986, 1005-1006.) The question of whether Proposition 8 is a constitutional amendment or constitutional revision remains unresolved, and a new petition arguing that Proposition 8 is a revision was filed by civil rights groups on November 5, 2008.[19]

[econgrad]

Here is a quote from someone against prop 8 explaining why you are wrong.


Prop 8 is no joke. It’s not an ordinary law. Ordinary laws can be invalidated by the California Supreme Court. If Prop 8 passes, it will be enshrined in the California Constitution, which cannot be overturned by the California Supreme Court. Basically, it is like kryptonite to the loving same sex couples who wish to enter into life-long commitments in California. Ever see Superman and see what kryptonite does to him? Yeah. If Prop 8 is used against decent same sex couples who just want to be treated like equals under the law, it’s like that. It is the exact opposite of funny. It is serious.


See for yourself, here is the link.

http://gracethespot.com/?cat=125

[krudmonk]

Too bad you weren't a civics grad.

[Michael Kramer]

Your so called "activist" judges are conservative and were only interpreting the constitution based on the argument.

Letting the majority vote on minority rights rarely works in favor of the minority. Many straight people have no idea what it is like to be gay and make silly assumptions that it is a choice. :shrug:

I love that argument. Just ask a straight man if he chose to be heterosexual because it was the right thing to do. How stupid is that? :koko: I'm sure they woke up one day, saw a good looking man and said...he's cute, I want to get into his pants...wait that's wrong! I'm going to like women instead.

Desegregation didn't happen due to voters, it was argued and decided in the courts. Less than a century ago, it was also considered "immoral and destructive to society" to allow women to vote, integrate and allow interracial marriages. But is was okay to marry your cousin.

Boy, I really do love the "our country was founded on Judeo-Christian values Nice...many of our founding fathers were slave owners and believed they were saving the Africans from a savage life by introducing "Christian values"

The bottom line is that the vote happened. People are again legally discriminated against. Telling them to shut up is like the abusive misguided parent trying to silence a child in fear of being proven wrong.

The argument that the "overwhelming majority" believes in banning same sex marriage is a joke. It was 61 percent in 2000, now it's 52.5 percent and wouldn't have been that high if it weren't for the deceitful ads.

Econograd....Nice to see you replaced Sarah Palin with Reagan. You do have a right to your own opinion as do I and anyone else on this board.

This election has turned into the Jerry Springer show.

[wburg]

Apparently Prop. 8 isn't as court-proof as some have thought: it might go before a court within the next week:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/10/BATO141LU9.DTL&type=politics&tsp=1

I notice your signature line, econgrad...I thought you didn't own any guns?

[econgrad]

Your so called "activist" judges are conservative and were only interpreting the constitution based on the argument. That's so not true, the 9th circut in SF is completely leftist.

Letting the majority vote on minority rights rarely works in favor of the minority. Many straight people have no idea what it is like to be gay and make silly assumptions that it is a choice. :shrug: I agree with you 100%

I love that argument. Just ask a straight man if he chose to be heterosexual because it was the right thing to do. How stupid is that? It is very stupid, I agree, but this has nothing to do with prop 8:koko: I'm sure they woke up one day, saw a good looking man and said...he's cute, I want to get into his pants...wait that's wrong! I'm going to like women instead. That's funny. :haha:

Desegregation didn't happen due to voters, it was argued and decided in the courts. Less than a century ago, it was also considered "immoral and destructive to society" to allow women to vote, integrate and allow interracial marriages. But is was okay to marry your cousin. very true,l but nothing to do with prop 8

Boy, I really do love the "our country was founded on Judeo-Christian values Nice...many of our founding fathers were slave owners and believed they were saving the Africans from a savage life by introducing "Christian values" This is simply not very accurate, and has not anything to do with prop 8.

The bottom line is that the vote happened. People are again legally discriminated against. This is not about equal rights, this is about a definition of marriage in culture. Marriage had to be defined, there is much more to this, if you are interested do some research on the Catholic Church's stance and reasoning. It is not based on the Bible nor anything relating to God, it is a very logical and reasonable point. Telling them to shut up is like the abusive misguided parent trying to silence a child in fear of being proven wrong. Who did this? What? I would never tell you to shut up.

The argument that the "overwhelming majority" believes in banning same sex marriage is a joke. It was 61 percent in 2000, now it's 52.5 percent and wouldn't have been that high if it weren't for the deceitful ads. The deceitful ads are the ones claiming Prop 8 is about hate and discrimination, it is only about defining marriage.

Econograd....Nice to see you replaced Sarah Palin with Reagan. You do have a right to your own opinion as do I and anyone else on this board. Thanks! If you knew me, you would know that I believe these discussions are healthy for society, people who fear to talk about politics or religion or morality or anything are just plain awful. If we were at a coffee shop, I would buy you a cup of coffee and discuss this civilly.

This election has turned into the Jerry Springer show. This, I must agree with 100% as well, maybe for some different reasons, and I am sure for some of the same reasons

.

[econgrad]

I notice your signature line, econgrad...I thought you didn't own any guns?

"My Hypocrisy only goes so far.."

WHAT MOVIE? ANYONE?

[Michael Kramer]

.

It was the conservative State Supreme Court that overturned Prop 22. Hardly leftest.

[econgrad]

It was the conservative State Supreme Court that overturned Prop 22. Hardly leftest.

Come on man! Everyone, Gavin dipshit Mayor himself has admitted the 9th circuit is pro-left. Your just making false statements without backing them up, do you know what the 9th circuit is?


A San Francisco trial court threw out all of the gender requirements on state constitutional grounds. On appeal, an intermediate court reversed that decision. In December 2006, the California Supreme Court voted unanimously to review all six cases and held oral argument on March 4, 2008, consolidating the cases as In Re Marriage Cases.[17] The Court ruled on May 15, 2008, that Proposition 22 violated the state Constitution and was therefore invalid.[18] Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger immediately issued a statement pledging to uphold the ruling, and repeated his pledge to oppose Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment initiative that would override the Court's ruling and again ban same sex marriages by placing the text of Proposition 22 in the State Constitution.

[wburg]

Come on man! Everyone, Gavin dipsh*t Mayor himself has admitted the 9th circuit is pro-left. Your just making false statements without backing them up, do you know what the 9th circuit is?


econgrad:

Well, I know who the 9th circuit ISN'T. They weren't the ones who threw out Prop. 22 and thus reopened the window for gay marriage. That was the California State Supreme Court, an entirely different court.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is a federal court. They are not the same court as the California Supreme Court. It doesn't matter whether the 9th Circuit Court are all card-carrying Communists or not for purposes of this discussion, because they were NOT the people who overturned Prop. 22.

standard wikipediation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Supreme_Court
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals_for_the_Ninth_Circuit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_22_(2000)

[econgrad]

econgrad:

Well, I know who the 9th circuit ISN'T. They weren't the ones who threw out Prop. 22 and thus reopened the window for gay marriage. That was the California State Supreme Court, an entirely different court.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is a federal court. They are not the same court as the California Supreme Court. It doesn't matter whether the 9th Circuit Court are all card-carrying Communists or not for purposes of this discussion, because they were NOT the people who overturned Prop. 22.

standard wikipediation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Supreme_Court
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals_for_the_Ninth_Circuit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_22_(2000)


Your mistaken.
http://www.9thcircuitwatch.com/

[wburg]

Your mistaken.
http://www.9thcircuitwatch.com/
Um, no, you're mistaken. The link you provided doesn't have a story (that I could find) claiming that the 9th Circuit Court overturned Prop. 22. If there is such a story, please provide a direct link. Here's the appellate court case information:

http://appellatecases.courtinfo.ca.gov/search/case/dockets.cfm?dist=0&doc_id=447693&doc_no=S147999

Note that this is the CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT. That is, the Supreme Court of the State of California, not a federal court. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is a FEDERAL court, not a state court.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, by the way, did hear a case submitted by two men who wanted to marry, and were challenging the Defense of Marriage Act, a federal regulation signed by Clinton that bans gay marriage, and Prop. 22. They threw the case out, and the suit was dismissed, on grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the federal law, and abstained from making a decision on state law because that was outside their purview as a federal court. In other words, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the supposedly uber-liberal body you claim is responsible for throwing out California's gay marriage ban, ruled in favor of a law that prohibits gay marriage.

http://www.alliancedefensefund.org/news/story.aspx?cid=3748

[krudmonk]

I love how he thinks the judges are regular people from San Francisco.

[econgrad]

^ There are regular people from San Francisco?

Wburg, both courts ruled on prop 22 if you read many articles on that website. What and how does this move me towards being wrong on voting yes on 8?
It doesn't, and no conservative court would be activist and overturn the voters. They are activists and liberal.

[wburg]

^ There are regular people from San Francisco?

Wburg, both courts ruled on prop 22 if you read many articles on that website. What and how does this move me towards being wrong on voting yes on 8?
It doesn't, and no conservative court would be activist and overturn the voters. They are activists and liberal.

Obviously the facts won't stand against your mighty opinions, econgrad, so I won't bother reiterating the specific court cases that tossed out Prop. 22. I posted them already.

It's far from the first time that a state proposition was overturned. In California, voters approved Proposition 14 in 1964. This was in response to the Rumford Fair Housing Act, an act that made housing discrimination based on race illegal in California. Proposition 14 passed with wide popular support--65% yes, 35% no, thus maintaining the right of property owners to enforce racial covenants. Prior to the civil rights era, many property owners put these racial exclusion covenants on their property: it was illegal to sell the property to anyone who wasn't white. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out Proposition 14, on the basis that it violated the 14th Amendment, and racial covenants finally fell by the wayside.

Why did the judges throw out Proposition 14? Because it violated the civil rights of American citizens. Even though the voters supported it with a significant majority, discriminatory laws like racial exclusion covenants are not acceptable under the Constitution.

Deciding whether or not laws are constitutional is EXACTLY the job of the courts. Whether laws are popular or not is not the issue, nor what the courts consider--they rule based on the constitutionality of the law. That isn't decided by who gets the most votes.

[Majin]

I really don't want to get into this prop 8 argument but I'll just say in this rare case wburg is actually right on the money in relation to the job of the supreme court vs voter passed laws.

It's really sad how many people are willing to blindly support discriminatory laws despite the fact that our nations history is littered with other discriminatory laws that we now find repugnant. How is prop 8 any different?

[jsf8278]

^ There are regular people from San Francisco?

Wburg, both courts ruled on prop 22 if you read many articles on that website. What and how does this move me towards being wrong on voting yes on 8?
It doesn't, and no conservative court would be activist and overturn the voters. They are activists and liberal.

The word "activist" is a term of art. Both liberal and conservative judges are "activist," in that they overturn laws. During the 1930's the extremely conservative US Supreme Court was overturning many of the New Deal laws passed by congress and signed into law by the president.

A more recent example is when the US Supreme Court overturned the Violence Against Women Act (authored by Joe Biden). The conservative members voted to overturn it and the liberals voted to keep it.

I'm not very familiar with state courts, so I don't have any examples there. I will say that you should really reconsider calling the CA Supreme Court Justices "liberals." You do realize all but one was appointed by a Republican?

[snfenoc]

David Souter and John Paul Steven were appointed by RePUBElicans. That hardly makes them conservative.



Equality. Hmmmmmmm. What happens when equality flies in the face of right? If equality leads us in the direction of wrong, it is wrong. Sorry. 2+2 does not equal 5, and Man + Man (or Woman + Woman) does not equal marriage. You may want to check your Bibles and thousands of years of tradition. Prop 22 unconstitutional? Well, it depends on your interpretation. I doubt the framers of the state's constitution (as well as those who wrote the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution) intended it to support the twisted sham that is gay marriage.




I won't get into the whole Marbury v. Madison debate anymore, I know people think my position is stupid, and I know my views are not accepted. However, I'll leave you with the words of Thomas Jefferson (another man with stupid positions):

"To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy."

[econgrad]

Obviously the facts won't stand against your mighty opinions, econgrad, so I won't bother reiterating the specific court cases that tossed out Prop. 22. I posted them already.

It's far from the first time that a state proposition was overturned. In California, voters approved Proposition 14 in 1964. This was in response to the Rumford Fair Housing Act, an act that made housing discrimination based on race illegal in California. Proposition 14 passed with wide popular support--65% yes, 35% no, thus maintaining the right of property owners to enforce racial covenants. Prior to the civil rights era, many property owners put these racial exclusion covenants on their property: it was illegal to sell the property to anyone who wasn't white. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out Proposition 14, on the basis that it violated the 14th Amendment, and racial covenants finally fell by the wayside.

Why did the judges throw out Proposition 14? Because it violated the civil rights of American citizens. Even though the voters supported it with a significant majority, discriminatory laws like racial exclusion covenants are not acceptable under the Constitution.

Deciding whether or not laws are constitutional is EXACTLY the job of the courts. Whether laws are popular or not is not the issue, nor what the courts consider--they rule based on the constitutionality of the law. That isn't decided by who gets the most votes.

What facts? You read a summary from Wikipedia and you think you have facts? You can fool many people on this forum with your bogus arguements, try doing some full research. First off, trying to compare gay marriage to a civil rights issue (very insulting to the 7/10 blacks who voted yes on prop8) is bogus argument number 1, why? Marriage is limited by the law, we cannot marry a relative, or an underage person, nor a cow or a donkey. Prop 8 defines marriage in the constitution, "Between a Man and a Woman". That's it. Have all the civil unions you want, the only reason gays want to use the term marriage is their continued fight and war on religion. Their continued efforts to create a non religious secular society. All the arguments about civil rights is just smoke and mirrors.
Taught in Schools: It is a fact that if Prop 8 did not pass, gay marriage would be taught to as young as kindergarten. Its strange how we accept the government to pick up our children by buses, shipping them away to schools which we have no say in what is taught there. Parents should have absolute control over what their children are taught.
• In the year 2000, 61% of Californians voted in favor of marriage being designated as one man and one woman.
In 2008 four judges overturned this vote and determined that gay marriages should be legal.
• There are over six million households in California. Only 92,000 households are made up of gay couples. Less
than two percent of the population are on the verge of forever re-defining marriage for the other 98%. No longer
will there be Brides and Grooms. Only Party A and Party B.

With the passage of Prop 8, the gay community does not lose any rights, California already has in place a domestic partnership law that gives them all the rights of a married couple, but without re-defining what marriage is for the rest of the population. Continuing to prove this is not a civil rights issue but a war on traditional values and religion.

• If Proposition 8 did not pass and gay marriage was legalized, school-age children as young as kindergarten will be taught that gay marriage is equal to traditional marriage, regardless of what your beliefs are. In
Massachusetts, where gay marriage has been legal for several years, a father actually ended up behind bars after visiting his son’s school to request that he be allowed to “opt out” on behalf of his kindergarten child
when gay marriage is discussed. He was told he would not be notified and that wasn’t an option. When he refused to leave the school grounds until they agreed to his request, he was arrested and put in jail. His case has
gone all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, where he is waiting a decision to find out if they will consider hearing the arguments.
• If Proposition 8 did not pass and gay marriage is legalized forever, just expressing out loud that you don’t agree with the gay lifestyle would be considered hate speech. Churches will lose their religious freedom and be
forced to perform gay marriages or risk penalties including fines and jail time for the pastor.

• If Proposition 8 did not pass, it could have opened the door for any number of others to argue their right to get married: this could include multiple partners, not limited to two; parent and child; brother and sister. Once the door is opened to re-define marriage, the re-definitions will go on and on.

• If the gay community will have in fact “won” the right to have their voices
heard and the conservative community and people of faith will forever lose their right to openly proclaim their religious beliefs. Their freedom to speak out their beliefs on behalf of traditional marriage and family will put
them at risk of being charged with a hate-crime.
• Children need a mother AND a father. Legalizing gay marriage tells children they only need what the adults in their life feel they need: two fathers or two mothers. Its an unproved experiment destined to become a social nightmare.

[bennywah]

marriage has taken on many different forms over the life of humans, so like society it has changed with the times. Religion and its views have no place in our laws or courts, and we are supposed to have a separation of "church and state" so a church's view can't influence laws as to what marriage is supposed to be, and after talking to family members who vote democratic but are church patrons on a regular basis THAT was their overall view as to why it was wrong, because of the bible, and more than likely the majority that supported prop 8.

when 65% + of married couples end in 7 years or less marriage is not what it used to be, and if marriage in our 21st century society is to be based on love, than all humans deserve that right, PERIOD!!!

my last points, the prop is illegal under california's constitution, and if you are not gay then don't claim to think you know wether it was a choice, or if they were born gay, if they were born gay which evidence and any gay person will tell you than to deny them rights for a thing that can't change about themselves is discrimination, just like racial marriages, land rights, genocide ect, within the next 40 years the view on gays will change as it did for blacks, and women, its time those that can't sit and find out who a real gay person is, how they think and that the same omni present being that created straight people also created gay people and loves them as well. the bible was written by man and has changed with him, its time to look forward and realize that what's custom, or religious has no bearing on the here and now.

[bennywah]

so are kids never on their own anyway going to find out about homosexuals? And if they did this might somehow turn them gay?

Parents don't take the time teach much at home anymore theses days, not all bur most, thats part of the problem we have with our younger generations coming up, it can be taught in school, or on tv, but when the subject matter is not to their liking they want gov't or laws to just hide it.

If parents want to do right by their kids they'll discuss these matters at home before anyone else can, present them their own views, what others think and allow their kids at an appropriate age to make their own view on the issues, hiding or sheltering only makes things worse as kids get older, they'll be more likely to try things or experiment, and no I dont mean gay sex. If the kids are gay they were born that way, hiding it, not teaching it, ect won't change that, the education argument was a way to make it better than basing it off religious views or customs.

If parents are so worried about their kids, then turn off the t.v, disconnect the internet, and take the kids outside, read a book, have discussions and be opened minded, the kids will be better for it.

[econgrad]

RE-read my post, parents should not be put in jail if they do not want their children exposed to a gay marriage.


More examples of the tolerant left:

LA Prop 8 Protesters Target Blacks

Unfortunately, you had to know this was coming.

Angered by the news that black voters were a major factor in the success of Prop 8, California's gay marriage ban, some segments of yesterday's anti-Prop 8 protests in LA soon devolved into hateful pits of racism:

Geoffrey, a student at UCLA and regular Rod 2.0 reader, joined the massive protest outside the Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Westwood. Geoffrey was called the n-word at least twice.

It was like being at a klan rally except the klansmen were wearing Abercrombie polos and Birkenstocks. YOU NIGGER, one man shouted at men. If your people want to call me a FAGGOT, I will call you a nigger. Someone else said same thing to me on the next block near the temple…me and my friend were walking, he is also gay but Korean, and a young WeHo clone said after last night the niggers better not come to West Hollywood if they knew what was BEST for them.

Los Angeles resident and Rod 2.0 reader A. Ronald says he and his boyfriend, who are both black, were carrying NO ON PROP 8 signs and still subjected to racial abuse.

Three older men accosted my friend and shouted, "Black people did this, I hope you people are happy!" A young lesbian couple with mohawks and Obama buttons joined the shouting and said there were "very disappointed with black people" and "how could we" after the Obama victory. This was stupid for them to single us out because we were carrying those blue NO ON PROP 8 signs! I pointed that out and the one of the older men said it didn't matter because "most black people hated gays" and he was "wrong" to think we had compassion. That was the most insulting thing I had ever heard. I guess he never thought we were gay.

Gun owners and people who attend church weekly also overwhelmingly supported Prop 8, but protesters failed to single them out the way they did blacks. Perhaps that's because a gun owner isn't as easily spotted as a black person, or perhaps that's because gays, rightly, are especially angry that so many black Americans refuse to sympathize with their struggle. Regardless, it's likely that yesterday's incident was just the beginning of this insanity.

Source: http://www.stereohyped.com/la-prop-8-protesters-target-blacks-20081110/



Published: November 12, 2008
“The mob exploded"

Frustrated by passage of Proposition 8, same-sex marriage backers turn to violence, vandalism, threats

While the California Supreme Court considers whether to hear a request to nullify a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages approved by 52.3% of the state’s voters on Nov. 4, homosexual activists from one end of the state to the other have taken to the streets, attacking a 69-year-old woman in Palm Springs, vandalizing Mormon temples, holding protests outside Protestant and Catholic churches, and causing near-riots in cities like West Hollywood.

Near Sacramento, a Mormon house of worship was spray-painted with “No on 8;” in Riverside, “Yes on 8” signs were arranged to form a swastika on the lawn of a Catholic church; and in Carlsbad, members of the Knights of Columbus collecting money outside an Albertson’s grocery store over the weekend to help disabled children were told by the store manager to leave after same-sex marriage advocates complained that the Knights had contributed to the Yes on 8 campaign.

“Even Rick Warren's Saddleback Church was targeted by nearly a thousand protesters, despite the church's groundbreaking efforts to bring together evangelicals and liberal politicians to combat the global AIDS epidemic,” reported the Campaign for Children and Families.

“During protests over the past several days, homosexuals angry about the passage of Proposition 8, which reserves marriage licenses for a man and a woman, have hurled the N-word against black persons walking by, marched through police blockades, pounded on doors of businesses, and protested outside churches,” said a Campaign for Children and Families news release.

One of the most dramatic anti-Proposition 8 incidents occurred in Palm Springs last Friday during an anti-Prop. 8 rally outside city hall. “The rally got off to a rough start when the protesters verbally attacked a Prop. 8 supporter, Phyllis Burgsess,” the Desert Sun reported. “She carried a cross, which angered the crowd. A couple people knocked the cross out of her hand and stomped on it, sparking the rest of the crowd to charge her.” The newspaper reported yesterday that Burgsess has decided to file criminal charges against her assailants.

The attack on Burgsess was captured on film by KPSP television, CBS channel 2. (To see the footage, Click Here.)

Catholic News Agency, citing a story in the Meridian, a magazine for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), reported that a Los Angeles Police Department supervisor who is a practicing member of the religious group, said that several members of his church had received hate mail after their names, religious affiliation, contribution amounts, and addresses were published on a web site inciting Proposition 8 opponents to target the individuals listed.

The police supervisor, Paul Bishop, said some of the 2,500 protesters at the LDS Temple bore signs reading “Separation of Church and Hate” and “Mormon haters.” Some signs were left on the temple walls, according to CNA. “The late local news showed scenes of several Hispanic females in tears outside the temple trying to remove the signs desecrating the walls and fences surrounding the temple,” said Bishop. “As these individuals – who according to a temple spokesperson were not church members – removed the hate-filled signs, the mob exploded and began beating the individuals to the ground. Police intervened and arrests were made, but the fact this was allowed to happen at all was appalling.”

The Oakland Tribune reported that a protest outside a Mormon temple on Sunday forced the closing of nearby freeway off-ramps for more than three hours.

Another 2,500 protesters gathered at the steps of the state Capitol in Sacramento, said CNA. In downtown Los Angeles, about 150 protesters gathered outside the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels chanting, “What would Jesus say?”

Attorney Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, said in a prepared statement he believes the ongoing vandalism and protests will backfire. "Californians are among the most tolerant people in the world,” said Dacus. “They are also not stupid, and they deliberately rejected forced acceptance of gay marriage, while leaving in place domestic partnerships and a host of other special rights based for homosexuals. The hatred and intimidation we are seeing right now from gay activists could set their movement back years. If anything, they are convincing a lot of Californians that we did the right thing by not caving in to their demands."

Said Randy Thomasson, president of the Campaign for Children and Families, "This screaming and shouting, name-calling and pushing by homosexual activists is not unlike a small child throwing a fit because he doesn't get his way. The public is getting a clue that homosexual activists don't like democracy and are willing to trample anyone and anything that gets in their way. How is it that those who demand tolerance from others are so intolerant of the people's vote to reserve marriage for a man and a woman?"

© California Catholic Daily 2008. All Rights Reserved.


Watch for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5ZDElQNBAQ

[Grimnebulin]

Some interesting history about the history of marriages per The New Yorker...a few years old but still relevant.


Love Supreme
Gay nuptials and the making of modern marriage.
by Adam Haslett May 31, 2004 - The New Yorker

In December of 1990, Genora Dancel and Ninia Baehr, a lesbian couple from Honolulu, applied for and were denied a license to marry. They decided to file suit against the state for discrimination. The local branch of the A.C.L.U. declined to represent them, and the national gay legal organizations initially kept their distance, considering the issue premature. But the couple persisted, and three years later the Hawaii Supreme Court became the first in the nation to support the right of same-sex couples to wed. Conservative religious groups poured money into the state and eventually helped pass an amendment to its constitution declaring marriage an exclusively heterosexual institution.

More was at stake than the laws of Hawaii. Article IV of the United States Constitution establishes that “Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State.” This is the reason that a couple married in New York can fly to California and still legally be husband and wife when they land. Worried that other states might one day extend marriage rights to same-sex couples, conservatives in Congress introduced the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman for the purposes of all federal law, from taxes to Social Security, and released the states from any constitutional obligation to recognize same-sex marriages that might be performed elsewhere. President Clinton, seeking to deny Bob Dole a wedge issue in his 1996 reëlection campaign, signed the bill late on a Friday night, after the press corps had gone home.

The issue’s sudden prominence during the past several months stems from a decision of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts last November to grant same-sex couples full civil marriage. For the first time in this country’s history, a state has sanctioned the marriage of two men or two women; because the Massachusetts constitution can’t be amended any sooner than 2006—the process is under way but by no means certain to succeed—it will do so for at least the next two years. The Bay State thus joins the Netherlands, Belgium, and three Canadian provinces in offering gay couples not only the rights and obligations of marriage but the word itself.

The ensuing national ferment has become a struggle over the meaning and purpose of matrimony. For marriage as we know it today is the product of a particular history—a history that explains both its public character and the private expectations we have for it. The advent of same-sex marriage brings into focus a much larger transformation in how we have come to imagine the institution.

For centuries in Europe, formal marriage was a private contract between landed families, designed to insure that property remained within a particular lineage. In the upper classes, families essentially married other families, forging political alliances and social obligations among relatives and kin. It was during the Reformation, with the emergence of the early Protestant idea of “companionate marriage,” that the emotional bond between husband and wife came to be seen as an end in itself. As the social historian Lawrence Stone noted, this was a marked departure from the Catholic ideal of chastity, which considered earthly marriage a more or less unfortunate necessity meant to accommodate human weakness; “It is better to marry than to burn,” St. Paul had said, but he made it sound like a close call. So when the Puritans wrote of husbands and wives as mutually respectful and affectionate partners they were moving toward a new understanding of marriage as a kind of spiritual friendship.

It was Milton who took this concept to its logical conclusion. Having married a woman with whom he soon discovered he had nothing in common, he became a staunch advocate of divorce. When the “meet and happy conversation” that is “the chiefest and the noblest end of marriage” ceases, he argued, no authority should have the power to force a man and a woman to remain wed. It was hundreds of years before the law caught up with his notion that irreconcilable differences might be grounds for divorce. But what his tracts on the subject demonstrate is that early Protestant thinking about matrimony contained the seeds of our own more radical individualism.

These days, few would disagree that respect and affection are central to a successful marriage. But most of us would add another ingredient, which had long been viewed skeptically as a reason to wed: romantic love. Burton, in his “Anatomy of Melancholy”—the most widely read book of the seventeenth century after the Bible—reflected a common view when he described marriage as one of several “remedies of love,” which was itself an illness to be overcome. Not until the confessional diaries and novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries started to influence bourgeois notions of what Jane Austen called “connubial felicity” did romance begin its steady ascent in the marital realm. Today, needless to say, the most respectable reason you can give for getting married is that you have fallen in love. We have managed to create an ideal of matrimony that combines both lifetime companionship and the less stable but more intoxicating pleasures of romantic ardor.

Such great expectations of marital happiness belong to a larger history of the Western emphasis on the self. The philosopher Charles Taylor, in an examination of how our attitude toward interior life has changed over the past five hundred years, argues that the trend line runs in one direction: from a self-understanding gained from our place in larger entities—such as a chain of being or divine order—toward purpose discovered from within, through what we consider to be authentic self-expression. This is the distance Western culture has travelled from the church confessional to the therapist’s couch. In turn, the choice of whom to marry has become less about satisfying the demands of family and community than about satisfying oneself. When you add the contraceptive and reproductive technologies that have separated sex from procreation, what you have is a model of heterosexual marriage that is grounded in and almost entirely sustained on individual preference. This is a historically peculiar state of affairs, one that would be alien to our ancestors and to most traditional cultures today. And it makes the push for gay marriage inevitable.

If agreement between two people were all that was required, of course, gays and lesbians would have been marrying for some time already. According to the 2000 census, the first to collect such data, there are five hundred and ninety-four thousand same-sex couples living in the United States (and that’s no doubt an undercount, given people’s reluctance to report their sexual orientation to the government). But marriage requires the consent of a third party—namely, the state.

This fact, too, can be traced to the same early Protestants who gave us companionate marriage. As the journalist E. J. Graff tells us, in her newly reissued popular history “What Is Marriage For?” (Beacon; $16), at the time Luther nailed his proclamations to the door, Rome had no requirement that a priest be present at the wedding ceremony; vows spoken in private were sufficient to create a binding marriage. That caused the aristocracy no end of trouble, given that disobedient children were liable to threaten carefully negotiated contracts by running into the closet with a servant and whispering sweet promises. For the northern European Protestants, the solution was to require, for the first time, a public ceremony with the presence of witnesses. They also transferred the power to enforce the new rules to the emerging secular states. In England, precaution had long taken the form of “banns”: a couple’s intention to wed was proclaimed in church on three successive Sundays, thus giving a community plenty of time to determine whether either party was committed elsewhere. The state-issued marriage licenses we employ today originated in magistrates’ offices and enabled well-to-do families to avoid the banns by attesting to the fitness of the parties in a document.

Informal arrangements nevertheless persisted among those who were less well off, or who lived in less regulated societies. In the early days of the American Republic, with a population scattered across the continent, there were simply too few ministers and justices of the peace to go around. Largely for the practical reason of not wanting to declare so many children bastards, most state courts recognized common-law marriage, established by mutual consent and cohabitation. If you said you were married and the neighbors tended to believe you, then in the eyes of the law you were. (In eleven states, including Texas, this is still the case.) In the decades after the Civil War, however, government bureaucracy, spurred by the moralists and social scientists of the Progressive movement, began to regulate marriage far more aggressively. For the first time, people who sought to wed had to submit to medical examinations, and those with syphilis or gonorrhea were prevented from marrying by criminal statute. By the century’s end, state legislatures had all but mandated that couples obtain a license to marry.

These government-sponsored contracts are at the center of the fight over same-sex unions. In the modern administrative state, civil marriage condenses within a single document a vast array of legal, financial, and medical rights and benefits. Like citizenship for the immigrant, it is a passport to a more secure world. As the old status of marriage has come to include such a range of contractual benefits, the debates over equality within and access to the institution have intensified.

Owing to the reforms of the past forty years, men and women now enter the married state with more legal parity than ever before. Under the old doctrine of coverture, a man owned not only his wife’s property but her body as well. Today, in nearly every state, men’s and women’s rights and obligations in alimony, child custody, child support, and property division in divorce have been made formally gender-neutral. Arrests and prosecutions for domestic abuse, rare thirty years ago, are now routine. As recently as 1984, a man could not be prosecuted for raping his own wife; today, it’s a crime in all fifty states.

During the same period that the old patriarchal rules were being revised, the Supreme Court struck down a series of laws limiting the right of individuals to marry in the first place. In the most famous case, Loving v. Virginia, a unanimous Court held that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional. “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men,” Chief Justice Warren wrote in 1967. A decade later, a Wisconsin law preventing people from marrying if they were behind on their child-support payments was overturned as too burdensome to the “basic civil rights of man.” In 1987, the Rehnquist Court deemed the freedom to marry so fundamental that it could not be denied to prison inmates, whose other constitutional rights are routinely abrogated.

Those who opposed extending this right to same-sex couples used to cite the fact that many states outlawed sodomy: how could you sanction the marriage of people who could be arrested for what they did together in the bedroom? Then, last summer, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Court struck down the thirteen remaining sodomy laws in the country, and established a broad constitutional right to sexual privacy. The force and scope of the opinion surprised even its supporters. In a rare gesture, the Court not only overturned Bowers v. Hardwick, a 1986 opinion upholding a Georgia sodomy statute, but in essence apologized for it: “Its continuance as precedent demeans the lives of homosexual persons.” The majority was careful to point out that the decision said nothing about the “formal recognition” of relationships. But opponents of same-sex marriage realized the decision’s importance. As Justice Scalia warned in a caustic dissent, “If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is ‘no legitimate state interest’ . . . what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising ‘the liberty protected by the Constitution’? Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry.” Five months later, the Massachusetts high court cited Lawrence in its decision.

Social conservatives now fear that, in the absence of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, the Supreme Court will combine its precedents on the fundamental right to marry with the more recent decisions in favor of gay rights to give same-sex couples their own Loving v. Virginia—nationalizing gay marriage through constitutional interpretation. As a doctrinal matter, such fears are well grounded. Few legal scholars would disagree with Justice Scalia that Lawrence has made this outcome far more plausible.

Politically, however, a gay Loving is unlikely in the foreseeable future. The Supreme Court is seldom a force of social innovation. The first state to strike down its anti-miscegenation law was California, in 1948. For nearly two decades thereafter, all through the period of Brown v. Board of Education, the Court avoided the controversy over interracial marriage, exercising its discretion not to hear a case. By the time it decided Loving, fourteen states had followed California’s lead, and only sixteen still maintained a ban. The Court endorsed what had become a majority position, if not in public opinion at least in legislative fact; the same can be said of Lawrence. The modern conservative obsession with what is selectively dubbed judicial activism has much to do with Roe v. Wade, and the fact that it struck down thirty state laws criminalizing abortion. No less an advocate of abortion rights than Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has suggested that it may have been precipitate not to allow the states to come to a stronger consensus before the Court brought the reform process to an end. In the informal electorate of the states, the vote on full civil marriage for same-sex couples now stands at forty-nine to one. It is difficult to conceive of the Supreme Court recognizing a right to gay marriage under these circumstances.

Meanwhile, interest groups on both sides are lobbying legislators and filing more suits, in an attempt to shape the outcome in one jurisdiction at a time. As a legal matter, these are contests over the expansion of the rights and obligations of marriage. As a political and cultural matter, they are contests over something less easy to codify: the official recognition of love. Here the two most important developments in the history of marriage—secular regulation and the rise of the romantic-companionate ideal—become intertwined. The state is being asked not only to distribute benefits equally but to legitimate gay people’s love and affection for their partners. The gay couples now marrying in Massachusetts want not only the same protections that straight people enjoy but the social status that goes along with the state’s recognition of a romantic relationship.

This is the difference between civil unions and marriage: one is a legal certificate and the other is a public endorsement. Not surprisingly, many Americans who might support the first remain uncomfortable with the second. In “Gay Marriage” (Times Books; $22), the journalist Jonathan Rauch means to persuade such people that same-sex marriage will be good not only for gay people but for marriage in general. Rauch is a conservative—how many books garner blurbs from both George Will and Barney Frank?—and his argument for the benefits to gay people is based largely on the social discipline he thinks it would impose: once gay men and lesbians are allowed to wed, society can begin expecting them to do so, as it does straight people. “The gay rights era will be over and the gay responsibility era will begin,” he writes. This soft coercion is a civilizing force, because “no other institution has the power to turn narcissism into partnership, lust into devotion, strangers into kin.” We shouldn’t expect results too soon, however: “As with the coming of capitalism to the Soviet empire, so with the coming of marriage to gay culture. Freedom and responsibility take time to learn.” With analogies as inviting as this, one wonders whether snuggling gay lovers ought to take a bus tour of Putin’s Russia before heading to the altar. Though clearly a true believer in matrimony, Rauch doesn’t make it sound like much fun.

The real threat to marriage, he says, is the growth of registered cohabitation, from domestic partnerships to civil unions, which increasingly includes unwed heterosexuals. He warns that we are heading to the day when marriage—straight or gay—will become “merely an item on a mix-and-match menu of lifestyle options, a truffle in the candy box.” For Rauch, whose view of marriage is more medicinal than confectionary, letting gays marry will actually help marriage by relieving the pressure to create alternatives.

What’s undeniable is that the battle over same-sex marriage arrives at a time of declining participation in the institution itself. The number of marriages performed each year in the United States (2.3 million) is as low as it has ever been relative to the adult population. As Andrew Hacker has pointed out, nearly half of Americans reach the age of thirty without having married, and almost twelve per cent of women and sixteen per cent of men enter their forties still never having wed—the highest percentages in the nation’s history.

As the numbers wane, though, the fantasy seems to grow more intense. The wedding industry generates at least seventy billion dollars a year in revenue, which is double the earnings of the movie business. Bridal magazines are some of the most profitable on the newsstand. The ersatz courtship of the Bachelor and the Bachelorette has provided some of the highest-rated television programming in recent years. At the same time, the pressures on the partnership that follows the wedding day are enormous: in an era of low civic participation and high economic insecurity, spouses are ever more relied upon as the sole providers of continuity and human solace. A state-sponsored, lifelong, intimate relationship—or the prospect of it—now carries a heavy and often unbearable responsibility for personal happiness.

What effect will allowing men to marry men and women to marry women have on our peculiarly modern venture of marriage? Proponents typically say that it will have hardly any—that there is no shortage of marriage licenses, and all that will happen is that more citizens and their children will have the benefits of existing family law. The opposition argues that one of the organizing institutions of our society will be imperilled.

History suggests that neither view is quite accurate. Despite comparisons to the repeal of miscegenation laws, no other expansion of the marriage franchise—to the sterile, to slaves, or to interracial couples—has required an alteration in the basic definition of the term: the union of a man and woman as husband and wife. To discount this as mere semantics misses what the definition points up: that marriage, through all its incarnations, has been a procedure that assigns people a new identity based on their gender. For centuries, it has been the ceremony that makes males into husbands and females into wives. Until very recently, this meant a lifetime commitment to both the security and the constriction of a well-defined social role. The symbolic danger that gay marriage poses to such an arrangement is obvious. It alters the public meaning of the word by further draining it of its power to reinforce traditional expectations of behavior. What does it mean to be a husband in a world where a man could have one of his own? This is up to each individual couple, one is tempted to say. Fair enough; but the words we use to describe our relationships are shared cultural property. There is no private language. In this sense, granting the word “marriage” to gay couples will eventually affect everyone.

The mistake is to consider the change in meaning particularly drastic. After all, undoing customary expectations for how a husband and wife behave toward each other has been one of the goals of the women’s movement since its inception. Rather than an abrupt departure, same-sex marriage is the culmination of a larger and ultimately more consequential change in the nature of marital relations between men and women.

Which is one of the reasons that the opposition to it is so fierce. It has come to symbolize what is, historically speaking, radical about contemporary marriage: the decline of the patriarchal legal structure and the rise of the goal of self-fulfillment. Gay marriage is unsettling, to many, not because it departs from modern meanings of matrimony but because it embodies them. ♦

[bennywah]

violence is never right, nor are slurs towards others, that being said, just like racial crimes were and are under reported, a few incidents of people being rash does not mean the majority of people opposed to prop 8 act or feel that way, and for the few acting out I'm sure they have seen and heard worse, doesn't make it right but the radical behavior argument goes both ways.

So in terms of what kids will feel as right or wrong if they dont have a mom or dad? My mom is a lesbian, single, makes north of $100k and my brother is happily married to a women for 4 yrs and they have an almost 2 yr old son, he also serves in the air force watches football, loves cars, he's a normal straight man.

I could list many more examples of other kids who came out just fine from being in a gay household which comes back to the point, your either born gay, or not, there's no oh janes got two mommies so I can do that too, just doesn't work that way.

Also my mom is African American, my dad is white, years ago we didn't know how interracial marriages would affect how kids see the world, these same arguments about how being different will change society is just ridiculous and have nothing to do with the law.

Since my mom is 54 years old, she's old enough to know about being segregated, different races not being able to marry, the arguments that were used against them are the same now, and since she knows she was born a lesbian and a black she can't change these things about herself, oh btw she was raised in a family where her parents stayed married till my grandmother passed away a few years ago, she has two sisters and two brothers, and they weren't exposed to any sort of gay lifestyle, they were actually air force brats.

So again, if a person is born black, or asian, or arab, or gay, how is it we can strip them of rights, or what we think is the right way? Gays make up an estimated 10% of the population, african americans around 12%, asians about the same, minority groups afforded equal rights under the law, until I hear an argument about how gays aren't born gay, and therefore aren't protected under the law for discrimination than I can't see how making marriage between just a man and women is fair, or right.

Some of the people so afraid of how gays raising kids will affect them should actually go and spend a month in a "real gay household". Not the west hollywood, queer as folk, will and grace gay that people seem to think gays represent, but a home where parents are raising their kids, working, being normal except for the fact they were born gay, they might find they have a lot more in common than what meets the eye, and that the kids in these families are just fine, if anything they are usually much more tolerant of other peoples differences than those who don't get exposed to other points of view.

In our society today marriage is supposed to be about love, and being together. Laws shouldn't be involved, schools shouldn't be involved, religion shouldn't be involved, customs, ect, it should be about the couples love and commitment to one another, and if those people were born gay, they should have equal rights to the same as their straight brothers and sisters.

so heres the debate I'd like to see, forget these protest against church, or social worries, If someone is born gay why is it that we should take away their rights, or treat them differently? And since minorities are born the color they are, being born gay is the same in that you can't change that about yourself, the only difference is gay people can hide the fact they are gay, and lie about it, and that too is wrong, its wrong they lie about it, but worse they feel because of society they can't be who they really are or love whom they are hard wired to love.

[econgrad]

Bennywah - It seems as if our disagreement is this, and I do not see anyway of finding middle ground. I am not convinced that a person is born anything. Being gay is a sexual act, it is not a race, it is not a culture, it is not something that is definable other than by thoughts and actions. Therefore to call it a civil rights issue as the same as blacks is not a valid point to me. We are not slaves to our genes nor slaves to our passions. There is truth, not just peoples opinions, there is a natural law and an absolute truth that applies to every society no matter what. We will see what the courts say in prop 8. Prop 8 has nothing to do with the debate of being born gay or not. Did you know Pre-1960's Homosexuality in the United States was considered by science a mental disorder, in ancient times in some societies it was the norm, it was just part of life and culture. For many who studied Greek and Roman culture (Pre-Christianity) it was such the norm that it could not be a "born this way" genetic code, therefore it was a learned behavior as with all cultural behaviors. Many see it as a battle for culture, the "Culture War" if you have not heard that term yet. Let's give it a rest and see what the courts say. I do agree with you, I believe we should all live in peace no matter what your beliefs are.

[krudmonk]

So there's not even gay culture now? Wow, you're venturing pretty far out there, Reagan Boy...

[bennywah]

well its a good thing we can all be pretty civil towards each other on this forum, hopefully others on both sides of the ball can do the same.

we can agree to disagree, and I have no idea whom you associate yourself with and how well you know them, and I'm aware of the historical, cultural applications of homosexuals in society, all I would say to you since you seem to know how to research and have the means to reason is this.

With people you know are gay, and those you don't, really ask them why, how, and when they knew they were gay, and you can do this across the country and the world and the answers will start to sound the same. I think the only way to really know wether something is a choice or not is to really understand the people who may be making them, I think you'll also find the majority of these people were raised in normal christian families, and you'll also hear about their struggles to come to grips with who they are, no book or study can have the impact of hearing this one on one.

Being human and knowing we can reason but also sense sincerity when its real has the power to sway opinions doesn't mean you may 100% agree but just like in a court case you might have doubts about how you thought before and realize maybe I should allow people to have their rights, instead of force my beliefs on them. With that I'm done with that particular discussion and will wait to see what the courts do.

[econgrad]

well its a good thing we can all be pretty civil towards each other on this forum, hopefully others on both sides of the ball can do the same.

we can agree to disagree, and I have no idea whom you associate yourself with and how well you know them, and I'm aware of the historical, cultural applications of homosexuals in society, all I would say to you since you seem to know how to research and have the means to reason is this.

With people you know are gay, and those you don't, really ask them why, how, and when they knew they were gay, and you can do this across the country and the world and the answers will start to sound the same. I think the only way to really know wether something is a choice or not is to really understand the people who may be making them, I think you'll also find the majority of these people were raised in normal christian families, and you'll also hear about their struggles to come to grips with who they are, no book or study can have the impact of hearing this one on one.

Being human and knowing we can reason but also sense sincerity when its real has the power to sway opinions doesn't mean you may 100% agree but just like in a court case you might have doubts about how you thought before and realize maybe I should allow people to have their rights, instead of force my beliefs on them. With that I'm done with that particular discussion and will wait to see what the courts do.

Deal! Believe it or not, I have some gay friends. I am friends with a manager at Badlands, but never had a deep discussion about this. I really never had the guts to bring it up in person, but I will ask in a friendly away about their point of view and then express mine and see what happens.

And krudmonk.......Reagan boy? :haha:

[bennywah]

cool, hopefully more people on both sides can do the same.

[jsf8278]

David Souter and John Paul Steven were appointed by RePUBElicans. That hardly makes them conservative.

I won't get into the whole Marbury v. Madison debate anymore, I know people think my position is stupid, and I know my views are not accepted. However, I'll leave you with the words of Thomas Jefferson (another man with stupid positions):

"To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy."

Well not all the founding fathers agreed with you and your pal Jefferson. James Madison believed that Equal Protection was at its apex when the ordinary political processes are inadequate to protect unpopular minorities from "the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority."

Additionally, by the time of Marbury v. Madison, most state supreme courts already were the ultimate arbiters of their constitutions. That's where constitutional review originated.

[cozmoose]

Message to all Prop 8 No supporters.

I've never heard so much bellyaching from losers than the prop 8 No supporters.

You've had your chance...there was a fair election....you lost...with no controversy...deal with it!

You all think you are soooo right and act so righteous...while the people that supported prop 8 are either stupid, ignorant, racist, religious fanatics...and other derrogatory names.

But, more you bellyache and stage protest, marches, devise attacks on churches etc, more support you will LOSE from the general public.

So keep this campaign going!...as if election did not occur...find loop holes, hold press conferences, beg the supreme court to intervene, look for Prop 8 supporters and "out" them and threaten their job... etc etc

I really want you to...because your actions will only hurt your cause and alienate the general public.

[snfenoc]

Well not all the founding fathers agreed with you and your pal Jefferson. James Madison believed that Equal Protection was at its apex when the ordinary political processes are inadequate to protect unpopular minorities from "the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority."

I wonder if Madison's thinking applied to a state's recognition of gay marriage. Hmmmmmmmm. I'll go out on a limb and say, probably NOT!

Additionally, by the time of Marbury v. Madison, most state supreme courts already were the ultimate arbiters of their constitutions. That's where constitutional review originated.

I don't say this to be rude, but.......SO??? OK, most states already had judicial review. That does not convince me to agree with the practice.

Again, I prefer constitutions be interpreted/upheld by the people and their direct representatives. You prefer they be upheld by a small group of unelected, elitist, lifers. I understand why people like judicial review, but I also understand the problems it creates. It seems that old TJ agreed with me. I'll take it. You want Madison? You got him. ;)

Now, I say we all stop arguing and get together for some fun. I know!!!! Let's go to a California Musical Theater production. I hear they do a great job due to their awesome artistic director, Scott Eckern. Oh, wait....... That's right, he does not work with the California Musical Theater anymore. Hmmmmmmmmm.......I wonder why? Wouldn't it be funny if he gave like, I don't know, let's say $1,000 to support Proposition 8 and the tolerant and diverse gay community found out about it and forced him to resign? No, that could never happen in the United States. Oh, wait....

[LivingInExile]

Hahahahahaha, Stay classy East Sac! :D

[BrianSac]

violence is never right, nor are slurs towards others, that being said, just like racial crimes were and are under reported, a few incidents of people being rash does not mean the majority of people opposed to prop 8 act or feel that way, and for the few acting out I'm sure they have seen and heard worse, doesn't make it right but the radical behavior argument goes both ways.

So in terms of what kids will feel as right or wrong if they dont have a mom or dad? My mom is a lesbian, single, makes north of $100k and my brother is happily married to a women for 4 yrs and they have an almost 2 yr old son, he also serves in the air force watches football, loves cars, he's a normal straight man.

I could list many more examples of other kids who came out just fine from being in a gay household which comes back to the point, your either born gay, or not, there's no oh janes got two mommies so I can do that too, just doesn't work that way.

Also my mom is African American, my dad is white, years ago we didn't know how interracial marriages would affect how kids see the world, these same arguments about how being different will change society is just ridiculous and have nothing to do with the law.

Since my mom is 54 years old, she's old enough to know about being segregated, different races not being able to marry, the arguments that were used against them are the same now, and since she knows she was born a lesbian and a black she can't change these things about herself, oh btw she was raised in a family where her parents stayed married till my grandmother passed away a few years ago, she has two sisters and two brothers, and they weren't exposed to any sort of gay lifestyle, they were actually air force brats.

So again, if a person is born black, or asian, or arab, or gay, how is it we can strip them of rights, or what we think is the right way? Gays make up an estimated 10% of the population, african americans around 12%, asians about the same, minority groups afforded equal rights under the law, until I hear an argument about how gays aren't born gay, and therefore aren't protected under the law for discrimination than I can't see how making marriage between just a man and women is fair, or right.

Some of the people so afraid of how gays raising kids will affect them should actually go and spend a month in a "real gay household". Not the west hollywood, queer as folk, will and grace gay that people seem to think gays represent, but a home where parents are raising their kids, working, being normal except for the fact they were born gay, they might find they have a lot more in common than what meets the eye, and that the kids in these families are just fine, if anything they are usually much more tolerant of other peoples differences than those who don't get exposed to other points of view.

In our society today marriage is supposed to be about love, and being together. Laws shouldn't be involved, schools shouldn't be involved, religion shouldn't be involved, customs, ect, it should be about the couples love and commitment to one another, and if those people were born gay, they should have equal rights to the same as their straight brothers and sisters.

so heres the debate I'd like to see, forget these protest against church, or social worries, If someone is born gay why is it that we should take away their rights, or treat them differently? And since minorities are born the color they are, being born gay is the same in that you can't change that about yourself, the only difference is gay people can hide the fact they are gay, and lie about it, and that too is wrong, its wrong they lie about it, but worse they feel because of society they can't be who they really are or love whom they are hard wired to love.

Good Job, benywah, ---- a voice of reason, tolerance, fairness, and equality. :previous:

[BrianSac]

Some interesting history about the history of marriages per The New Yorker...a few years old but still relevant.


Love Supreme
Gay nuptials and the making of modern marriage.
by Adam Haslett May 31, 2004 - The New Yorker

In December of 1990, Genora Dancel and Ninia Baehr, a lesbian couple from Honolulu, applied for and were denied a license to marry. They decided to file suit against the state for discrimination. The local branch of the A.C.L.U. declined to represent them, and the national gay legal organizations initially kept their distance, considering the issue premature. But the couple persisted, and three years later the Hawaii Supreme Court became the first in the nation to support the right of same-sex couples to wed. Conservative religious groups poured money into the state and eventually helped pass an amendment to its constitution declaring marriage an exclusively heterosexual institution.

More was at stake than the laws of Hawaii. Article IV of the United States Constitution establishes that “Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State.” This is the reason that a couple married in New York can fly to California and still legally be husband and wife when they land. Worried that other states might one day extend marriage rights to same-sex couples, conservatives in Congress introduced the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman for the purposes of all federal law, from taxes to Social Security, and released the states from any constitutional obligation to recognize same-sex marriages that might be performed elsewhere. President Clinton, seeking to deny Bob Dole a wedge issue in his 1996 reëlection campaign, signed the bill late on a Friday night, after the press corps had gone home.

The issue’s sudden prominence during the past several months stems from a decision of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts last November to grant same-sex couples full civil marriage. For the first time in this country’s history, a state has sanctioned the marriage of two men or two women; because the Massachusetts constitution can’t be amended any sooner than 2006—the process is under way but by no means certain to succeed—it will do so for at least the next two years. The Bay State thus joins the Netherlands, Belgium, and three Canadian provinces in offering gay couples not only the rights and obligations of marriage but the word itself.

The ensuing national ferment has become a struggle over the meaning and purpose of matrimony. For marriage as we know it today is the product of a particular history—a history that explains both its public character and the private expectations we have for it. The advent of same-sex marriage brings into focus a much larger transformation in how we have come to imagine the institution.

For centuries in Europe, formal marriage was a private contract between landed families, designed to insure that property remained within a particular lineage. In the upper classes, families essentially married other families, forging political alliances and social obligations among relatives and kin. It was during the Reformation, with the emergence of the early Protestant idea of “companionate marriage,” that the emotional bond between husband and wife came to be seen as an end in itself. As the social historian Lawrence Stone noted, this was a marked departure from the Catholic ideal of chastity, which considered earthly marriage a more or less unfortunate necessity meant to accommodate human weakness; “It is better to marry than to burn,” St. Paul had said, but he made it sound like a close call. So when the Puritans wrote of husbands and wives as mutually respectful and affectionate partners they were moving toward a new understanding of marriage as a kind of spiritual friendship.

It was Milton who took this concept to its logical conclusion. Having married a woman with whom he soon discovered he had nothing in common, he became a staunch advocate of divorce. When the “meet and happy conversation” that is “the chiefest and the noblest end of marriage” ceases, he argued, no authority should have the power to force a man and a woman to remain wed. It was hundreds of years before the law caught up with his notion that irreconcilable differences might be grounds for divorce. But what his tracts on the subject demonstrate is that early Protestant thinking about matrimony contained the seeds of our own more radical individualism.

These days, few would disagree that respect and affection are central to a successful marriage. But most of us would add another ingredient, which had long been viewed skeptically as a reason to wed: romantic love. Burton, in his “Anatomy of Melancholy”—the most widely read book of the seventeenth century after the Bible—reflected a common view when he described marriage as one of several “remedies of love,” which was itself an illness to be overcome. Not until the confessional diaries and novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries started to influence bourgeois notions of what Jane Austen called “connubial felicity” did romance begin its steady ascent in the marital realm. Today, needless to say, the most respectable reason you can give for getting married is that you have fallen in love. We have managed to create an ideal of matrimony that combines both lifetime companionship and the less stable but more intoxicating pleasures of romantic ardor.

Such great expectations of marital happiness belong to a larger history of the Western emphasis on the self. The philosopher Charles Taylor, in an examination of how our attitude toward interior life has changed over the past five hundred years, argues that the trend line runs in one direction: from a self-understanding gained from our place in larger entities—such as a chain of being or divine order—toward purpose discovered from within, through what we consider to be authentic self-expression. This is the distance Western culture has travelled from the church confessional to the therapist’s couch. In turn, the choice of whom to marry has become less about satisfying the demands of family and community than about satisfying oneself. When you add the contraceptive and reproductive technologies that have separated sex from procreation, what you have is a model of heterosexual marriage that is grounded in and almost entirely sustained on individual preference. This is a historically peculiar state of affairs, one that would be alien to our ancestors and to most traditional cultures today. And it makes the push for gay marriage inevitable.

If agreement between two people were all that was required, of course, gays and lesbians would have been marrying for some time already. According to the 2000 census, the first to collect such data, there are five hundred and ninety-four thousand same-sex couples living in the United States (and that’s no doubt an undercount, given people’s reluctance to report their sexual orientation to the government). But marriage requires the consent of a third party—namely, the state.

This fact, too, can be traced to the same early Protestants who gave us companionate marriage. As the journalist E. J. Graff tells us, in her newly reissued popular history “What Is Marriage For?” (Beacon; $16), at the time Luther nailed his proclamations to the door, Rome had no requirement that a priest be present at the wedding ceremony; vows spoken in private were sufficient to create a binding marriage. That caused the aristocracy no end of trouble, given that disobedient children were liable to threaten carefully negotiated contracts by running into the closet with a servant and whispering sweet promises. For the northern European Protestants, the solution was to require, for the first time, a public ceremony with the presence of witnesses. They also transferred the power to enforce the new rules to the emerging secular states. In England, precaution had long taken the form of “banns”: a couple’s intention to wed was proclaimed in church on three successive Sundays, thus giving a community plenty of time to determine whether either party was committed elsewhere. The state-issued marriage licenses we employ today originated in magistrates’ offices and enabled well-to-do families to avoid the banns by attesting to the fitness of the parties in a document.

Informal arrangements nevertheless persisted among those who were less well off, or who lived in less regulated societies. In the early days of the American Republic, with a population scattered across the continent, there were simply too few ministers and justices of the peace to go around. Largely for the practical reason of not wanting to declare so many children bastards, most state courts recognized common-law marriage, established by mutual consent and cohabitation. If you said you were married and the neighbors tended to believe you, then in the eyes of the law you were. (In eleven states, including Texas, this is still the case.) In the decades after the Civil War, however, government bureaucracy, spurred by the moralists and social scientists of the Progressive movement, began to regulate marriage far more aggressively. For the first time, people who sought to wed had to submit to medical examinations, and those with syphilis or gonorrhea were prevented from marrying by criminal statute. By the century’s end, state legislatures had all but mandated that couples obtain a license to marry.

These government-sponsored contracts are at the center of the fight over same-sex unions. In the modern administrative state, civil marriage condenses within a single document a vast array of legal, financial, and medical rights and benefits. Like citizenship for the immigrant, it is a passport to a more secure world. As the old status of marriage has come to include such a range of contractual benefits, the debates over equality within and access to the institution have intensified.

Owing to the reforms of the past forty years, men and women now enter the married state with more legal parity than ever before. Under the old doctrine of coverture, a man owned not only his wife’s property but her body as well. Today, in nearly every state, men’s and women’s rights and obligations in alimony, child custody, child support, and property division in divorce have been made formally gender-neutral. Arrests and prosecutions for domestic abuse, rare thirty years ago, are now routine. As recently as 1984, a man could not be prosecuted for raping his own wife; today, it’s a crime in all fifty states.

During the same period that the old patriarchal rules were being revised, the Supreme Court struck down a series of laws limiting the right of individuals to marry in the first place. In the most famous case, Loving v. Virginia, a unanimous Court held that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional. “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men,” Chief Justice Warren wrote in 1967. A decade later, a Wisconsin law preventing people from marrying if they were behind on their child-support payments was overturned as too burdensome to the “basic civil rights of man.” In 1987, the Rehnquist Court deemed the freedom to marry so fundamental that it could not be denied to prison inmates, whose other constitutional rights are routinely abrogated.

Those who opposed extending this right to same-sex couples used to cite the fact that many states outlawed sodomy: how could you sanction the marriage of people who could be arrested for what they did together in the bedroom? Then, last summer, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Court struck down the thirteen remaining sodomy laws in the country, and established a broad constitutional right to sexual privacy. The force and scope of the opinion surprised even its supporters. In a rare gesture, the Court not only overturned Bowers v. Hardwick, a 1986 opinion upholding a Georgia sodomy statute, but in essence apologized for it: “Its continuance as precedent demeans the lives of homosexual persons.” The majority was careful to point out that the decision said nothing about the “formal recognition” of relationships. But opponents of same-sex marriage realized the decision’s importance. As Justice Scalia warned in a caustic dissent, “If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is ‘no legitimate state interest’ . . . what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising ‘the liberty protected by the Constitution’? Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry.” Five months later, the Massachusetts high court cited Lawrence in its decision.

Social conservatives now fear that, in the absence of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, the Supreme Court will combine its precedents on the fundamental right to marry with the more recent decisions in favor of gay rights to give same-sex couples their own Loving v. Virginia—nationalizing gay marriage through constitutional interpretation. As a doctrinal matter, such fears are well grounded. Few legal scholars would disagree with Justice Scalia that Lawrence has made this outcome far more plausible.

Politically, however, a gay Loving is unlikely in the foreseeable future. The Supreme Court is seldom a force of social innovation. The first state to strike down its anti-miscegenation law was California, in 1948. For nearly two decades thereafter, all through the period of Brown v. Board of Education, the Court avoided the controversy over interracial marriage, exercising its discretion not to hear a case. By the time it decided Loving, fourteen states had followed California’s lead, and only sixteen still maintained a ban. The Court endorsed what had become a majority position, if not in public opinion at least in legislative fact; the same can be said of Lawrence. The modern conservative obsession with what is selectively dubbed judicial activism has much to do with Roe v. Wade, and the fact that it struck down thirty state laws criminalizing abortion. No less an advocate of abortion rights than Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has suggested that it may have been precipitate not to allow the states to come to a stronger consensus before the Court brought the reform process to an end. In the informal electorate of the states, the vote on full civil marriage for same-sex couples now stands at forty-nine to one. It is difficult to conceive of the Supreme Court recognizing a right to gay marriage under these circumstances.

Meanwhile, interest groups on both sides are lobbying legislators and filing more suits, in an attempt to shape the outcome in one jurisdiction at a time. As a legal matter, these are contests over the expansion of the rights and obligations of marriage. As a political and cultural matter, they are contests over something less easy to codify: the official recognition of love. Here the two most important developments in the history of marriage—secular regulation and the rise of the romantic-companionate ideal—become intertwined. The state is being asked not only to distribute benefits equally but to legitimate gay people’s love and affection for their partners. The gay couples now marrying in Massachusetts want not only the same protections that straight people enjoy but the social status that goes along with the state’s recognition of a romantic relationship.

This is the difference between civil unions and marriage: one is a legal certificate and the other is a public endorsement. Not surprisingly, many Americans who might support the first remain uncomfortable with the second. In “Gay Marriage” (Times Books; $22), the journalist Jonathan Rauch means to persuade such people that same-sex marriage will be good not only for gay people but for marriage in general. Rauch is a conservative—how many books garner blurbs from both George Will and Barney Frank?—and his argument for the benefits to gay people is based largely on the social discipline he thinks it would impose: once gay men and lesbians are allowed to wed, society can begin expecting them to do so, as it does straight people. “The gay rights era will be over and the gay responsibility era will begin,” he writes. This soft coercion is a civilizing force, because “no other institution has the power to turn narcissism into partnership, lust into devotion, strangers into kin.” We shouldn’t expect results too soon, however: “As with the coming of capitalism to the Soviet empire, so with the coming of marriage to gay culture. Freedom and responsibility take time to learn.” With analogies as inviting as this, one wonders whether snuggling gay lovers ought to take a bus tour of Putin’s Russia before heading to the altar. Though clearly a true believer in matrimony, Rauch doesn’t make it sound like much fun.

The real threat to marriage, he says, is the growth of registered cohabitation, from domestic partnerships to civil unions, which increasingly includes unwed heterosexuals. He warns that we are heading to the day when marriage—straight or gay—will become “merely an item on a mix-and-match menu of lifestyle options, a truffle in the candy box.” For Rauch, whose view of marriage is more medicinal than confectionary, letting gays marry will actually help marriage by relieving the pressure to create alternatives.

What’s undeniable is that the battle over same-sex marriage arrives at a time of declining participation in the institution itself. The number of marriages performed each year in the United States (2.3 million) is as low as it has ever been relative to the adult population. As Andrew Hacker has pointed out, nearly half of Americans reach the age of thirty without having married, and almost twelve per cent of women and sixteen per cent of men enter their forties still never having wed—the highest percentages in the nation’s history.

As the numbers wane, though, the fantasy seems to grow more intense. The wedding industry generates at least seventy billion dollars a year in revenue, which is double the earnings of the movie business. Bridal magazines are some of the most profitable on the newsstand. The ersatz courtship of the Bachelor and the Bachelorette has provided some of the highest-rated television programming in recent years. At the same time, the pressures on the partnership that follows the wedding day are enormous: in an era of low civic participation and high economic insecurity, spouses are ever more relied upon as the sole providers of continuity and human solace. A state-sponsored, lifelong, intimate relationship—or the prospect of it—now carries a heavy and often unbearable responsibility for personal happiness.

What effect will allowing men to marry men and women to marry women have on our peculiarly modern venture of marriage? Proponents typically say that it will have hardly any—that there is no shortage of marriage licenses, and all that will happen is that more citizens and their children will have the benefits of existing family law. The opposition argues that one of the organizing institutions of our society will be imperilled.

History suggests that neither view is quite accurate. Despite comparisons to the repeal of miscegenation laws, no other expansion of the marriage franchise—to the sterile, to slaves, or to interracial couples—has required an alteration in the basic definition of the term: the union of a man and woman as husband and wife. To discount this as mere semantics misses what the definition points up: that marriage, through all its incarnations, has been a procedure that assigns people a new identity based on their gender. For centuries, it has been the ceremony that makes males into husbands and females into wives. Until very recently, this meant a lifetime commitment to both the security and the constriction of a well-defined social role. The symbolic danger that gay marriage poses to such an arrangement is obvious. It alters the public meaning of the word by further draining it of its power to reinforce traditional expectations of behavior. What does it mean to be a husband in a world where a man could have one of his own? This is up to each individual couple, one is tempted to say. Fair enough; but the words we use to describe our relationships are shared cultural property. There is no private language. In this sense, granting the word “marriage” to gay couples will eventually affect everyone.

The mistake is to consider the change in meaning particularly drastic. After all, undoing customary expectations for how a husband and wife behave toward each other has been one of the goals of the women’s movement since its inception. Rather than an abrupt departure, same-sex marriage is the culmination of a larger and ultimately more consequential change in the nature of marital relations between men and women.

Which is one of the reasons that the opposition to it is so fierce. It has come to symbolize what is, historically speaking, radical about contemporary marriage: the decline of the patriarchal legal structure and the rise of the goal of self-fulfillment. Gay marriage is unsettling, to many, not because it departs from modern meanings of matrimony but because it embodies them. ♦

I actually read all that. :previous:
Interesting, it gives some background and perspective on the history of marraige.