Lies and stupidityIt was hilarious last night watching Rachel Maddow report on the two–yes two!–Prop 8 defense witnesses, one of whom said he got his information “from the internet.” This is evidence?  This is farce, but farce playing with tens of thousands of lives and families and hopes and dreams.

And who did NPR…go to this morning to explain the position of the anti-gay marriage equality “argument”? None other than that nauseating shrew, Maggie Gallagher.  Despite the illegitimate “facts” put forth by the numbskulls associated with these various anti-gay organizations, they still are able to gain a presence in the media. The media speaks to these fools without ever asking them to prove their points or call them out on their “facts”.  Perhaps, this will begin to change now that Judge Vaughn Walker, in his ruling, has spelled out how to go about negating the arguments of these fools.  

Liars and bogeymenAmen

They know they’re in the wrong…That’s why all the H8ers can say is, “Don’t take away our right to vote on YOUR marriage!” They have no Constitutional ground to stand on, so they’re desperately trying to hold onto their sick political “wedge issue” that’s now slipping away from their grasp. Just sad…

They lost because…America is a Republic, not a Democracy.
If America were a Democracy, then the 50% + 1 who voted for Prop 8 would be the unassailable will of the people and the law of the land.
Democracy is majority rule, period. A Republic is majority rule with minority rights. Democracy is two wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for dinner. A Republic is a well-armed sheep. Mod rule or the rule of law. There is no in-between.
Just as it was impermissible for the people of Germany through their Reichs Chancellor Adolf Hitler to vote to divest German Jews of their property and their lives, it is impermissible for any majority to vote any minority out of their civil and human rights anywhere.
This also includes majorities such as “the poor” voting themselves the largess of minorities such as “the rich”, and majorities such as “the fearful” voting to divest minorities such as “gun owners” of their Constitutional rights.

Just not an issue for the majority to decide…I tried to explain to my dad by giving him an example:  Say the people of California overwhelmingly voted that every person in the state must dance a cha-cha at least once each Wednesday.  There would be no question in any sane person’s mind that there are certain things that simply shouldn’t be subject to majority vote.  
His response:  ”Well, that’s true, but THIS went to a proper vote and that means the will of the people should be honored!”
[sigh]

And incredibly,they seem completely unable to grasp how their own lies crumble when subjected to judicial scrutiny.  Self-delusion that thorough is admirable, in Lewis Carroll-ish kind of way.

All well and good, but we are left with ….. OBAMA as President.This from DKOS:

http://tinyurl.com/2d4uxru

“President Obama remains opposed to same-sex marriage despite a federal judge’s decision to strike down a ban on such marriages, a top White House adviser said Thursday.
Senior adviser David Axelrod said the president supports “equality” for gay and lesbian couples, but did not address directly Obama’s position on Wednesday’s court ruling, which struck down as unconstitutional California’s Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage in the state.
“The president does oppose same-sex marriage but he supports equality for gay and lesbian couples,” Axelrod said on MSNBC.
So is your GAYTM still open for this prick who thinks his parents marriage is better than yours?

Well…Maybe your dad likes a good cha-cha?

Actually, noA democracy is where the general populace make up the government. A republic is where more general groups make up the government. Rome and Venice were republics because the government consisted of certain families, and only members of those families could participate in government. The United States is a republic because the states, not the people, are the ones who participate in national government.
You will note that, in the US, it is the states and not the people who are represented in Congress. Each state has two Senators, regardless of population, and every state has at least one Representative, regardless of population. Representatives are allocated to states based on relative population by state, and not actual population. Until the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913, Senators were appointed by the state legislatures (although some states did hold a plebicite, which they could ratify if they wished.) It is the states, not the people, who elect the President and Vice-President: when you vote in a presidential election you are actually voting for a slate of pledged electors, who may or may not be bound by law to vote as appointed. That is why the United States is a republic.
Countries that are closer to true democracies — France, Italy, Iceland and the United Kingdom to name a few — also secure the rights of minorities against majority opinion. Arguably, France and the United Kingdom actually offer stronger protections for minorities than does the United States, despite being democracies rather than republics.
There is nothing inherent in a republic about treating minorities fairly. Germany has been a republic since the 18th century; that did nothing to prevent the Holocaust. And being a republic did nothing at all to benefit slaves or Native Americans within the boundaries of the United States.

Yeah, butJust because someone is opposed to same same marriage doesn’t automatically mean they think it should be illegal. Just like someone can be opposed to abortion, but think outlawing it is also wrong.

“Checks and Balances” may come back to bite us in the butt…All it would take is 5 SCOTUS justices…

Excellent Post

I have a better example, Jen!Tell you dad that what would he think if a proposition on the ballot which passed to make only one religion official – say, Catholics or which ever is diametrically opposed by your father.
This means that only Catholics will be able to run for office, be exempt from state taxes, be the only ones to able to vote, run for public office, and legally marry.
Every non-Catholic denomination will have to go underground and worship in secret, because since only Catholics can openly worship, everyone else is subject to raids and arrest. If there are those who continue to defy them, they face execution.
Let’s see if your dad approves of that, Jen!!

Exempt?I wonder what delusion powers the religious reicht to make them believe they’re exempt from the Eighth Commandment (Ninth for Catholics) which commands them to NOT bear false witness?

um …

Germany has been a republic since the 18th century.

I had the impression there was no unified Germany until 1871 — in the 18th Century it was a patchwork of kingdoms and electorates and duchies and free cities, even a Holy Roman Empire until Napoleon put a stop to it. When it did unify in 1871, it was as a monarchy with a crowned emperor (Kaiser = caesar). And it may have been a republic between 1919 and 1933, albeit a failed state at times, but certainly not a functional republic under the system of führerprinzip. And half of it, from 1945-1990, was a Democratic Republic under another one-party system.
And in any event, to get to the root of this discussion, a constitutional republic is, if you believe the Federalist Papers, one of checks and balances and an awareness that unpopular minorities should not be up for a vote (see Federalist Nos. 10 and 51). And above all, a rule of law in which no majority or Kaiser or Leader would rule without restraint.

Today we are proud to have formulated our legal principles from the very beginning in such a way that they need not be changed in the case of war. For the rule, that right is that which is useful to the nation, and wrong is that which harms it, which stood at the beginning of our legal work, and which established this collective term of nation as the only standard of value of the law – this rule dominates also the law of these times.
- Hans Frank, general counsel, National Socialist Party, Nov. 1939, to the German Academy of Law

there’s another exampleAnd one that I don’t think Judge Walker cited. In Nov. 1964, the voters of California passed Prop. 14, which enshrined in the state constitution the power of property owners to discriminate as they pleased in the sale or rental of their property — and written in a way that invalidated, past and future, any local or state ordinances against discrimination in property. And, on its face, it would cut off all debate.
It passed by a 2-1 margin, and in an election that was a landslide for a liberal Democratic ticket. How’s that for the will of the people?
Needless to say, it took all of three years to get to SCOTUS and its overturn. Reitman v. Mulkey, 387 U.S. 369 (1967), if anybody wants to look it up.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/…
Different prejudice, but the same principle. Any one-time majority is not a warrant for breaching equal protection under the law, or for closing the debate off forever by state constitutional amendment.
Beyond that, you can bring up Romer v. Evans, which did involve an anti-gay initiative, passed by popular vote. And that went down too. Walker did cite that one, if only to remind SCOTUS they’re already on the record on this.

The right to discriminate, including the right to discriminate on racial grounds, was now embodied in the State’s basic charter, immune from legislative, executive, or judicial regulation at any level of the state government. Those practicing racial discriminations need no longer rely solely on their personal choice. They could now invoke express constitutional authority, free from censure or interference of any kind from official sources.
– Mulkey

No republicThere were attempts to form a republic, but they failed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G…
The Führerprinzip wasn’t part of the Weimar Constitution. It was introduced by Hitler after Hindenburg died. But one of the problems of the Weimar Republic was indeed that you could suspend civil liberties and government elected by parliament easily as President (thus called “Ersatzkaiser”, surrogate emperor). It finally went down when Hindenburg and conservatives used the infighting of the democratic parties to suspend the elected government and appointed an emergency government, first by conservative Catholics, then by Hitler.

for a law professor, Obama has a short memoryWhen he was a toddler, his parents could not be married in a number of states, some of them making it criminal simply to be married and in that jurisdiction. (Loving v. Virginia, 1966). And in many states of the union his family would have had difficulty even finding lodging, since housing discrimination was legal into the mid-60s (see, e.g., Mulkey v. Reitman, 1967).
He’s going to have to show his hand shortly: the Feds weren’t respondents in this case but they were in the two Massachusetts cases, and the ODOJ has 60 days to appeal those. If he intervenes in the California case as well, that will be something to see.

I want the President of the United States to explain to all Americans why he doesn’t believe that all Americans should be equal under the law. I signed that [partners] bill six months before an election when it was at 35% in the polls. I never had a conversation with myself about whether or not I would sign the bill because I knew that if I was willing to sell out the hopes and dreams of a significant portion of our people, then I had wasted my life in public service.
– Howard Dean, 2003, Sacramento

Actually, yes.I’ll just leave this here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
I just want to clear up one foot-in-mouth comment I made IAT. At some point, I expressed a desire to repeal both the 13th and 16th Amendments as ratified. That was wrong. What I meant to say was the 16th and 17th Amendments as ratified. I incorrectly said I wanted to repeal the anti-slavery amendment, when I meant to say I wanted to repeal the popular vote of senators. For this confusion, I apologize and assert in no uncertain terms, I do not desire the repeal of the 13th Amendment.
Now, you say that the states and not the people are represented in Congress, and yet, you turn right around and mention the 17th Amendment which stripped all representation of states in Congress and made all representation in Congress a matter of popular vote. Which is it? Are the states represented in Congress, or is Congress only answerable (if at all) to the people? This is the reason I desire the repeal of the 17th Amendment, to return representation of the States to the Senate.
You speak of other example Democracies, and mention how they have enacted laws to protect GLBT people. That’s good. That’s a great and noble thing, but that is not a feature of Democracies. What if, in the fullness of time, another public sentiment were to grow to majority and the government were to change its mind, as people are want to do? If the mob has the power to vote for minority rights today, then they have the power to vote against them tomorrow. I would rather live in a proper Republic where the mob has no power to vote with respect to my private rights at all. Remember, the government which has the power to give to you everything you want has the power to take from you everything you have.
Historicly, I already mentioned another Democratic government which lead to the murder of millions, Nazi Germany. More contemporary, we have the example of Uganda, which is also a Democratic Republic. Care to make the claim that those Democracies, those rules of the popular vote “offer stronger protections for minorities than does the United States”? It took the mutation of the Wiemar Republic from a Federal Parliamentary Republic to a Liberal Democracy for Hitler to come to power.
Germany was not a Republic since the 18th century. Through several periods it morphed and changed, frequently due to being conquered in war. It was not a Republic which gave rise to Hitler, but a Democracy. It was the mob voting extra-constitutional (illegal, unlawful, pick your terms) powers to their “Leader” which lead inexorably to the holocaust. Both Uganda, a Democratic Republic, and the government of Germany which lead to the rise of the Nazis, the Weimar Republic, were ultimately Republics in name only. Even the Roman Republic retained the name after the reinstatement of the Caesars. Funny how much politicians like to lie about what they themselves really are.

that is trueThe Weimar Republic already had started forming special courts that suspended due process and even rule of law. All Hitler needed to do was add the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended much of the republic’s constitution. At that point it was over. No more constitutional republic till 1949 in the West, and not till 1990 in the East.

Alert legal experts recognized at the time just how far the [German] Supreme Court had gone in perverting justice with its fatal message that the (presumed) interest of the state stood above the law. By implication, even the most heinous crimes were not punishable if they were committed in the interest of the state, while legal actions were punishable if they ran counter to it.
-Ingo Müller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, regarding a 1928 case under Weimar

Glenn Greenwald gets a dig at MaggieIn today’s Salon column on anti-gay responses.
http://www.salon.com/news/poli…

“Here we have an openly gay (according to the San Francisco Chronicle) federal judge substituting his views for those of the American people and of our Founding Fathers who I promise you would be shocked by courts that imagine they have the right to put gay marriage in our Constitution. We call on the Supreme Court and Congress to protect the people’s right to vote for marriage,” stated Maggie Gallagher, Chairman of the Board of NOM.
(Well, yes [notes Glenn] — the founders would’ve been shocked, because the decision was based in part on the 14th Amendment, which the founders had nothing to do with, because they owned people as property.)

I might add, Maggie seems to believe everything she reads in the San Francisco Chronicle. She’s slipping. Or maybe melting, melllting … what a world, what a world.

Send it to the San Francisco Chronicle. They’ll take anything.
– Ben Bradlee, quoted in “All the President’s Men”

erratumIt’s actually Alex Pareene, at Salon’s War Room. My bad.
Still, it’s a delicious dig.

Oops.I was thinking of 1814 and the founding of the German Confederation, and I didn’t make the leap from 1800s to 19th century. Sorry about that.

Ask himIf he would be okay with a proposition outlawing guns being passed in CA or NY or wherever it could theoretically get passed.

I will have to watch the video latter at home(Danged firewall.)
The United States was conceived of as a republic and not a democracy. Most of the Founders disliked the idea of a pure democracy, and many wrote about their fear of “mob rule.” With regards to the 17th Amendment, keep in mind that no matter how the Senators are selected, they still represent the state and not the people. Every state has exactly two senators, regardless of their population.
Likewise, regardless of who Representatives and Senators answer to, they are delegates representing the states. The distinction can be made very clear by contrasting Congress (which is republican in nature) and state legislatures (which are much more democratic.)
Every ten years, legislative districts are redrawn so as to have a very close to equal number of residents. Every representative and every senator to the legislature will represent approximately the same number of people. In Congress, every state has exactly two Senators regardless of how many residents the state may have. States have an allocation of representatives based on relative population, with every state having at least one. While Congressional districts within a state have nearly the same number of residents, the number of people a Congressman represents can vary hugely: as of 2008, a Representative from Rhode Island stood for about 525,000 people, while the Representative from Montana stood for more than 936,000 people. In a democracy, such a discrepancy would not exist.
Keep in mind that Nazi Germay was a republic, not a democracy: like the US, it was a federation of (theoretically) sovereign states. While I was off in my statement about the 18th century, Germany most certainly a republic at the time Hitler came to power.
And since I cannot watch YouTube at work: perhaps you can explain how Rome and Venice were republics, even though slavery was a common practice in both and the lack of basic civil rights for the common populace was endemic?

fun with civil procedureJudge Walker apparently has shortened the appeal time regarding a stay of his order. Make of this later order what you will; it sounds like he wants written pleadings in by Friday and might rule as soon as Monday.
If he lifts the stay, the weddings are on — although the Prop. 8 people might try an interlocutory appeal to the 9th Circuit, staying it there pending the main Circuit ruling.
http://seegersalvas.com/Prop8S…
It’ll certainly make more wingers’ heads explode in the meantime. Dum, dum de-dum, dum dum de-dum.
BTW, Grieg’s “Wedding Day at Troldhagen” (Op. 65, No. 6) makes an excellent wedding march.

Thank you all for the gifts and the flowers,
Thank you all but it’s back to the showers,
Don’t tell Paul but I’m not getting married today!
– from “Company”, Stephen Sondheim

No stays in 2004When San Francisco began the “summer of love” action, the wingnuts went to court to get an injunction against the issuing of licenses to same-sex couples. The courts refused, because the wingnuts could not prove any reason why the license issuance was an immediate problem for the state. Wonder if similar reasoning will work here.  

different circumstancesThe Newsom marriages were undertaken without the administrative authority of State law; the State never recognized them, and there was no immediate “harm” that would justify an injunction. Eventually the state courts ruled that Newsom had exceeded his authority.
However, and Judge Walker noted this, State law could and did grant 18,000 marriages after the In re Marriage ruling made it possible. Prop 8 stopped that, but if Prop 8 is invalid, and the Order at the end of Walker’s ruling is emphatic on this, then marriage equality is restored. Unless the 9th Circuit rules otherwise, or unless the 9th Circuit stays it pending a ruling on the merits of the substantive case.

Democracy and liberty are often used today as synonyms, but they are not; indeed, there is an inevitable tension between them. Democracy means that people ought to have a meaningful say in the decisions that affect their lives … Liberty, on the other hand, means that even in a democracy, the majority cannot be allowed to rule everything, that people have rights – are born with rights – that no majority should be able to take away.
-Ira Glasser, Visions of Liberty: The Bill of Rights for All Americans (1991)

it’s a question of de jure and de factoWeimar Germany was arguably a republic: it had a constitution and an elected parliament. The Reichstag Fire Decree effectively ended that. No charter, no multi-party system, just the rule of force.
Rome (pre-Augustus) was a “republic” in the sense it had no king and a representative assembly, although definitely an upper-class system. It still had the forms of the Republic after they surrendered authority to the Caesars, but at that point no one recognized at as anything but empire. The Senate was effectively a sham.

They won’t let us in [the Senate] because I’m a woman and you’re a fool. That’s odd, when you think of it, because it’s filled with nothing but fools and old women.
– Livia Drusilla, “I, Claudius”

Then he should say so.Honestly, I would personally love someone in a position of social, if not legal, authority to come out clearly and cleanly and say exactly that:
“I don’t believe that same-sex marriage is something that I can reconcile with my personal religious beliefs, and I would prefer that everyone felt the same way. At the same time, I hold individual liberty and freedom, especially in matters that touch on religion, to be a fundamental cornerstone of our country. As a result, I believe that we have to allow everyone the freedom to make that choice, and I support complete civil equality. It is not a choice I would make, but it is one I absolutely support for others to make. Otherwise, my own freedom is meaningless.”

QuestionIs there any possibility the 9th Circuit Court may refuse to hear an appeal? And if so then what?

possible answerPossibly. I’d have to research the circuit court’s rules of procedure. Certainly, the Prop. 8 side didn’t make much of a case and in many courts a showing like theirs would have gotten a summary judgment against them, not a full trial or ruling.
If the 9th Circuit doesn’t hear it, two things happen. Judge Walker’s ruling stands, and Prop. 8 is struck down in California but is not binding in the rest of the Union. The case law would be less persuasive elsewhere than if it had gotten to the Circuit level. And, meantime, the losing side probably could appeal it to SCOTUS, which doesn’t have to grant cert. but might.
Same thing in Massachusetts. If the ODOJ doesn’t appeal to the 1st Circuit, the ruling stands in Massachusetts. The wrinkle there is that it would require the Federal Gov’t, the respondent in those cases, to conform to the state law as well.
Fiat justitia ruat coelum.

Thanks n/t

Would be nice…