The rights of farm animals outweigh the rights of some humans, at least that is the message that California is sending after the big historic election last night.
I’m all for the “yay” that Obama won the presidency – this is something that needed to happen to restore our reputation with the rest of the world (something that I’m sure many people forgot about over the years is that the US is only part of the world, and not the whole world…) but I have much sadness in that my state – and I’ve only ever had residence in California – would choose to add to the constitution blatant discrimination against a single group of people.
This is far worse than electing an Austrian muscle head as Governor…
Now that the unthinkable has happened, the lawsuits are starting to fly (something that was going to happen no matter which way the proposition fared) and one can hope that there is something that can be used to repeal this, or force it’s way up to the Supreme Court for a final decision. This amendment to the state constitution is, in my opinion, a slippery slope on which the reintroduction of segregation (of any type) could be applied. I mean, we’ve already said that homosexuals aren’t eligible to marry. Next step is to do to them, what we had done with blacks all the way up through the Sixties. After we do that, what’s to say we can’t turn our attention back to segregating based on race, or what Germany in the Twenties and Thirties did with religion/heritage.
Also, and I have to stress that I’m no lawyer, but if the state starts to annul the 18,000 same-sex marriages, doesn’t that go against the following part of the California Constitution?
CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION, ARTICLE 1 DECLARATION OF RIGHTS, SEC. 9. A bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts may not be passed.
After all, the state issues marriage licenses, which are legal contracts between two parties (and like any contract, it takes some doing to get out of it when you are trying to…) so if they start to dissolve these contracts because a new addition to the constitution tells them to, wouldn’t that be impairing the obligation of contracts?
Though a press release I received as I was writing this strongly indicates that the existing marriages will continue to be recognized, it seems to me that the Prop 8 supporters will attempt to have them annulled all the same – after all, the amendment clearly states “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” I’m sure the intent was also to not recognize any same-sex unions performed anywhere else – so why on earth would they sit back and allow any of them. Even our Attorney General Jerry “moon-beam” Brown’s statement seemed a little vague (this was from August, by the way):
“I believe that marriages that have been entered into subsequent to the May 15 Supreme Court opinion will be recognized by the California Supreme Court,” He noted that Proposition is silent about retroactivity, and said, “I would think the court, in looking at the underlying equities, would most probably conclude that upholding the marriages performed in that interval before the election would be a just result.”
The phrases “I believe” and “I would think” just sort of irritate me, because I’m an expert in wishy-washy-ness (having been a practitioner of it for years…) So, I’ll just sit back and see what happenes. I just hope that the recent marriage license that my name is on (and so is my wife’s, but it’s not our own – we were just witnesses) doesn’t get wiped out because of this insanity…