I Come to Bury Proposition 8, Not to Praise It

As I've said over and over again, I really wanted to be against gay marriage. I'm not a particularly bright or sophisticated guy, but I can tell a dick joke like nobody's business. And if there's one thing that I learned as an infant, it's that writing pro-gay marriage jokes is a bitch.

The problem with that is that I couldn't figure out a way to be against it without feeling like an abject moron. I couldn't even think of a purely intellectually conservative (as opposed to religious) reason to oppose it, mostly because there isn't one. Sometimes, I learned, it's best to sacrifice the funny to avoid looking like a fucking idiot.

As a general rule, I'm not pro-marriage at all, which is why I'm thankful that almost all of my girlfriends over the last decade have been married. It spares me the trouble. Would you decide to go, say, skydiving if it had a 50% chance of killing you? Well, marriage has that rate of failure, but it only kills your soul.

On the other hand, marriage has been deemed beneficial by most societies, and it brings with it great benefits. So I suppose that we're stuck with it.

That being said, those benefits - including the recognition of the institution itself - are determined by the government. When you get right down to it, marriage is a government service that is specifically mentioned in both the tax code and criminal and civil law. There are privileges that are outlined in all of them. The law at every level of American society is replete with references to marriage. That's problematic in the United States.

Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution reads as follows; " All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

California's Proposition 8 violated almost every letter of the Fourteenth Amendment, never mind it's spirit. Like most conservatives who aren't bound for a fucking lunatic asylum, I believe that the Constitution means exactly what it says. And after repeated readings, I have yet to find a single caveat of "Unless you're a fag, or something."

Prop 8 managed to violate every single part of the Fourteenth Amendment, mostly because it created a number of different classes of homosexuals by governmental dictate. If you were one of the 18,000 Californians who got hitched during the short time that gay marriage was legal, you were fine. But if you weren't, you were screwed. Oh, and if you happened to get a gay divorce, you would never be allowed to marry again. Ever. How precisely does that constitute "equal protection of the laws?"

That's constitutionally problematic in that the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that marriage is a "fundamental right," albeit one that isn't specifically mentioned in the Constitution. In 1987, the Court ruled in Turner v. Safley that marriage is a right that the states couldn't restricted for prisoners. In the 1978 Zablocki v. Redhail decision, the court ruled that the states could not deny the right to remarry even if child support had not been paid to a previous spouse.
Are gays really worse than convicted felons and deadbeat dads? Really?

Which brings us to the incredibly silly "democratic will of the people" argument. Let me me begin by saying that the people are idiots and your average Republican is a weapons-grade hypocrite. Everybody who makes this argument is either a liar or an asshole.

The Constitution of the United States was never put before the people in a referendum because that's not the way a republic works. The people are, by and large, too busy or too stupid to be thinking about things as trivial as the fundamental rights of man, so they elect folks to do it for them. The courts exist as a further check against the passions of the mob, which is why judges shouldn't be elected by the fucking mob at all.

Nobody other than members of Congress and a few state legislatures voted to ratify the First Amendment. Does that mean if a state held a referendum creating Canadian-style Human Rights Commissions that necessarily restrict speech freedoms, it would be okay? If the states, through their legislatures, can limit individual rights, how can you argue that the District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago rulings were properly decided? The laws at issue in those cases were more in character with the fundamentally republican principles of America, as opposed to populist practices that only really began in 1911 and have been slowly driving places like California into a death spiral.

By the way, didn't Republicans actually applaud the federal intereference in popularly passed laws in Gonzales v. Raich? Which is it, friends? When does the will of the people of California mean something, and when does it not?

As I mentioned in my last little essay, the United States is being eaten alive by an almost molecular lack of seriousness. They would much sooner be consumed with nonsense like who's marrying whom, rather than what they owe to who and why.

But if I know my American politics - and I do - both parties will spend the next three months either chasing this issue or running away from it. And I would remind you that gay marriage is an issue that effects only 1-10% of the total population. Just as has happened before, Rome is falling, and the only thing that the Romans can focus on is the sodomy.

With that, I leave you with the only sensible thing that Keith Olbermann has ever said.





Special thanks to the Tiger on Politics, who, although he sorta disagrees with me, should really be buying me legendary floods of alcohol soon. Did I mention that I really enjoy drinking heavily?