A Little Joy Creeps Into America: Everyone Can Get Married in California
30 days from now, gay couples will be able to get married in California. The California Supreme Court has handed down the decision to overturn that state's ban on gay marriage. People who love one another and who happen to be of the same gender will now be able to do what people of opposite genders have always been able to do in California. The court appears to have used an increasingly rare tool called reason in making its decision:
"The California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples," Chief Justice Ronald George wrote in the majority opinion.Some of you who are old enough may remember when reason was commonly applied to the question of people's rights in a society that styles itself as just. This was a relatively common practice for some time until the more recent trend of applying personal fears and distaste elevated to a social level, a procedure often based on books written by people whose idea of "justice" was using rocks to bash in the skulls of people of whom they didn't approve (e.g., Leviticus).
Allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry "will not deprive opposite-sex couples of any rights and will not alter the legal framework of the institution of marriage," George said.
Ed Harrington, the general manager of the [San Francisco] city's Public Utilities Commission, has lived with his partner for 35 years. In 2004, he performed marriage ceremonies for about 40 same-sex couples.Why, that promiscuous bastard! How dare he belittle normal marriage by putting he and his partner of the past 35 years on the same footing as couples who have been together half as long. Clearly, it's not possible for two people of the same gender to love one another in the same way that those of opposite genders do.
"You wait for this your whole life," said Harrington, who said he planned to call his partner and say, "I love you. What more do you say on a day like this?"
I wish Ed Rehmus had lived to see today. I also wish that there weren't a bunch of moon-faced assassins of joy waiting in the wings for their chance to once again tear people's hearts to shreds in the name of their twisted, bloodthirsty deity. You know, the same one who tells them to stone people in the streets and once got some doddering goatherd to nearly slit his son's carotid artery:
The celebration could turn out to be short-lived, however. The court's decision could be overturned in November, when Californians are likely to vote on a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages. Conservative religious organizations have submitted more than 1.1 million signatures on initiative petitions, and officials are working to determine if at least 694,354 of them are valid...None of those signatures are valid. Not a single one, because it's none of their business. It isn't their place to impose their idea of what a family is on anyone else. It has nothing to do with them. These people who push these petitions and those who sign them so that they can insert themselves between two people whom they've never met aren't valid people. And isn't it all cozy and Orwellian and ironic (sarcastic? sadistic?) that this organization working it's tuchis off to interfere with other people's lives calls itself the Liberty Counsel? What they want is exactly the opposite of liberty. I suppose that if their petitions fail they can always find plenty of rocks to throw.
Liberty Counsel, which represented the group Campaign for California Families before the court in arguing for the state law, denounced the ruling and said it would ask the justices to stay its effect until after the November election.
For all their bleatings about how gay people marrying one another weakens "traditional marriage," they've yet to explain why the only state in which same-sex marriage is legal has the second lowest divorce rate in the country (2.2% in Massachusetts, unchanged since gay marriage became legal in 2004) while a state like Arkansas which, as far as I know is big on "traditional values," has a rate nearly three times that (6.0% as of 2005). It must be all those people from Arkansas who get a divorce and flee to Massachusetts to turn gay, I suppose.
Has Don Wildmon sent me a "Dear Manmeat" letter about this yet? I can't wait to get home and find out. He must be frothing at the mouth by now, no doubt praying for earthquakes and large jetliners slamming into buildings. They're so much more efficient at making the streets run with the blood of the disbelievers than are old-fashioned rocks.
