Vote no on California Prop 8.

[arkuat]

I wish I had already set up a proper local politics filter for this, but I haven't. I've already encouraged Californians to vote for Prop 11, but even though my own instinct is to vote No on any California proposition I haven't researched, I know this is not the case for everyone, and there's actually another proposition on the California ballot that I feel even more strongly about.

If you live in California, and you're planning to vote for Proposition 8, please think twice. Proposition 8 will forbid marriages between couples who are good marriage partners. I believe that marriage, when it works well, is one of the pillars of our society, and is something that ought to be encouraged, not forbidden. Please consider that if Proposition 8 passes, all the members of the couples who are currently married under current
California law whose marriages would be dissolved by Proposition 8's passage, are unlikely to remarry under the terms that Proposition 8 allows. Please allow those who have a will to marry, to marry. Please don't vote against one of the pillars of our society. Please vote no on Prop 8.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

Yes, that.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

i don't think i know, in real life, even one single person who is against gay marriage. i guess that's pretty rare.

[janradder.livejournal.com]

Does it look like it may pass?

[arkuat]

There is a scary amount of money to support it coming in from out of state, and many of the "don't usually go to the polls" voters who are expected to show up for this election tend to go for this sort of thing. I haven't actually been following the opinion polls closely, but my same-sex-couple married friends are concerned. Perhaps they're worried because they've already been married before in San Francisco and had the California SC annul that one.

California is a big state, and in elections about issues such as this, the so-called "social liberals" sometimes seem like a thin coastal veneer.

[joelrosenberg.livejournal.com]

Couldn't agree more. That said, as I've commented over at Volokh, I think the opposition to Prop 8 has been seriously mishandled. It's a tricky thing to try to persuade people that they're bigoted without demonizing them, and the opponents of Prop 8 have been less than effective at that.

I hope it gets defeated. In a few years, with enough married gay folks out of the closet, the chances of it getting reintroduced and getting this close are low, but this whole thing does show the dangers of getting courts out too far ahead of the public.

reveritas: As the polling in CA shows, it's not rare at all. Me, I know a lot of folks who are against gay marriage (and not all of their reasons are bigoted, either), and more who are opposed to judges turning their policy preferences into "rights." (I'm not one of the former, but I am one of the latter. Were the Minnesota Supreme Court to do the same thing, I'd be unhappy about it, too; courts that can create rights can also take rights away every bit as easily -- or moreso; remember when we used to have a Fourth Amendment?)

[arkuat]

Yeah, the fourth amendment was nice. I miss that. I wish we still had a fourth amendment. It would be pretty cool to be constitutionally protected against unreasonable searches and seizures by people in authority.

But that constitutional law has always been somewhat chancy in its application. Even before the higher courts began to dilute it, it was applied as if it was only written to protect people of european descent. It's possible that much of the dilution was a result of courts trying to be fair and equal, observing how the fourth amendment had been applied to blacks and indians and homosexuals, and trying to find some middle ground between that and the way it had traditionally been applied to cases involving heterosexual people of european descent.

This may explain much of what the courts have done with the second amendment as well.