Monday, April 25, 2011
Grasping at Straws. AOL News today reported ("Judge's Gay Partner Raised in Proposition 8 Appeal") that the antigay bigots who lost a Federal challenge to the Proposition 8 ballot initiative that purported to outlaw gay marriage (but, the Federal Court ruled, could not do that because it violated gay people's constitutional rights) have filed a motion to "overturn[that decision] because the federal judge who struck down Proposition 8 was in a long-term relationship with another man. * * * [which motion claims that] '"Only if Chief Judge Walker had unequivocally disavowed any interest in marrying his partner could the parties and the public be confident that he did not have a direct personal interest in the outcome of the case'." The story was followed by a couple of hundred comments, many of them bigoted antigay nonsense, so I answered some and added my own comment (at the end of the 42 responsive comments below). ADDENDUM: I went back to that story after a couple of hours, and added 32 more comments, amounting to about 2,300 more words. To show my own original comment, then, before the added reply-comments, I have boldfaced that paragraph.
The moral of your silly story is that no judge can sit in judgment of anyone who has anything in common with him or her -- or who is different from him or her.
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Yes, you're mistaken. A decision stands on its own, not on its authorship. And no judge can put his or her own prejudices into a decision without expecting it to be reviewed and overturned if legally void.
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People who don't want to be faithful -- male or female; straight or gay; lesbian or heterosexual -- should not get married. And unjust divorce laws need to be abolished, not enforced equally against everybody. As I look around at the straight world, I see an awful lot of infidelity and divorce by straight people. What do YOU see?
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Why don't you post under your real, full name, and town, so your neighbors can hold you to account for your bigotry?
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Moslem, Christian, Jewish judges don't matter. The LAW matters. We have appeals to correct legal errors in decisions rendered by judges of any religion.
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Perhaps you're not aware of the FACTS (a) that not all gay men have ******** ["anal sex" censored by AOL moderator/software] and (b) that MOST straight couples at some point in time, and some straight people a LOT of the time DO have ********.
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So the world is in danger of depopulation, is it? If homosexuality could bring down this planet's catastrophic overpopulation, homosexuality should be not only legal but encouraged (if not compulsory). As for flaunting one's sexual orientation, perhaps you don't see all the heterosexual hugging and kissing in TV programs, commercials, movies, etc., activity on the street, etc. Straight people wouldn't THINK of making obvious their sexual orientation, of course not. The world is being DESTROYED by heterosexuality. You must be so proud.
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pwanless hugely misstates and exaggerates in calling lesbians "half of the gay population". First, lesbians and gay men are NOT the same, any more than blacks and Chinese are the same thing. Second, there are nowhere near as many lesbians as gay men.
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Your "marriage is an institution" [not a right] premise in no way makes any sense. You don't seem to understand that you make no sense. Sad.
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Don't straight people make a huge, expensive show of their weddings, the start of their governmentally-approved SEXUAL relationship? If gay people were to say that NOBODY should have the right to marry, and that sexual behavior is not for government to approve or disapprove, so all weddings should be without legal sanction, and NO benefits should appertain to straight people's sexual relationships, that would remove "bedroom behavior" as a political issue, wouldn't it? Would you be in favor of outlawing marriage for everyone?
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Amazing. Gay people ask for the SAME rights, and all of a sudden YOUR rights are SPECIAL rights because other people want them too. You cannot magically make the SAME rights SPECIAL rights just by saying so. There has to be some logic, some SENSE, some consistency for rational people to believe something.
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The right to marry is in Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml).
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All treaties to which the United States is signatory are, WITH the Constitution, the supreme law of the land. If Jody doesn't understand that, or does not know that the U.S. SIGNED the Universal Declaration, then she needs some legal education.
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The judge in the Proposition 8 case did not draft the proposition. By your reasoning, no white person should be allowed to act as judge on a case involving white people.
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Unmarried heterosexuals CHOOSE not to marry. They are not FORBIDDEN to marry. If you don't understand the difference, you should not be allowed to drive, nor use a pedestrian crossing without assistance, because you have no judgment.
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Your Highness makes no sense. I say everybody should have the right to choose to marry or stay single, and Y.H. seems to think I'm saying that nobody has a right of choice in this regard. What a twisted world Y.H.'s mind must be.
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The judge was not in the closet. He just wasn't shouting his private relationship. I thought you bigots WANTED gay people to stop 'forcing their lifestyle on others' by publicly proclaiming their orientation. What "hate" has the judge showed in LOVING a man for 10 years? You're making up gay people you know. You do NOT know any gay people who would talk to you about ANYthing. You're just fabricating ridiculous, contemptible, obvious nonsense, like the antiblack bigots who claim that "some of my best friends are black".
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Your fear of your own attraction is showing.
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I have to wonder about your ability to think. Let me try to explain things to you, slowly: the SAME rights are NOT special rights. The desire to reproduce is NOT heterosexual; it is intrinsic to the INDIVIDUAL, a form of egoism, not heterosexualism. Gay people do NOT hate heterosexuals, only mistreatment by heterosexuals. You are PROJECTING your hatred of homosexuals onto gay people and thinking that because you hate them, therefore they must hate you. We have no reason to hate heterosexuals. Our PARENTS are heterosexuals, as are most of our family, co-workers, neighbors, etc. If we don't care to hang out with heterosexuals much of the time but prefer to be with people more like ourselves, that's simply natural. "Birds of a feather flock together." "Natural" means "occurring in nature". Homosexuality and lesbianism occur in nature. Has no male dog ever humped your leg? Watch dogs and cats; you don't have to go to more exotic species to see a LOT of homosexual behavior. You pass it off as "confused" rather than what it is: homosexual. With the onset of artificial insemination, marriages of convenience, surrogacy, and in vitro fertilization, heterosexuality has become OBSOLETE as a means of reproduction. And with the arrival of massive overpopulation of this overstrained planet, accidental reproduction has become a BLIGHT upon the world.
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Yeah, them durned nigras demanded special rights too, like the right to vote. Look how that turned out. One of them durned nigras became President of the YOUnited States, by some crazy accident. What next? Sum durned homo becoming President? They've got to back off and say they've got enuf. Second-class citizenship in the Younited States is better than first-class citizenship everwahr else, ain't it?
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In Prop 8, a 4% majority was permitted to take away a basic human right. Mind you, 60% -- a 10% majority -- is required for almost any controversial legislation in the U.S. Senate. This is why we had to put some rights into the Constitution, so that supermajorities of size would have to agree to take away people's rights.
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The supremacy clause establishes that Federal law voids conflicting State law, not that State law supersedes FEDERAL laws and basic constitutional rights. You don't know what you're talking about. The Bill of Rights and other provisions of the Federal Constitution cannot be voided by state laws nor referendums, and basic rights can be taken away only by the large supermajorities required for Constitutional amendments, not 4% (52% to 48%), which is only 2% above a majority, and not a majority of all the people, but only a majority of those who took the trouble to vote on that referendum. This is akin to the people who vote in a particular referendum approving a law to take away the vote in all future elections of everyone who did not vote in that referendum, or voiding the right of HETEROSEXUALS to marry, by a 2% or 4% majority.
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[The judge's homosexual relationship] wasn't secret. It just wasn't intruded into the case. By your reasoning, no married person could judge a case involving heterosexual marriage; nor could a single heterosexual; nor could a single gay man. White judges couldn't sit in cases involving white people, woman judges in cases involving women, black judges in cases involving black people -- or the other way around. We couldn't very well have a black person judging white people, or a woman men, or heterosexuals judging homosexuals -- or anybody judging anybody.
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Homosexuality is an orientation, not a race. So what? You are not making any sense. What has sexual orientation got to do with the society's interest in helping relationships survive long-term, so that private persons take care of each other, so the government won't have to.
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Nowhere does the story say that the judge was in the closet. And "closet queen" is an antigay slur. Stop using bigoted language.
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So government can outlaw heterosexual marriage any time it wants, eh? I have pointed out that the RIGHT to marry is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which the United States is a signatory. By your reasoning, nothing is a RIGHT. Certainly the South did not regard there to be a RIGHT to vote if the would-be voter was black; and of course women had no RIGHT to vote until 1920. Elections are only an "institution", not a right. You make no sense.
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The claim that the judge's long-term relationship biased him against Prop 8 because he might have been expected to take advantage of gay marriage is not just logically shaky but actually disproved by the fact that gay marriage was regarded as legal for over a year, but the judge did NOT marry his partner now of ten years, then of perhaps eight years. Since he did NOT insist on marrying his partner when he had the chance, there is no reason to believe that he would feel an urgent need to make gay marriage available for his own benefit. The argument that he was self-interested so should have recused himself is, thus, FATUOUS -- one of those straws that a drowning man is supposed to clutch at. A lot of people, straight as well as gay, see no reason to get married, and even good reason not to -- for instance, because they don't need a piece of paper to validate their love, or because they understand that sometimes relationships fail, and it's better not to be financially ruined if they do.
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Wrong again. Marriage was, for centuries if not millennia, and even to this day in some places, between one man and SEVERAL or even MANY women; in a very few cultures, it has been between one woman and SEVERAL men. The one-to-one thing is, in historical terms, DEVIANT, and, in the estimation of many cultures, UNNATURAL. But you don't know anything about other cultures, do you? You know nothing of the history of marriage in the world at large. Think about THIS, then: since the number of males and females at young adulthood has always been roughly equal, if one man was allowed to have several, or many, wives, other men could have NO wife. Four wives for the rich man, no wife for 3 poor men. 100 wives for the sultan or sheikh, no wife for 99 men.
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To Jody: so if the majority of people here or in AOL's moderators area, decide to ban you from these comments areas, that's fine with you, eh? And if the majority of Americans decide that everyone named "Jody" should be killed, that's fine too? A "simple" majority is not enuf even to pass many controversial ordinary pieces of legislation thru the United States Senate, much less take away the right to marry -- by a vote of 52%! It takes 60% to pass much of anything thru the U.S. Senate now, but 52% in California is enuf to take away the right to marry? How about the right to vote? The right to breathe?
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Plainly you are insane or a worthless gadfly, saying stupid and ridiculous things just to irritate people. Who is hurt by a bank robbery? The bank, of course; the insurance company that insured the bank against loss from robbery; the FDIC if that robbery affected the bank's ability to give depositors their money back. Who is hurt if some fool who refuses to use a seatbelt gets into an accident and is seriously hurt? The insurance group of which s/he is a part, and who will have to pay to repair the fool's injuries, even if that means their insurance rates will have to go up. If the fool is uninsured, the government -- meaning everybody who pays taxes -- will have to pay for that fool's medical care. If anyone were so unwise as to love that fool, and the fool was killed, the fool's foolhardiness would hurt them too. "No man is an island" -- except perhaps for danrothesq, whom no one would miss. And if he didn't have medical insurance, we should just let him die if he got into a serious accident while refusing to wear a seatbelt. No one else should have to pay for his misbehavior. As to sexual behavior, however, there is no wider harm to an individual's personal choices. But danrothesq can't understand that obvious distinction.
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Note that that is only 5 above the positive votes. There is a TINY coterie of Radical Right lunatics who SWARM select stories on AOL and try to make the whole world believe that their insane view of things is the majority view. It is not. It's just a few dozen evil loons.
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Kindly name the provision of the U.S. Constitution that forbids homosexuality. You cannot, because there is no such thing. but you don't know the Constitution or anything else about the American credo, which was first set out in the Declaration of Independence, which spoke to the "pursuit of happiness". You want other people to be unhappy. You are un-American. You are an enemy of everything this country stands for. YOU should leave.
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There is no compulsory voting in the United States, so 52% of Californians who bothered to vote in Proposition 8 do NOT constitute a majority of Californians. And a 2% majority is NOT enuf to take away people's basic rights.
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There is no God, despite the wish of simpletons that there were. Jesus was an UNmarried man of age 30 or so, in a culture where everyone was expected to be married by age 20. Hm. If God is your only argument, you have no argument.
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You know nothing about HIV, which is a HARMLESS microbe that has NOTHING to do with AIDS or any other adverse health issue (www.virusmyth.com).
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The people who base their hostility to homosexuality on Leviticus ignore that much of Leviticus concerns ANIMAL SACRIFICE and Jewish dietary laws. They can sit at their computer, eating a bacon cheeseburger and drinking a glass of milk, yet justify their hatred of homosexuals by Leviticus, which they themselves violate every day.
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einpet needs to know that there is no such thing as a soul, no God, no "holy" this nor "sacred" that. It's all nonsense. If we had a kind of Judeo-Christian shariah law, that forced people to obey everything in the Judeo-Christian Bible, everyone would have to practice animal sacrifice and Jewish dietary laws, nobody would be allowed to work on the Sabbath (whatever day that might be), masturbation would be punished by law, there would be no divorce, adultery would be punished by death, etc. The Bible thumpers would discover that there are 613 commandments, not 10, in the Old Testament, and getting a haircut could get you beaten. It is so much easier to ignore the inconvenient parts of the Bible and land hard only on the ones you like to inflict on other people, than to heed, yourself, what the whole thing says.
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What, pray, have CHILDREN to do with gay marriage? You make no sense.
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The Bible is b.s. There are only a few parts that any decent people pay any attention to, first among which is the Golden Rule, which has various phrasings but most commonly something like this: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." That means a lot of things, such as don't forbid other people to marry unless you are content to have them forbid you to marry; don't take away other people's rights of ANY kind unless you are content to have them take away YOUR rights; and gay men PERFECTLY obey the Golden Rule, much more literally than can heterosexuals. Think about it. If you can. Aside from these few valid, non-superstitious and non-supernatural passages, the remainder of the Bible should be burned or composted, and used as fertilizer in national forests.
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So you think it's a great thing that hundreds of thousands of kids abandoned by heterosexual parents or taken away from abusive heterosexual parents by the courts, grow up in (sometimes abusive and often unloving) foster homes or group homes, unloved, unnurtured, to become permanently wounded adults, rather than that they be adopted by loving gay parents? I don't. But, then, I'm a decent human being. You? I don't think so.
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Who lied and cheated? About what? The judge didn't intrude his personal life into the workplace, which you people say gay people should never do. And then you complain that he didn't intrude his personal life into the workplace. Make up your mind (your teeny, tiny, intolerant, bigoted mind).
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Civil union is unconstitutional because it does NOT create an equal relationship under the law. Equal treatment under law is required by the 14th Amendment to the Federal Constitution. California voters cannot nullify the 14th Amendment, but must abide by its requirement that everyone be treated equally by government. If you don't understand that, there's something wrong with you.
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The Supreme Court gave up its antihomosexual ways several years ago, when it voided antigay sodomy laws.
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First, learn how to quote. Second, a judge who had a year to marry his gay lover but chose NOT to is NOT ruling on something in which he has a personal interest. The only interest he had is the personal interest all of us have: social justice. And no one should ever recuse himself from a case involving social justice.
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So you're a lawyer all of a sudden? A person recuses himself only when he has a personal interest, such as ownership of the business at issue. It does NOT relate to a black person's refusing to participate in a trial of a civil rights issue, or a woman's refusing to participate in an issue of equal pay for equal work, or a gay judge refusing to participate in a case involving gay marriage.
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How dare you refer to that judge as "Backdoor Sanders"? You know NOTHING about his sexual practices, and they really are NONE of your business. The "majority of citizens" did NOT vote for Proposition 8. The vote was 52% for, but that was 52% of the people who voted. NOT everyone voted, not even nearly. And a 2% majority is a very thin reed upon which to build a house of hate.
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This is a perfect example of "damned if you do, damned if you don't". If the judge had said he is himself gay, he would be condemned for 'forcing his lifestyle' on everyone, and accused before he handed down any decision of being biased. NOTE that he did NOT marry his boyfriend in the year when gay marriage was believed to be legal, so he was NOT personally 'interested' in gay marriage for himself.
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Cut the RadRite crap. Liberals are better educated, higher paid, and harder working at good jobs than RadRite white trash.
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Wouldn't that [striking down gun-control laws] be legislating from the bench? Make up your mind. Either voiding laws is a proper exercise of judicial authority or it is not. And gun-control laws HAVE been struck down. Did you PROTEST that "judicial activism"?
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Which citizens? Did EVERYONE eligible to vote, vote? NO, they sure as heck did not, because we have a low participation rate. Turnout of REGISTERED voters was 79.42% -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_(2008) -- which means that 20.58% of REGISTERED voters did NOT vote, ten times the 2% majority vote in the actual referendum. And "registered voters" is not equivalent to "eligible voters", there being a lot of UNregistered voters who COULD vote but didn't even register. If you want to talk authoritatively about what the people want, we have to have compulsory voting, but you wouldn't want that, because then highly motivated but unrepresentative minorities could not hijack the electoral process.
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Bobalicious seems to think that the only purpose of marriage is reproduction. But society does not require that heterosexual couples reproduce or they lose their marriage. And planet Earth is grotesquely overpopulated, with 14 million children dying every year from starvation and diseases they might survive were it not for deprivation. As for his peculiar and scientifically unsupportable remarks about "deformity of intended order" -- whatever he THINKS that meaningless phrase means -- ignore the obvious fact that homosexuality DOES serve a function in the larger order, in lowering population increase.
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Your ludicrous, silly slander of homosexuals as "not honorable" condemns itself, but it should still be condemned forthrightly by all decent people. Do you really mean that, or are you just a troll trying to get everybody's goat? As for "ill intent", protecting equality under law is not in the slitest "ill intent". What does the "TNC" in your ID mean? "The Nut Case"?
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"Normal" is a statistical term, and refers to commonness. Geniuses are abnormal; saints are abnormal; professional athletes are abnormal. The fact of their abnormality does not make them bad. People of very modest intellectual gifts are the great majority. That doesn't make them wise, or right, or worthy of respect for their uninformed opinions.
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Wrong. The law permits one person (male) to marry another, unrelated person (female). The demand is only that the law must permit one person to marry another unrelated person, without reference to gender -- one person, NOT related to the other person. Of course, "incest" is of little importance if the people cannot reproduce.
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So when the Supreme Court voided McCain-Feingold and unleashed a flood of money on the ridiculous and patently false pretense that corporations are people who have a right of free speech, it created a new law, and thus violated the Constitution, and you were FURIOUS about that, eh?
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Unfortunately, a lot of black Baptists did vote against gay rights in Prop 8. Some have since realized the error of their ways, and might vote the opposite way if a new Prop 8 were presented to them.
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What a twisted piece of imitation-logic you put forth. You can marry -- just not anyone you could love! Your simpleminded bigotry fools no one. You aren't making any valid point. You are just thrashing around desperately looking for some justification for your unjustifiable malice toward people who have never done you any harm and never interfered in any way with your pursuit of marital happiness.
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If voiding a law is judicial activism, then the current Supreme Court is filled to overflowing with judicial activists, because they struck down McCain-Feingold and many other laws.
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The history of the United States is a history of progress from inequality toward equality, and that move was resisted at every stage of the game. But it was never stopped. And it never will be. You are on the losing side of history, and there is no place on Earth you can go that is more reactionary than the U.S. of A. that you pretend to love but actually hate. Because the United States is about "liberty and justice for all", not just for some. And you can't stand that.
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If committed partners, gay or straight, refuse to marry, then they willingly pass up the benefits of marriage. That is nothing like the case here, where a straight couple CAN marry if they want to but a gay couple cannot. You cannot seriously believe that the two situations are comparable. Unless you have a serious intellectual or emotional problem.
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And [Conservatives] never admit, when a judge voids a law they don't like, that that is judicial activism.
The moral of your silly story is that no judge can sit in judgment of anyone who has anything in common with him or her -- or who is different from him or her.
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Yes, you're mistaken. A decision stands on its own, not on its authorship. And no judge can put his or her own prejudices into a decision without expecting it to be reviewed and overturned if legally void.
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People who don't want to be faithful -- male or female; straight or gay; lesbian or heterosexual -- should not get married. And unjust divorce laws need to be abolished, not enforced equally against everybody. As I look around at the straight world, I see an awful lot of infidelity and divorce by straight people. What do YOU see?
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Why don't you post under your real, full name, and town, so your neighbors can hold you to account for your bigotry?
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Moslem, Christian, Jewish judges don't matter. The LAW matters. We have appeals to correct legal errors in decisions rendered by judges of any religion.
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Perhaps you're not aware of the FACTS (a) that not all gay men have ******** ["anal sex" censored by AOL moderator/software] and (b) that MOST straight couples at some point in time, and some straight people a LOT of the time DO have ********.
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So the world is in danger of depopulation, is it? If homosexuality could bring down this planet's catastrophic overpopulation, homosexuality should be not only legal but encouraged (if not compulsory). As for flaunting one's sexual orientation, perhaps you don't see all the heterosexual hugging and kissing in TV programs, commercials, movies, etc., activity on the street, etc. Straight people wouldn't THINK of making obvious their sexual orientation, of course not. The world is being DESTROYED by heterosexuality. You must be so proud.
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pwanless hugely misstates and exaggerates in calling lesbians "half of the gay population". First, lesbians and gay men are NOT the same, any more than blacks and Chinese are the same thing. Second, there are nowhere near as many lesbians as gay men.
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Your "marriage is an institution" [not a right] premise in no way makes any sense. You don't seem to understand that you make no sense. Sad.
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Don't straight people make a huge, expensive show of their weddings, the start of their governmentally-approved SEXUAL relationship? If gay people were to say that NOBODY should have the right to marry, and that sexual behavior is not for government to approve or disapprove, so all weddings should be without legal sanction, and NO benefits should appertain to straight people's sexual relationships, that would remove "bedroom behavior" as a political issue, wouldn't it? Would you be in favor of outlawing marriage for everyone?
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Amazing. Gay people ask for the SAME rights, and all of a sudden YOUR rights are SPECIAL rights because other people want them too. You cannot magically make the SAME rights SPECIAL rights just by saying so. There has to be some logic, some SENSE, some consistency for rational people to believe something.
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The right to marry is in Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml).
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All treaties to which the United States is signatory are, WITH the Constitution, the supreme law of the land. If Jody doesn't understand that, or does not know that the U.S. SIGNED the Universal Declaration, then she needs some legal education.
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The judge in the Proposition 8 case did not draft the proposition. By your reasoning, no white person should be allowed to act as judge on a case involving white people.
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Unmarried heterosexuals CHOOSE not to marry. They are not FORBIDDEN to marry. If you don't understand the difference, you should not be allowed to drive, nor use a pedestrian crossing without assistance, because you have no judgment.
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Your Highness makes no sense. I say everybody should have the right to choose to marry or stay single, and Y.H. seems to think I'm saying that nobody has a right of choice in this regard. What a twisted world Y.H.'s mind must be.
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The judge was not in the closet. He just wasn't shouting his private relationship. I thought you bigots WANTED gay people to stop 'forcing their lifestyle on others' by publicly proclaiming their orientation. What "hate" has the judge showed in LOVING a man for 10 years? You're making up gay people you know. You do NOT know any gay people who would talk to you about ANYthing. You're just fabricating ridiculous, contemptible, obvious nonsense, like the antiblack bigots who claim that "some of my best friends are black".
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Your fear of your own attraction is showing.
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I have to wonder about your ability to think. Let me try to explain things to you, slowly: the SAME rights are NOT special rights. The desire to reproduce is NOT heterosexual; it is intrinsic to the INDIVIDUAL, a form of egoism, not heterosexualism. Gay people do NOT hate heterosexuals, only mistreatment by heterosexuals. You are PROJECTING your hatred of homosexuals onto gay people and thinking that because you hate them, therefore they must hate you. We have no reason to hate heterosexuals. Our PARENTS are heterosexuals, as are most of our family, co-workers, neighbors, etc. If we don't care to hang out with heterosexuals much of the time but prefer to be with people more like ourselves, that's simply natural. "Birds of a feather flock together." "Natural" means "occurring in nature". Homosexuality and lesbianism occur in nature. Has no male dog ever humped your leg? Watch dogs and cats; you don't have to go to more exotic species to see a LOT of homosexual behavior. You pass it off as "confused" rather than what it is: homosexual. With the onset of artificial insemination, marriages of convenience, surrogacy, and in vitro fertilization, heterosexuality has become OBSOLETE as a means of reproduction. And with the arrival of massive overpopulation of this overstrained planet, accidental reproduction has become a BLIGHT upon the world.
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Yeah, them durned nigras demanded special rights too, like the right to vote. Look how that turned out. One of them durned nigras became President of the YOUnited States, by some crazy accident. What next? Sum durned homo becoming President? They've got to back off and say they've got enuf. Second-class citizenship in the Younited States is better than first-class citizenship everwahr else, ain't it?
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In Prop 8, a 4% majority was permitted to take away a basic human right. Mind you, 60% -- a 10% majority -- is required for almost any controversial legislation in the U.S. Senate. This is why we had to put some rights into the Constitution, so that supermajorities of size would have to agree to take away people's rights.
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The supremacy clause establishes that Federal law voids conflicting State law, not that State law supersedes FEDERAL laws and basic constitutional rights. You don't know what you're talking about. The Bill of Rights and other provisions of the Federal Constitution cannot be voided by state laws nor referendums, and basic rights can be taken away only by the large supermajorities required for Constitutional amendments, not 4% (52% to 48%), which is only 2% above a majority, and not a majority of all the people, but only a majority of those who took the trouble to vote on that referendum. This is akin to the people who vote in a particular referendum approving a law to take away the vote in all future elections of everyone who did not vote in that referendum, or voiding the right of HETEROSEXUALS to marry, by a 2% or 4% majority.
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[The judge's homosexual relationship] wasn't secret. It just wasn't intruded into the case. By your reasoning, no married person could judge a case involving heterosexual marriage; nor could a single heterosexual; nor could a single gay man. White judges couldn't sit in cases involving white people, woman judges in cases involving women, black judges in cases involving black people -- or the other way around. We couldn't very well have a black person judging white people, or a woman men, or heterosexuals judging homosexuals -- or anybody judging anybody.
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Homosexuality is an orientation, not a race. So what? You are not making any sense. What has sexual orientation got to do with the society's interest in helping relationships survive long-term, so that private persons take care of each other, so the government won't have to.
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Nowhere does the story say that the judge was in the closet. And "closet queen" is an antigay slur. Stop using bigoted language.
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So government can outlaw heterosexual marriage any time it wants, eh? I have pointed out that the RIGHT to marry is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which the United States is a signatory. By your reasoning, nothing is a RIGHT. Certainly the South did not regard there to be a RIGHT to vote if the would-be voter was black; and of course women had no RIGHT to vote until 1920. Elections are only an "institution", not a right. You make no sense.
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The claim that the judge's long-term relationship biased him against Prop 8 because he might have been expected to take advantage of gay marriage is not just logically shaky but actually disproved by the fact that gay marriage was regarded as legal for over a year, but the judge did NOT marry his partner now of ten years, then of perhaps eight years. Since he did NOT insist on marrying his partner when he had the chance, there is no reason to believe that he would feel an urgent need to make gay marriage available for his own benefit. The argument that he was self-interested so should have recused himself is, thus, FATUOUS -- one of those straws that a drowning man is supposed to clutch at. A lot of people, straight as well as gay, see no reason to get married, and even good reason not to -- for instance, because they don't need a piece of paper to validate their love, or because they understand that sometimes relationships fail, and it's better not to be financially ruined if they do.
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Wrong again. Marriage was, for centuries if not millennia, and even to this day in some places, between one man and SEVERAL or even MANY women; in a very few cultures, it has been between one woman and SEVERAL men. The one-to-one thing is, in historical terms, DEVIANT, and, in the estimation of many cultures, UNNATURAL. But you don't know anything about other cultures, do you? You know nothing of the history of marriage in the world at large. Think about THIS, then: since the number of males and females at young adulthood has always been roughly equal, if one man was allowed to have several, or many, wives, other men could have NO wife. Four wives for the rich man, no wife for 3 poor men. 100 wives for the sultan or sheikh, no wife for 99 men.
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To Jody: so if the majority of people here or in AOL's moderators area, decide to ban you from these comments areas, that's fine with you, eh? And if the majority of Americans decide that everyone named "Jody" should be killed, that's fine too? A "simple" majority is not enuf even to pass many controversial ordinary pieces of legislation thru the United States Senate, much less take away the right to marry -- by a vote of 52%! It takes 60% to pass much of anything thru the U.S. Senate now, but 52% in California is enuf to take away the right to marry? How about the right to vote? The right to breathe?
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Plainly you are insane or a worthless gadfly, saying stupid and ridiculous things just to irritate people. Who is hurt by a bank robbery? The bank, of course; the insurance company that insured the bank against loss from robbery; the FDIC if that robbery affected the bank's ability to give depositors their money back. Who is hurt if some fool who refuses to use a seatbelt gets into an accident and is seriously hurt? The insurance group of which s/he is a part, and who will have to pay to repair the fool's injuries, even if that means their insurance rates will have to go up. If the fool is uninsured, the government -- meaning everybody who pays taxes -- will have to pay for that fool's medical care. If anyone were so unwise as to love that fool, and the fool was killed, the fool's foolhardiness would hurt them too. "No man is an island" -- except perhaps for danrothesq, whom no one would miss. And if he didn't have medical insurance, we should just let him die if he got into a serious accident while refusing to wear a seatbelt. No one else should have to pay for his misbehavior. As to sexual behavior, however, there is no wider harm to an individual's personal choices. But danrothesq can't understand that obvious distinction.
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Note that that is only 5 above the positive votes. There is a TINY coterie of Radical Right lunatics who SWARM select stories on AOL and try to make the whole world believe that their insane view of things is the majority view. It is not. It's just a few dozen evil loons.
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Kindly name the provision of the U.S. Constitution that forbids homosexuality. You cannot, because there is no such thing. but you don't know the Constitution or anything else about the American credo, which was first set out in the Declaration of Independence, which spoke to the "pursuit of happiness". You want other people to be unhappy. You are un-American. You are an enemy of everything this country stands for. YOU should leave.
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There is no compulsory voting in the United States, so 52% of Californians who bothered to vote in Proposition 8 do NOT constitute a majority of Californians. And a 2% majority is NOT enuf to take away people's basic rights.
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There is no God, despite the wish of simpletons that there were. Jesus was an UNmarried man of age 30 or so, in a culture where everyone was expected to be married by age 20. Hm. If God is your only argument, you have no argument.
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You know nothing about HIV, which is a HARMLESS microbe that has NOTHING to do with AIDS or any other adverse health issue (www.virusmyth.com).
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The people who base their hostility to homosexuality on Leviticus ignore that much of Leviticus concerns ANIMAL SACRIFICE and Jewish dietary laws. They can sit at their computer, eating a bacon cheeseburger and drinking a glass of milk, yet justify their hatred of homosexuals by Leviticus, which they themselves violate every day.
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einpet needs to know that there is no such thing as a soul, no God, no "holy" this nor "sacred" that. It's all nonsense. If we had a kind of Judeo-Christian shariah law, that forced people to obey everything in the Judeo-Christian Bible, everyone would have to practice animal sacrifice and Jewish dietary laws, nobody would be allowed to work on the Sabbath (whatever day that might be), masturbation would be punished by law, there would be no divorce, adultery would be punished by death, etc. The Bible thumpers would discover that there are 613 commandments, not 10, in the Old Testament, and getting a haircut could get you beaten. It is so much easier to ignore the inconvenient parts of the Bible and land hard only on the ones you like to inflict on other people, than to heed, yourself, what the whole thing says.
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What, pray, have CHILDREN to do with gay marriage? You make no sense.
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The Bible is b.s. There are only a few parts that any decent people pay any attention to, first among which is the Golden Rule, which has various phrasings but most commonly something like this: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." That means a lot of things, such as don't forbid other people to marry unless you are content to have them forbid you to marry; don't take away other people's rights of ANY kind unless you are content to have them take away YOUR rights; and gay men PERFECTLY obey the Golden Rule, much more literally than can heterosexuals. Think about it. If you can. Aside from these few valid, non-superstitious and non-supernatural passages, the remainder of the Bible should be burned or composted, and used as fertilizer in national forests.
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So you think it's a great thing that hundreds of thousands of kids abandoned by heterosexual parents or taken away from abusive heterosexual parents by the courts, grow up in (sometimes abusive and often unloving) foster homes or group homes, unloved, unnurtured, to become permanently wounded adults, rather than that they be adopted by loving gay parents? I don't. But, then, I'm a decent human being. You? I don't think so.
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Who lied and cheated? About what? The judge didn't intrude his personal life into the workplace, which you people say gay people should never do. And then you complain that he didn't intrude his personal life into the workplace. Make up your mind (your teeny, tiny, intolerant, bigoted mind).
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Civil union is unconstitutional because it does NOT create an equal relationship under the law. Equal treatment under law is required by the 14th Amendment to the Federal Constitution. California voters cannot nullify the 14th Amendment, but must abide by its requirement that everyone be treated equally by government. If you don't understand that, there's something wrong with you.
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The Supreme Court gave up its antihomosexual ways several years ago, when it voided antigay sodomy laws.
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First, learn how to quote. Second, a judge who had a year to marry his gay lover but chose NOT to is NOT ruling on something in which he has a personal interest. The only interest he had is the personal interest all of us have: social justice. And no one should ever recuse himself from a case involving social justice.
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So you're a lawyer all of a sudden? A person recuses himself only when he has a personal interest, such as ownership of the business at issue. It does NOT relate to a black person's refusing to participate in a trial of a civil rights issue, or a woman's refusing to participate in an issue of equal pay for equal work, or a gay judge refusing to participate in a case involving gay marriage.
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How dare you refer to that judge as "Backdoor Sanders"? You know NOTHING about his sexual practices, and they really are NONE of your business. The "majority of citizens" did NOT vote for Proposition 8. The vote was 52% for, but that was 52% of the people who voted. NOT everyone voted, not even nearly. And a 2% majority is a very thin reed upon which to build a house of hate.
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This is a perfect example of "damned if you do, damned if you don't". If the judge had said he is himself gay, he would be condemned for 'forcing his lifestyle' on everyone, and accused before he handed down any decision of being biased. NOTE that he did NOT marry his boyfriend in the year when gay marriage was believed to be legal, so he was NOT personally 'interested' in gay marriage for himself.
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Cut the RadRite crap. Liberals are better educated, higher paid, and harder working at good jobs than RadRite white trash.
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Wouldn't that [striking down gun-control laws] be legislating from the bench? Make up your mind. Either voiding laws is a proper exercise of judicial authority or it is not. And gun-control laws HAVE been struck down. Did you PROTEST that "judicial activism"?
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Which citizens? Did EVERYONE eligible to vote, vote? NO, they sure as heck did not, because we have a low participation rate. Turnout of REGISTERED voters was 79.42% -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_(2008) -- which means that 20.58% of REGISTERED voters did NOT vote, ten times the 2% majority vote in the actual referendum. And "registered voters" is not equivalent to "eligible voters", there being a lot of UNregistered voters who COULD vote but didn't even register. If you want to talk authoritatively about what the people want, we have to have compulsory voting, but you wouldn't want that, because then highly motivated but unrepresentative minorities could not hijack the electoral process.
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Bobalicious seems to think that the only purpose of marriage is reproduction. But society does not require that heterosexual couples reproduce or they lose their marriage. And planet Earth is grotesquely overpopulated, with 14 million children dying every year from starvation and diseases they might survive were it not for deprivation. As for his peculiar and scientifically unsupportable remarks about "deformity of intended order" -- whatever he THINKS that meaningless phrase means -- ignore the obvious fact that homosexuality DOES serve a function in the larger order, in lowering population increase.
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Your ludicrous, silly slander of homosexuals as "not honorable" condemns itself, but it should still be condemned forthrightly by all decent people. Do you really mean that, or are you just a troll trying to get everybody's goat? As for "ill intent", protecting equality under law is not in the slitest "ill intent". What does the "TNC" in your ID mean? "The Nut Case"?
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"Normal" is a statistical term, and refers to commonness. Geniuses are abnormal; saints are abnormal; professional athletes are abnormal. The fact of their abnormality does not make them bad. People of very modest intellectual gifts are the great majority. That doesn't make them wise, or right, or worthy of respect for their uninformed opinions.
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Wrong. The law permits one person (male) to marry another, unrelated person (female). The demand is only that the law must permit one person to marry another unrelated person, without reference to gender -- one person, NOT related to the other person. Of course, "incest" is of little importance if the people cannot reproduce.
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So when the Supreme Court voided McCain-Feingold and unleashed a flood of money on the ridiculous and patently false pretense that corporations are people who have a right of free speech, it created a new law, and thus violated the Constitution, and you were FURIOUS about that, eh?
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Unfortunately, a lot of black Baptists did vote against gay rights in Prop 8. Some have since realized the error of their ways, and might vote the opposite way if a new Prop 8 were presented to them.
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What a twisted piece of imitation-logic you put forth. You can marry -- just not anyone you could love! Your simpleminded bigotry fools no one. You aren't making any valid point. You are just thrashing around desperately looking for some justification for your unjustifiable malice toward people who have never done you any harm and never interfered in any way with your pursuit of marital happiness.
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If voiding a law is judicial activism, then the current Supreme Court is filled to overflowing with judicial activists, because they struck down McCain-Feingold and many other laws.
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The history of the United States is a history of progress from inequality toward equality, and that move was resisted at every stage of the game. But it was never stopped. And it never will be. You are on the losing side of history, and there is no place on Earth you can go that is more reactionary than the U.S. of A. that you pretend to love but actually hate. Because the United States is about "liberty and justice for all", not just for some. And you can't stand that.
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If committed partners, gay or straight, refuse to marry, then they willingly pass up the benefits of marriage. That is nothing like the case here, where a straight couple CAN marry if they want to but a gay couple cannot. You cannot seriously believe that the two situations are comparable. Unless you have a serious intellectual or emotional problem.
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And [Conservatives] never admit, when a judge voids a law they don't like, that that is judicial activism.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Dr. Phil Has Gay Couple as Guests. I sometimes watch the Dr. Phil show, at least until I see what the topic is. Then I usually turn off, because the topic turns me off, and both stupid and crazy people irritate me. Most of the topics dealt with are irrelevant to my life as a gay man. I also realized that most of the things that Dr. Phil deals with have little or no relevance to me in other ways, because I live alone, my extended family is scattered across thousands of miles, I rarely see my friends because the three I am in touch with most often are scattered (several miles from me in different directions) and I communicate with them almost only via email and IM, and rarely via fone or in-person. So I don't really need relationship advice. I see acquaintances at art events here in Newark (NJ, which has a very active arts community), but those are very brief and casual conversations.
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In any case, I have not until today had a clear idea of where Dr. Phil stands on the issue of homosexuality. Certainly homosexuality has been very underrepresented in his discussions, but I didn't know why that might be.
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Today, I finally saw him speak with a gay couple, Ródiney Santiago and Reichen Leimkuhl. Leimkuhl had won CBS's Amazing Race in 2003 with a different partner, Chip Arndt, but they later broke up. Divorced people are hardly new on Dr. Phil. He's had hundreds of straight divorced people on his show.
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I have actually been indignant that Dr. Phil gave no time nor attention to gay men, but when finally a gay couple was featured, their only problem seemed to be petty annoyance about each other's tidiness. Big deal. The good doctor had them take a personality test, and that indicated that they were pretty well suited to each other. That doesn't mean they'll stay together, of course, it being very difficult for most people to commit to a life-long relationship. But Dr. Phil was not the slitest judgmental, and acted as tho it was absolutely, perfectly normal for these two men to be romantically and (sexually) involved. Good.
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In any case, I have not until today had a clear idea of where Dr. Phil stands on the issue of homosexuality. Certainly homosexuality has been very underrepresented in his discussions, but I didn't know why that might be.
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Today, I finally saw him speak with a gay couple, Ródiney Santiago and Reichen Leimkuhl. Leimkuhl had won CBS's Amazing Race in 2003 with a different partner, Chip Arndt, but they later broke up. Divorced people are hardly new on Dr. Phil. He's had hundreds of straight divorced people on his show.
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I have actually been indignant that Dr. Phil gave no time nor attention to gay men, but when finally a gay couple was featured, their only problem seemed to be petty annoyance about each other's tidiness. Big deal. The good doctor had them take a personality test, and that indicated that they were pretty well suited to each other. That doesn't mean they'll stay together, of course, it being very difficult for most people to commit to a life-long relationship. But Dr. Phil was not the slitest judgmental, and acted as tho it was absolutely, perfectly normal for these two men to be romantically and (sexually) involved. Good.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Lowering the Age at Which the Castration Conspiracy Attacks. The Parent Dish website printed an article, hilited on a Welcome screen on AOL, about British doctors giving children as young as 12 drugs to hold off puberty for children who are confused about gender. I was livid, so read thru the comments after it, then added three of my own.
That is a profoundly ignorant and intolerant remark [that in that person's day, people suppressed homosexual tendencies and got married, and everyone was better off for it]. Gay men were oppressed for centuries by the suggestion that "man" means "heterosexual, attracted to women", whereas it just means having an XY chromosomal constitution, which implies nothing about sexual orientation. People may experiment, but unless there are powerful forces interfering with their choice, they will all, at maturity, choose gay or straight. It is only the insistence that male = heterosexual that causes some sad gay kids to be confused: "I'm drawn to boys, so I must be a girl." Then the Castration Conspiracy arrives and pushes them to pretend that they are "a woman trapped in a man's body", which is of course completely insane. Alas, large parts of society have been persuaded by organized lunatics to accept that insanity as sane, then push sexually confused people to mutilate themselves horribly and irreversibly. But sane people could not be persuaded that a woman could be trapped in a man's body if society were not so utterly unwilling to accept that a fully normal and properly functioning man can be totally and intensely oriented to men sexually, esthetically, and emotionally. We need to save people from the hideous physical assault that is "sex-change" surgery, by accepting the normality of homosexuality. "Normal" does not mean "majority". Castrating a gender-confused gay boy is a crime against humanity, Mengele medicine.
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There is no such thing as a natural born "tranny". There is no such thing as a "transsexual" at all, tho there are a few people born as intersexes or with ambiguous genitalia. In most cases, once actual, chromosomal gender is established, surgery can successfully repair developmental accidents and give a person a reasonable facsimile of the appropriate genitalia. That is not what is meant by "transsexual". Rather, people who are confused about gender are not helped to find their true selves (their biological gender) but instead pushed by a very real conspiracy of crazy people in the nonexistent "LGBT community" (the four groups HATE each other, and do not hang out together) to be surgically mutilated, then lie to the world and trick unsuspecting people into homosexual or lesbian relationships they would never willingly have engaged in. This is all a crime against humanity, and is all arisen from the preposterous notion that all normal people are heterosexual. The "doctors" involved in behavior such as described above, and in nonexistent "sex-change" operations (you can't change a person's gender unless you can change every single cell's chromosomal makeup, which is impossible) are guilty of crimes against humanity. Their offending hand should be amputated, and it should be unlawful to replace it with a prosthesis. Mutilating people in so hideous and irreversible [a] way is Frankensteinian, even Nazistic. It is not an act of kindness, and is CERTAINLY not an act of understanding.
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"Howard" needs to mind his own business, and not speculate about the sex acts of other people. Gay men do not tell straight men that heterosexual activity is disgusting and intended ONLY for reproduction, and has not even been necessary for reproduction since the arrival of the age of the test-tube baby. If homosexuality were not normal, it could not happen. "God", in His infinite wisdom, would have made the parts fit only one way, just as man made polarized electric plugs fit only one way. In this time of horrendous overpopulation, when nearly 15 million people, mostly children, die of starvation, heterosexuality is something we should be MOST actively discouraging, and homosexuality is something we should most definitely be encouraging. Instead, straight people have to OUTLAW it because the drive is so powerful that if NOT outlawed, a very large portion of all men would be having sex with men and not bothering with all the drama and frustration of dealing with women, whom they will not ever understand.
That is a profoundly ignorant and intolerant remark [that in that person's day, people suppressed homosexual tendencies and got married, and everyone was better off for it]. Gay men were oppressed for centuries by the suggestion that "man" means "heterosexual, attracted to women", whereas it just means having an XY chromosomal constitution, which implies nothing about sexual orientation. People may experiment, but unless there are powerful forces interfering with their choice, they will all, at maturity, choose gay or straight. It is only the insistence that male = heterosexual that causes some sad gay kids to be confused: "I'm drawn to boys, so I must be a girl." Then the Castration Conspiracy arrives and pushes them to pretend that they are "a woman trapped in a man's body", which is of course completely insane. Alas, large parts of society have been persuaded by organized lunatics to accept that insanity as sane, then push sexually confused people to mutilate themselves horribly and irreversibly. But sane people could not be persuaded that a woman could be trapped in a man's body if society were not so utterly unwilling to accept that a fully normal and properly functioning man can be totally and intensely oriented to men sexually, esthetically, and emotionally. We need to save people from the hideous physical assault that is "sex-change" surgery, by accepting the normality of homosexuality. "Normal" does not mean "majority". Castrating a gender-confused gay boy is a crime against humanity, Mengele medicine.
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There is no such thing as a natural born "tranny". There is no such thing as a "transsexual" at all, tho there are a few people born as intersexes or with ambiguous genitalia. In most cases, once actual, chromosomal gender is established, surgery can successfully repair developmental accidents and give a person a reasonable facsimile of the appropriate genitalia. That is not what is meant by "transsexual". Rather, people who are confused about gender are not helped to find their true selves (their biological gender) but instead pushed by a very real conspiracy of crazy people in the nonexistent "LGBT community" (the four groups HATE each other, and do not hang out together) to be surgically mutilated, then lie to the world and trick unsuspecting people into homosexual or lesbian relationships they would never willingly have engaged in. This is all a crime against humanity, and is all arisen from the preposterous notion that all normal people are heterosexual. The "doctors" involved in behavior such as described above, and in nonexistent "sex-change" operations (you can't change a person's gender unless you can change every single cell's chromosomal makeup, which is impossible) are guilty of crimes against humanity. Their offending hand should be amputated, and it should be unlawful to replace it with a prosthesis. Mutilating people in so hideous and irreversible [a] way is Frankensteinian, even Nazistic. It is not an act of kindness, and is CERTAINLY not an act of understanding.
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"Howard" needs to mind his own business, and not speculate about the sex acts of other people. Gay men do not tell straight men that heterosexual activity is disgusting and intended ONLY for reproduction, and has not even been necessary for reproduction since the arrival of the age of the test-tube baby. If homosexuality were not normal, it could not happen. "God", in His infinite wisdom, would have made the parts fit only one way, just as man made polarized electric plugs fit only one way. In this time of horrendous overpopulation, when nearly 15 million people, mostly children, die of starvation, heterosexuality is something we should be MOST actively discouraging, and homosexuality is something we should most definitely be encouraging. Instead, straight people have to OUTLAW it because the drive is so powerful that if NOT outlawed, a very large portion of all men would be having sex with men and not bothering with all the drama and frustration of dealing with women, whom they will not ever understand.
