I’ve recently realized that I am an inherently selfish person. I have to make an effort on many occasions to overcome my own limitations and recognize that the world and its inhabitants do not revolve around me and my opinions, wants, or needs.
Point being, I make that effort. I don’t always succeed, and sometimes I do it a little begrudgingly, but I recognize the worth and value of those around me and offer what I can to hold them in the esteem worthy of a fellow human being.
The big thing in the news right now is the overturning of Proposition 8 in California – the law that took away the right for same-sex couples to marry in 2008 after they had already been given that right.
Yesterday, Federal Judge Vaughn Walker made a historic decision when he overturned Prop 8. (Emphasis mine)
The case was brought by two gay couples who said California’s Proposition 8, which passed in 2008 with 52 percent of the vote, discriminated against them by prohibiting same-sex marriage and relegating them to domestic partnerships. The judge easily dismissed the idea that discrimination is permissible if a majority of voters approve it; the referendum’s outcome was “irrelevant,” he said, quoting a 1943 case, because “fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote.”
He then dismantled, brick by crumbling brick, the weak case made by supporters of Proposition 8 and laid out the facts presented in testimony. The two witnesses called by the supporters (the state having bowed out of the case) had no credibility, he said, and presented no evidence that same-sex marriage harmed society or the institution of marriage.
Same-sex couples are identical to opposite-sex couples in their ability to form successful marital unions and raise children, he said. Though procreation is not a necessary goal of marriage, children of same-sex couples will benefit from the stability provided by marriage, as will the state and society. Domestic partnerships confer a second-class status. The discrimination inherent in that second-class status is harmful to gay men and lesbians. These findings of fact will be highly significant as the case winds its way through years of appeals.
One of Judge Walker’s strongest points was that traditional notions of marriage can no longer be used to justify discrimination, just as gender roles in opposite-sex marriage have changed dramatically over the decades. All marriages are now unions of equals, he wrote, and there is no reason to restrict that equality to straight couples. The exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage “exists as an artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles in society and in marriage,” he wrote. “That time has passed.”
To justify the proposition’s inherent discrimination on the basis of sex and sexual orientation, he wrote, there would have to be a compelling state interest in banning same-sex marriage. But no rational basis for discrimination was presented at the two-and-a-half-week trial in January, he said. The real reason for Proposition 8, he wrote, is a moral view “that there is something wrong with same-sex couples,” and that is not a permissible reason for legislation.
“Moral disapproval alone,” he wrote, in words that could someday help change history, “is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and women.”
I know there are many many people out there who believe that morality alone is very much a reasonable basis to deny rights. To those people I ask: Who decides what is and isn’t moral?
There are men and women in Utah who believe it is perfectly moral to have multiple wives. Should we allow that view of morality be the line that dictates our legal system?
What about the men and women who believe it is perfectly moral to engage in negotiated infidelity? Should that view of morality be the line that dictates our legal system and our rights?
Judge Walker is absolutely right: Moral disapproval alone is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and women. (I would add to any men and women)
Being gay does not make someone less American or less of a human.
The Friendly Atheist posted a video today that I hadn’t seen before, but I’m so glad he did. It is a clip of Keith Olbermann from right after Prop 8 was voted in:
… With so much hate in the world, with so much meaningless division, and people pitted against people for no good reason, this is what your religion tells you to do? With your experience of life and this world and all its sadnesses, this is what your conscience tells you to do?
With your knowledge that life, with endless vigor, seems to tilt the playing field on which we all live, in favor of unhappiness and hate… this is what your heart tells you to do? You want to sanctify marriage? You want to honor your God and the universal love you believe he represents? Then Spread happiness — this tiny, symbolic, semantical grain of happiness — share it with all those who seek it. Quote me anything from your religious leader or book of choice telling you to stand against this. And then tell me how you can believe both that statement and another statement, another one which reads only “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
How wonderful that the idiotic ballot measure was overturned yesterday.
How could you read the reactions to Judge Vaughn Walker‘s ruling and not be overjoyed?
You’d have to be heartless.
