Collegiate Times

There's more at stake in Proposition 8 than just gay marriage, though. Even proponents of gay marriage ought to be wary of allowing to stand a judicial fiat which had no business being imposed - I'd personally vote for Prop. 8 if I could in order to stand up to activist judges inventing laws when the legislature (and the citizens they serve) decide not to do so.

Kyle still sucks his thumb at night because he's wary of the boogie man.

The flaw to this article is how the author defines marriage. Not everyone views marriage the same way. I would say that marriage is a contract, its a contract between you - your spouse - and god.

Why are we blaming judges for upholding the constitution? Yes on 8 supporters aren't undoing what the judges upheld, they're undoing the state's constitution - what's next?

Churches will always have their freedom to exclude gays all they want. Prop 8 will just make it so they can't do it to people outside their church. I don't understand how the churches from all these religions should be allowed to impose their oppressive beliefs on all gays and their families.

I can't wait to vote against gay marriage. If that was passed it would just be another reason for more people to become fairies and spread around AIDS.

“Marriage, in America, is for "love matches;" it's not for the sole purpose of procreation.” This is precisely why this argument has gotten as far as it has. Marriage is much larger than “love matches” it involves property, tax privileges, and yes, procreation. So to water it down to “love matches” is childish at best. This thinking is most likely the reason our divorce rate is so high in this country. Marriage is a right, instituted by God (as are all rights, read the Declaration of Independence) between a man and a woman. Civil marriage (with tax benefits, visitation rights etc) is a privilege, granted by the voter or the voter’s representative.

Jonathan Daugherty, I must correct several fallacies in your post. First, civil marriage has nothing to do with God. Atheist couples often marry, and the religious fanatics backing Prop 8 do not object, provided the two people in the couple possess one penis and one vagina between them. Second, in 1967's Loving v. Virginia the US Supreme Court case that overturned all state laws against interracial marriage, the court deemed marriage to be a "basic civil right." Lastly, the Declaration of Independence was used to break away from Britain, partly because religious zealots there were telling American colonists how to worship, but it has NO place in our government. The founders of this country, who were more Deist than Christian, wisely never once mentioned God in the Constitution. The CA constitution requires equal protection under the law for all citizens. Why do you think there is anything at all American about denying a basic civil right to two people based upon their genitals?

'God given rights' was a specific change when Jefferson brought the Declaration before his editors. That means, that the founders wanted that specific phrase in it. Just about all the founders have one quote or another that sums up the notion that a nation run without moral order derived from god is not a nation at all. As for Jonathan's post --- he clarified it really well, i believe it was you 'Rational Thought' who misunderstood. Jonathan defined 2 versions of marriage, a religious and a civil version. And the main reason US broke from England was not because of religious zealots --- thats why they moved to America, they broke from England because of 'no taxation without representation'. Get your facts right.

If proposition 8 is successfully rejected, what will happen to those same-s3x marriages that have already been acknowledged by the state? Will they be grandfathered in, or will they be null and void?

correction: successfully "passed"

Marriage is basic human right. S-e-xual deviancy is NOT. NOTE: the college newspaper can't include the word s-e-x w/o it being a bad word. My goodness VTech - are college students grown ups or elementary school children?

To Rational Thought: I agree that civil marriage has nothing to do with God. That is why I differentiated "civil marriage” from simple “marriage.” It would seem that the pro-homos_xual marriage crowd has very little interest in civil rights and civil marriage. If they were they would fight to have the privileges of civil marriage bestowed upon them, not an outright change in definition. The question proposed in these proposals and amendments is whether or not we should as a society change the definition of marriage to something it has never been. To what extent this effects marriage privileges (the civil contract side) is something that can and should be debated. There is no rational reason to change the definition of what constitutes a marriage when you are simply aiming to get civil privileges.

"Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!" ~ Ghostbusters

Could i marry a cat or a dog?

My cat refuses to get married. Free room & board, medical, friskies and sleeps around...

'To Rational Thought', If Thomas Jefferson caught you trying to insinuate that he wanted a "Christian Nation" in any way shape or form, he'd probably punch you in the nose. Thomas Jefferson was very much a Deist, he believed strongly in separation of church and state and was instrumental in securing that for Virginia. Jefferson felt that the New Testament was "so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture" and while he believed in a higher power you can hardly use him to base your argument of instituting Biblical Law in the US. "Rational Thought" is correct, the Virginia v. Loving court ruled: "Marriage is one of the "'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival.... ". Sadly, we as a nation, have not learned our lesson and we still use the same kind of misguided interpretations (racists used the Bible to justify miscegenation) and self-delusions to try and deny a significant portion of our population, what has been decidedly a "basic civil right of man".

Jonathan, the only type of marriage that the US government (or the states in it's union) can recognize is a civil one, and this is because of the separation of church and state. Any attempt to make laws todeal with the gender of people in these marriages, therefore must refer to civil marriages. To delude yourself into thinking that Prop 8 is anything but an attempt to implicate a religious rule into a legal law is darn foolery. Prop 8 is not about protecting a single religious ideal, it is an attempt to force a religious ideal onto a government. It is insulting that you or anyone tries to say anything else. Furthermore, there has never be an attempt to force a single church to accept a gay marriage through the government, because gays for the most part don't want any part of these sorts of intolerant views. If they want someone of more accepting beliefs they can generally find Jesus at a Methodist or Episcopalian church. Unfortunately, if you and your kin have their way it is not nearly as easy to just up and leave your home and country to find a place where you are accepted nor should these people be forced to.

You raise an interesting, and seemingly contradictory, point, Patrick, when you quote the Loving decision. The fact that the court cites marriage as "fundamental to our very existence and survival," it seems to indicate that the state's interest in preserving and encouraging legal marriage is vested almost universally in the 'furtherance of the species.' This is to say, the state is not interested directly in the happiness of its citizens, but rather in the fact that married couples tend to create children. It doesn't speak, of course, to the purpose of marriage in general, but rather to the benefit the state derives from such a union. None of this discussion, however, actually speaks to the real issue at hand - why is it so necessary to redefine a cultural term such as marriage, when it would be just as easy to rewrite the legal definition to indicate "legal unions?" If there is no fundamental difference in benefits derived by the involved parties, why does anyone care at all what the word use to characterize them is?

Kyle, "fundamental to our very existence and survival" could mean fundamental to our health, happiness, etc. Not necessarily just the furtherance of the species. And like you said, if there's no difference in benefits, why DO people care what word other people are characterized as? Why not just call it marriage?

Because people very often and very easily conflate legal definitions with standard definitions, as is the very case here. Marriage has an historical definition of a man and a woman, and ought to have no legal definition at all. Certain things, by the way, are fundamental to our existence and survival - happiness is not one of those things (pleasant though it might make things).

Re-read my post, i said founding fathers. Jefferson was only 1 of those. And if you look at his letters to Adams it is clear that a nation run completely void of religion was not his intention. He did not want the church tied with the state like The Church of England, but that does not mean he did not want religion in the hearts and minds of the decision makers.

Kyle, you really need to go back and review the history of common law and the reasons for instituting a legal recognition of marriage. Simply, it is to provide rights, originally these were focused on inheritance to make it easy to assign inheritance. Over time it has taken on the purpose of providing other rights and even provides some encouragements (such as tax relief) to couples as they tend to be more resilient and thus more productive than single members. It has never been for the furtherance of our species, and to twist that quote as you have is an odd sort of perversion. Also, the law is not supposed to adjust itself to accommodate stupidity and lack of understanding just because you are insecure about your definitions. Finally, marriage has not historically only been between a man and a woman. History has treated homos*xuality differently throughout time but it is clear that there are societies from Rome to China that supported gay marriages and to say it is historically between a man and woman is either narrow minded, ignorant or both.

"To Patrick", Jefferson was one of many, yes. But he was a representative of the group -- though I would argue he was an over-achieving representative. He along with many of his peers were Deist, Agnostic, or Unitarian. Jefferson is such a good representative because he was the writer and the brain behind much of what was written. It's hard to refute you're letter without a quotation, or preferably the complete text. Jefferson believed in religion being a personal thing and that it should never be a part of government. Jefferson even went so far as to say "Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law", referring to the common law that is the basis for both the English and US law systems. It is certain that if Jefferson decided to abandon his principles of separation of church he would never once think to choose Christianity as the religion to give preference to "Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity." Finally, It is important to note that not even all sects of Christianity would agree with Prop 8 as many now support both gay marriage and gay priests and to choose one sect's definition of marriage over another is definitely an endorsement of a religion.

Once again, Patrick, we are conflating the notions of 'rights' and 'benefits.' The claim of the gay community (ostensibly) is that they feel that they are being denied the right to access benefits bestowed by the government unfairly, because their unions cannot achieve the appropriate legal status required to become eligible for those benefits. That's different from claiming a 'right to marry,' which is an invalid claim (and the SCOTUS was wrong when they said it was) because it inherently implies that marriage cannot actually exist without the government to provide the necessary benefits. Governments don't EVER create rights-they can only restrict them. So again, the discussion is over access to benefits - or is it? There are many who argue (fairly convincingly) that at issue here is not a right/benefit concept at all, but rather a push to undermine societal conceptions of what constitutes legitimate relationships. That's why I've argued time and time again that the issue of benefits is one thing (and governments really ought not provide benefits to anyone - that's not what the government is set up to do, despite Obama's musings) - and the issue of the 'definition of marriage' is a completely different issue.

If we have to give benefits to couples, call them something other than marriages (for everyone) - civil unions, couples, I don't really care what it is. But the whole reason we are in this mess is because some bureaucrat somewhere in history decided that laws needed to be written to determine to whom I can give my stuff when I die. I question why such a law was written in the first place, anyway - it's my stuff, and the government ought to have no say whatsoever in determining where it goes when I'm done with it. "Fundamental to existence and survival" is a pretty cut and dry point - it implies that without marriage, the species would cease to exist. The claim the court makes is a dubious one, of course, but you are the one who cited it. If later courts could construe the principle of eminent domain to mean 'public benefit' without a whiff of Constitutional evidence, why can't I do the same? The law is not designed to adjust itself to anything at all - but legal definitions are explicit because they need to be. My point is that there ought to be no legal definition of marriage in the first place. Lastly, I never claimed that no society has ever sanctioned gay unions. - and I'm not sure from where you got that point. But again, we are dealing with a legal rather than a social concept.

Look, the best way to illustrate this is as follows. If you want to get married to someone or something, come over to my house. I'll marry you, we can have a ceremony and a party afterwards and then whatever. I will believe that you are married, and you will believe that you are married. And the state won't care, because you won't claim any legal benefits from it. But if the only purpose of marriage at all is to obtain legal benefits, we'd do a lot better to revise the legal terminology to reflect that fact. Marriage has a 'traditional' definition in our society, and while that definition doesn't necessarily coincide with the traditions of all other countries, it shouldn't have to. The word is defined pretty well already, and I simply fail to see why changing the definition would benefit anyone. Unless the goal is to compel universal acceptance of homos3xuality as an ethically acceptable way of life. . . .

I would agree that the term 'marriage' should be removed from all legal documents as it is a loaded word and civil union applied to both hetero- and homo- sexual marriages instead. It would be nice if people were mature enough to understand the difference between a legal context and whatever religious context you choose. However, as long as the word marriage exists in the law it cannot confer rights to one portion of the populace while denying it to another based upon arbitrary superstitions. Proposition 8 is not about inserting marriage into laws it is about making sure the current legal definitions (under whatever name they're given now) is non-discriminatory. If you want to keep your word safe then fighting for Prop 8 doesn't achieve your goals. You should be working to amend current law so that a legal-marriage no matter whom it applies to is called a civil-union. The government does not exist to legislate morality, it exists to enforce and mediate the social contract. It is not ethical to go around screaming racist epithets but it is legal. I am sure nearly every church in the world would tell you that you are heretical if you look to government for your morality. Furthermore, we do not all come from your traditions so your argument still does not apply the US legal system.

Couple of points, Patrick. Your last comment confuses me - it seems like you advocate ethical relativism, which would invalidate the legal structure we enjoy here in the States. You're right that not everyone came from the same background - but that's why laws have to remain constant and precise, because they provide the common ground on which each of us stand. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to LIKE every law that is passed - and if so, work to overturn them. But what I'm talking about is a 'traditional Western social point of view,' which certainly contributes to our legal structure but is not part-and-parcel of that structure. We're conflating a legal argument with an ethical argument, which is making this discussion difficult to follow (I'm as much at fault in that department as you are, I think). To close this, though, I'd charge that governments are not to be viewed as the fonts of morality - however, the laws enacted and upheld by governments tend to be founded, at least in part, by the prevailing morals of the popular culture.

The other point I'd like to make is the same one I've been making in other boards - at issue here is the RIGHT to access to benefits bestowed by the government. The RIGHT to marriage cannot exist, else it would have to be universally applicable. In other words, I ought to have the RIGHT to marry whomever, or whatever, I want, if marriage itself is an absolute right. Governments never create rights, because rights are vested wholly in the people who are governed. If the government can create something, it can also take it away - which implies that the right would exist only so long as the government exists to provide it. I think that's a backwards way of looking at our political structure - and a potentially dangerous one. Like you said, it's dangerous to look to government to provide you with morality - those things which we view as rights are echoes of our own moral thoughts.