Prop 8’s Day In Federal Court Starts Today

I usually avoid discussion of certain issues, such as gay marriage, because they are not really hot button issues with me. Furthermore, while, if pressed, I do not support gay marriage, I do support civil unions, and, this being America, where freedom should reign supreme, and, with a Classical Liberal doctrine of “if it doesn’t affect me, why should I care?”, gays should have a legal right to be recognized as paired under the law. But, I do have a big problem with people making up civil rights and pretending that the Constitution gives them those, and, attempting to thwart the will of the People through judicial activism

After a run of setbacks at the state level, gay rights advocates will take the campaign for same-sex marriage into a federal courtroom on Monday, starting down a treacherous avenue that ends at a U.S. Supreme Court dominated by conservatives.

Two couples are asking Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker to rule that same-sex marriage is a right embedded in the Constitution, and that it was violated last year when California voters passed a ballot measure confining matrimony to members of the opposite sex.

Can anyone say what, exactly, that embedded right is? Like with so many things, rights just seem to appear somewhere in the Constitution out of thing air, but, no one can actually pin them down or highlight them in actual specific words. However, I can pin down a section which allows a State to enact laws such as Prop 8, where the Federal government needs to butt out, Amendment 10.

“From a conservative standpoint, people who wish to enter into the institution of marriage wish to enter into something that is the building block of our society, and that is itself a conservative value,” said Olson, who served as solicitor general under President George W. Bush.

But, marriage is a religious doctrine first and foremost which is about the joining of a Man and a Woman together under the Lord’s eye. And, let’s not forget, quite a few on the liberal side voted in favor of Proposition 8, which is the reason it passed.

Over at the NY Times, they actually allow Edwin Meese III to write an op-ed piece against this lawsuit

THE much-anticipated trial to determine the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8 is scheduled to begin this morning in the case of Perry v. Schwarzenegger. What’s at stake in this case, filed in federal district court in San Francisco on behalf of two gay couples, is not just the right of California voters to reaffirm the definition of marriage as only between a man and a woman, but also whether marriage may be otherwise defined in any state.

What he is pointing too, of course, is the further erosion of 10th Amendment Rights. Anyhow, what is your opinion?

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