njlauren
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Your whole argument is the religious right talking points, including the logic of Antonin Scalia,who once was a brilliant jurist but who today is nothing more than a uber Catholic ideologue (there is a reason why he isn't chief justice). One of the fundamental weaknesses of your position is when you say that the state has the right to regulate rights (which of course it does)...what you and the right leave out is that to put regulation on rights, you have to show cause to do so, and the burden is high. Because the Vatican or because retarded Christians who read a bible like a comic book don't like it is not a valid reason, 'majority rule' in regulating rights is not valid if all it is is dislike of a minority. Put it this way the 2nd amendment allows regulation, not because people feel like it, but because a justifiable case can be made, based on facts, that regulating the right to own guns is in the public interest, to prevent a harm, with same sex marriage, other then "jesus don't like it', "The Pope don't like it", there is zero basis to regulate it.
Here is my discussion of your points:
1)The constitution doesn't grant the right of marriage. No, it doesn't, the same way it doesn't talk about local property taxes, health inspections of restaurants, how many schools a town has, when the garbage is picked up. Why? Because under the constitution, those rights are granted to the states, which is why DOMA was illegal, congress has zero right to say what a real marriage is.
2)States therefore have the right to decide the rules of marriage,ages, waiting periods, etc, that has been long held. However, the federal constitution was extended to the states a long, long time ago, so state law is subject to constitutional review (as it was with Loving), despite what the states rights droolers from down south claim. Thus, if the state grants the right of marriage, it comes under the purview of scotus, to see if it violates any rights. Since marriage is not enumerated under the constitution, you could not say the constitution grants this right, it doesn't; however, the constitution does have the 14th amendment, and that has been upheld in many, many cases covering state laws, including Jim Crowe (after all, the federal constitution says nowhere that whites and blacks are equal, the dear old constitution, written supposedly by demi gods, said black were 3/5 of a person, since most were slaves).
As you point out, rights can be regulated, as you note, the second amendment, despite what the NRA says. is not absolute, the government has the right to decide things like permitting, what kind of weapons you can buy, ammo, carry laws, etc. All rights have burdens on them, free speech is not absolute, neither is freedom of the press, habeus corpus can be suspended by congressional authority to the president.
What you are leaving out, though, is such regulation itself is not merely a matter of what representatives decide, what the majority wants, those regulations have burdens on them too. When the state limits access to rights and benefits they grant, they have to show cause that in doing so they are protecting society and/or are preventing a harm. Note that you cannot say, as the religious reich do, that you have to prove same sex marriage is a benefit, the burdens of legislation are about potential harm in doing something.
For example, states decide at what age someone can marry, and that in turn is based upon the concept of when someone has the ability to consent (usually the age of marriage and consent to sex are the same, given that sex is supposed to happen inside marriage). The state can do that because there is scientific proof that children below a certain age cannot consent, and marriage is all about that, as is sex.
Loving was thrown out because those supporting Miscegenation couldn't put one shred of evidence in front of the court that interracial marriage had any negative effects on society, all the opponents could bring up remind me a lot of arguments against same sex marriage in how baldy stupid they are "mixing races causes degeneration for both groups", "interracial children will never fit in", and my favorite "by tradition, God separated the races after the Tower of Babel, we were meant to be apart and this violates it", "allowing interracial marriage will disrupt the social harmony of the country and lead to anarchy"........today all of those look laughable, but they were seriously made, and at the time of Loving, roughly 80% of americans thought interracial marriage was a bad thing (a year after the decision? 90% thought it was okay). BTW interracial marriage bans were just as traditional, going back in western civilization a long way such bans existed in law and churches going back a long, log way)...
Okay, so let's look at same sex marriage in those terms. If the state is going to limit a right/benefit it gives couples, in this case marriage, with same sex marriage their needs to be an argument that such ban has rational reasons for it to be in place, majority opinion doesn't count/matter (see Loving above), long held tradition doesn't matter, what matters is opponents have to show that having same sex couples marry will cause harm..and what do we hear?
-Marriage is about procreation. *bong*...sorry, but we don't put anything in marriage law about having kids, infertile couples, couples who don't want kids, couples past the age of procreation, all are given the right to marry. Oh, infertile couples can adopt or use surrogates? Well, guess what, so can same sex couples, they can adopt kids, and yep, they can use sperm donors, surrogate moms, you name it, just like straight couples
Oh, wait a minute, I forgot, of course, kids raised by same sex parents are not as 'normal' as kids from hetero parents *dong*..sorry, you lost that one, every study done so far shows that is nothing more than "fact' posed by religionists
-If we allow same sex marriage, chaos will ensue, and no one will get married. What they usually drag out is stats from Sweden, where most couples now don't marry and they blame passing same sex marriage for it. Problem is, in Sweden couples can file for rights without getting married, and that law was passed almost 10 years before sweden officially accepted same sex unions, and the rate of marriage was plummeting before gays were married.
More importantly, as of this writing, Mass has had 10 years of same sex marriage, quite a few countries have it, and nothing has come out of it. Sorry, Sammy boy (Alito), it doesn't take hundreds of years to see ill effects......
-The majority of the people are against it. *dong*..when it comes to rights, majority rule is fundamentally opposed to our constitution, that has rights enumerated, including the 14th, to stop the majority from tyrannizing the minority (Madison's words, not mine, and he wrote the constitution and the Bill of Rights).
-Same sex marriage will mean we will have a shortage of kids, society will die. *dong*....gays make up somewhere less than 10% of the population, and let's say even half of those marry, how does that effect procreation? Even assuming gays don't have kids (they do, in pretty large numbers as a percentage), if let's say 5% of the population refuses to have kids, how does that affect the other 95%
-If we allow same sex marriage, then it will be 'legitimizing' the homosexual lifestyle, and it will cause all these people who have been kept on the straight and narrow path of being in God's image to 'go straight' cause after all, a woman can please a woman better than a man, and vice/versa with men.....I won't even comment on this except to say that anyone that believes this has an iq less then 60, especially given that most gay people are born to straight parents.....
Want an interesting one? In testimony about Prop 8, those who brought the suit to the Supreme Court when questioned admitted that there was no rational basis to ban same sex marriage, that the reason it should be upheld is that marriage should come about organically by will of the people, which as an argument for banning same sex marriage is no argument at all, 'will of the people' 'comfort levels' have never been legitimate reason to ban rights, despite the fact that it has. Bill O'Reilly, not exactly a member of the ACLU, recently came out and said all the arguments against same sex marriage are religious in nature, and therefore, the bans are illegal under our law.
-Gays have the same rights as straights, they can marry an opposite sex partners. Now rephrase that, an interracial couple (using loving) can marry someone of their own race...doesn't sound too good, does it? You say that in public, and other then maybe among the rednecks down south, most people would look at you like you were a cretin.
3)Time to blow away another myth "Gays already have the right to be a couple, to sign contracts"....*dong*. The biggest reason that is a lie is that same sex couples have to go through hoops, extraordinary effort, to do that, and it doesn't even begin to give the same rights of marriage. Married couple, husband dies, no will, it goes to the wife; same sex couple, family of deceased can challenge the partner getting it. Same sex couple has kids together, state doesn't allow second parent adoptions, birth mother dies.....in a straight marriage, surviving spouse would get them, in a same sex couple, family could and will take them away. Same sex couple, one of them gets sick, they have medical power of attorney with other partner.....hospitals often refuse to recognize those, and the partner has to fight tooth and nail to be allowed to make decisions, partners birth family can often push them aside, and courts aren't exactly always friendly to gays. If marriage gives automatic rights to straight couples that gay couples don't have, that is another example of the 14th amendment, it is why the whole argument about the term marriage being the problem is bullshit, since no alternative to marriage gives the rights marriage does, either in scope or in ease of access.
4)Biggest myth of all" "Marriage has been the kingpin of our society for thousands of years, undermining that wil ruin society"
And yep, it is a myth. First of all, through most of human history, most people didn't bother getting married, they never formally got recognized by the state or church. Despite what Der Pope said before running away with his tail between his legs, the RC didn't even have a formal rite until the 9th century, and it wasn't until 1200's that they required people to be married in church...so much for the bedrock of the church, 1000 years?
More importantly, even in Catholic Europe the only people who routinely married formally were the well off and nobility, and they did so, not cause God wants it, but because of legal rights. By formally marrying, it set up inheritance of property and titles, and with high nobility it also cemented alliances and such. This represented a very small portion of the population, since in Medieval Europe, most people didn't have any property to hand down. William Manchester and others who wrote about Medieval life wrote about this, that couples simply paired up to live together and had kids.....did you ever wonder where common law marriage came from? Most people did not marry until the 1600's, when they routinely had some wealth to protect, at that point more and more people wed officially...and note the common thread, people back then didn't marry, even though "God commanded it", until there was legal reason to do so, which kind of puts another spin on marriage being sacred (I also will note that legal marriage is not sacred at all, given that secular people can marry people; the biggest problem is that if marriage is supposed to be sacred, it never should have been written into law).
So where is this holy, sacred marriage that held together society? The history above indicates that society continued to exist without formal marriage and more importantly, that marriage the whole time has been mostly about legal rights, that only became common when there was a legal (not a moral) need to do so.
What this says about marriage is that despite what the bible thumpers claim, marriage has predominantly been a legal issue, not a religious one, and what I wrote above is what history says. If so, if so many people never got married for so many centuries, then arguing that adding same sex marriage to the legal definition of marriage will ruin it looks pretty shaky, since marriage itself has changed, and 500 years ago I could argue that having commoners marry would ruin civilization, since after all, up until that time only a small percent bothered to, and broadening the scope would 'destroy' marriage and civilization (and I am sure that the nobility in fact argued against peasants marrying).
If there is no rational basis to put a burden on same sex marriage asa legal right, people not liking it is not a good excuse, and the 14th amendment would stand, because otherwise it is allowing states to put a caveat on the rights/benefits they offer without having good reason to do so. If a state, for example, tried banning drivers who were blue eyed blondes, arguing they were too stupid to drive, the 14th amendment would apply,because there is no proof of that; if a state says a driver cannot be licensed until 17, they make the argument that that is when they feel the kid is responsible enough. Insurance companies charge much higher rates for young men then women, yet that is legal, because there is data that shows that young men are a lot more of a risk then young women (young men have in fact challenged this, arguing that state regs allowing this are discriminatory against young men, but courts have ruled it was fair, because of the evidence).
Face it your argument is basically that you and others like you don't like gays and want to reserve marriage for straight people so gays will be second class citizens. In some ways same sex marriage is like Jim Crow, those fighting same sex marriage want to keep marriage for straights because they want their marriage to be 'special' and their coupling 'above' gays, Jim Crow was so that the poor white trash down south could have a group of people they could feel superior to. One of the most common arguments I hear from the religious types is that if you legalize same sex marriage, it will 'legitimize the homosexual lifestyle', which tells a lot, that despite all their claims, they are trying to return things to where gays were a despised minority in the closet. Put it this way, I have been married longer than most of the opponents of same sex marriage, been with the same woman for 30 years, married 25, and I can't find a single thing in our relationship that would be changed by legalizing same sex marriage, won't change when we have sex, our property taxes, or our feelings for each other, about all it changes is I can tell same sex couples "welcome to the third ring of mariage, the suffering" *lol*
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RE: -=Cali leads the pack, same sex marriage OK within ... - 
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