Pajiba

I wish I could say I was shocked, but the best thing about being a pessimist is that one is so rarely wrong.

Fuck California, the minds that make Bazooka Joe movies are hardly going to vote the right way on the big stuff.
Fuck California in its Ass. Then marry it. Yeah. I went there with the nonsensical insults.

Prop #9: A proposition to cock-punch all those reponsible for Prop 8 and it's subsequent upholding.

Amendment: those who don't have a cock get a swift kick in the box.

Tracer - unfortunately, I hear ya on that. For some reason, it helps that I felt prepared that this was going to happen. It doesn't make me any less bitter though. Or pissed.

For folks looking to put their anger to good use, (not that there's anything wrong with ranting, raving, or rioting) here's something you can do to help in the fight: https://secure.couragecampaign.org/page/contribute/Fearless.

Peeps, just move to New England. We might not have the waves and exactly the weather, but we've got some good seafood and warm hearts.

2nd that, strtwise. It's the job of the court to decide what is legal and constitutional, not to decide what the best outcome is and form a decision to achieve it. I blame movies for people thinking the latter. I hate prop 8, but this was probably the correct decision (I say probably because I don't know the California constitution).

strtwise has it right. Unfortunately, we can't blame the Ca S.C. rather the Ca voters. Hopefully in 2010 or 2012 we can vote remove the amendment.

My political stance is if you want to get out of a recession, allow Gays & Lesbians to marry and legalize pot.

I've maintained for the last few years that the all the negative/bad things that sane people do are the result of one or both of two things: fear, and/or greed.

What are California voters afraid of?

Am I correct in having always thought Iowa was a sane, quietly-progressive place? California has some politics I like, but y'all do have a lot of evangelical loonies and NIMBY tech-types.

I agree that this is much more the fault of the electorate than the Court. We Californians should have gotten it right at the ballot box. Not being an attorney, I can't fully comprehend the underlying issues, but I can understand the potential problems with the Court's setting an incorrect legal precedent on a technicality when it comes to the amending of the state constitution. The Court's job is interpretative rather than legislative, and I respect that.

HOWEVER, it seems to me that there is a greater authority that should supersede the state constitution and these technicalities, and that is the federal constitution and whatever guarantees of equal protection it provides in spirit and mandate if not in letter. Proposition 8 is a discriminatory betrayal of all the good things to which I believe this country claims to aspire, and consequently I was hoping the court would go out on a bit of a limb here and interpret it accordingly. I can't help but think that 100 years from now the school of thought endorsed today will be only viewed as backward and shameful. The sooner that we can get on the right side of history the better.

The CA Supreme Court got it right. Liberals can bitch about their rational now, but more often than not it will be liberals who benefit from this decision. The CA Supreme Court decision is not about gay marriage, its about the right of the public to vote to amend the constitution. As the state becomes more liberal in its voting demographics it will be dems who benefit from the underlying court analysis.

As for the California voters, Prop 8 would never have passed without two minority groups: Blacks and Hispanics.

Also, the people running the campaign for gay marriage totally fucked things up. If they do even a half-assed job in two years then Prop 8 will be overturned at the polls.

don't they know that brad & angie won't marry until gays are allowed to marry?
screw what your constituents want-think about the WORLD.
& yes, i am being facetious.

L.O.V.E. >> I'm sorry, but it really irks me when Prop 8's passage is blamed on racial turnout at the polls. The voting breakdown for Prop 8 was much more a generational, educational, and ideological (specifically religious) divide than a racial one. To claim that those 70% of African-Americans and 53% of Latinos made the difference in the election without any regard for codependent variables or recognition of decision-making by those individuals that isn't directly related to how they identify ethnically is wrong.

I can just as easily say that Prop 8 would not have passed if white Republicans had not shown up at the polls. They were far more in favor of the proposition (82%) than any individual ethnic group.

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#val=CAI01p1

Arr matey, glad to see there's a fellow divorce attorney on here with me...I'll save you a seat in hell.

As far as this whole gay marriage thing goes, I'll have to defer to Wanda Sykes for making the most concise statement on the topic, "If you don't believe in same sex marriage, then don't marry someone of the same sex."

Simple as that.

=FAIL ?!?

What. The. Fuck. When did this become an acceptable debate tactic? How lazy do you have to be to exclaim 'FAIL!' instead of "I do not agree with so and so"?

Darth, the poll you cite proves my point. Whites voted 51 to 49 in favor. African-American's voted 70% for Prop 8, including Black women at 75%. A higher percentage of Hispanics than whites voted in favor of Prop 8. But those demographics also show why its likely Prop 8 gets overturned in a few years as the older generation dies off.

if it hadn't happened i 'd try to go Bisexual if it weren't for STDs

I don't know what Prop 8 is but from what I can gather it upholds gay marriages which already exist but will not grant new ones. It sounds terribly silly. Be thankful though that you're discussing the issue and taking it to court. Other countries are still light years away from gay marriage. You're a step closer to winning the fight even though you'll keep on finding setbacks until all the USA has gay marriage.

In Malta we've only just started discussing introducing DIVORCE which is very, very sad (Malta and the Philippines are the only two countries in the world where you cannot get a divorce. Weirdly, Malta recognises divorces obtained in other countries which effectively means that people who are wealthy enough and for whom it is convenient enough to get a divorce abroad can do so but citizens who can't keep on suffering). Many people whose marriage has failed cannot move on and are stuck in a legal and moral limbo. The catholic church still has a huge effect on our politics and like the church the state likes to sweep the troubles under the carpet and pretend that marriages last forever no matter what happens. Gay marriage or abortion or rights for cohabiting couples are very, very far from being obtained so although this Prop 8 business sounds bad, you're ahead and you shouldn't lose hope. I still think the USA is slowly moving in the right direction.

L.O.V.E. >> I don't think it proves your point, unless your point is simply that removing African-Americans and Hispanics from the voting populace would have pushed the election the other way. My response to that is: so what?

As I said, removing white Republicans (who comprised a full quarter of the voting body) also would have pushed the election the other way. Removing people who self-identify as "conservative" (who comprised 30 percent of the voters) would have pushed it the other way. Removing Republicans (29 percent of the voters) would have pushed it the other way. All three of those labels skewed more heavily in favor of Prop 8, and they actually say something useful about the person's thinking beyond the color of his or her skin.

My point is that any given African-American or Hispanic voter did not vote "Yes" on Prop 8 because of their ethnicity. Other factors beyond their ethnicity made up their minds for them, and I find it overly simplistic to essentially ascribe blame to an entire ethnic group without taking into account those factors. Is a voter from those ethnic groups more likely to be under-educated? Is a voter from those ethnic groups more likely to be religious? Those are relevant questions that your statement ignores.

Curious to know which groups voted for Prop 8. Saw on the news a black middle aged woman being interviewed and she said that if the blacks and latinos are ignored by politicians they're going to rebel by voting for Prop 8. I mention it because I live in NYC, where the majority of blacks and latinos who label themselves under a religious heading are Christians, Pentecostals and Evangelicals; usually not the most open-minded groups out there. California obviously has a large latino population so I was wondering if besides the whole Mormon money funding, the actual voters were older minorities.

My mom is gay and I love her. We have a tanking economy, no jobs, housing foreclosures, crap health insurance, and the religious right is worrying about this. I think I stopped listening to the religious people in charge when they started molesting little kids.

WORRY. ABOUT. YOUR. OWN. DAMN. FAMILY.

*right-wing.

my b for the double post

as in no longer a crime?

Marriage (mostly consensual nowadays) is not the same as rape/assault (whether heterosexual, homosexual, with an object, or whatever). I mean, gay sex is gay sex, but what that person did to you was more than just gay sex. It was forceful sexual assault. You should have already sued the guy, if you have any clue who did it...

...and why am I now skeptical that Utah Dynamo is being serious?

@Utah Dynamo

UD, you're a troll. Have a nice life.

Darth, if anyone is being simplistic its you. You so want to turn this away from race, but if you look at the poll you use, highly educated people and well-to-do people voted for Prop 8. And to label them as white conservative men i putting your neck in the sand. The real driving force was non-whites making over 50K per year and non-white college grads.

Did Conservatives vote for Prop 8? Well of course they did. But what really tipped the balance of this vote?

Is a liberal really incapable of looking at a minority group and saying, "You fucked us over"? Is the white liberal guilt too strong to do that? Education and money were not relevant in this situation.

Religion, on the other hand, was a huge factor. But if you give Black and Latino voters a pass on that one then you got to do the same for those old white men too.

Is it naive of me to think that because many minority groups have been put down/targeted/given no rights/etc that they would be more likely or supportive of giving gays and lesbians THEIR rights? Or is that childish?

I've heard older black preachers say that gay marriage is an abomination straight from the Bible, but supposedly Genesis 9:27 is the passage the KKK always interpreted as saying blacks are lower than whites.

I guess I just thought that if you've been shit on throughout history you'd want to take the opportunity to not shit on anyone else.

L.O.V.E.>> No, a liberal (or at least this liberal) is capable of looking at a group of people and differentiating them as individual human beings. Do you think there was this vast group of African-Americans or Hispanics that voted "Yes" out of racial solidarity alone? Do you not give those ethnic groups credit for voting for reasons that transcend race? My main issue here is that your initial post essentially makes the statement that "African-Americans passed Prop 8" or "Hispanics passed Prop 8," because I don't believe that it's constructive to pigeonhole races in that manner when economic and cultural factors have a bearing on those voters' motivations.

I don't have any "liberal guilt," and I don't have an agenda here.

The most "well-to-do" people (those making over $150,000 per year) voted against Prop 8 - not for it. And how you can look at that education table and claim that education was "not relevant" is completely beyond me. People with postgraduate degrees voted overwhelmingly against Prop 8 (60%), and those who did not complete college voted on the order of 56% or 57% in favor of it. College graduates generally voted against Prop 8, and those who had not graduated from college voted for it. That's a fairly clear-cut indicator to me.

I'll give you it's discouraging that "non-white college grads" voted "yes," but did non-white non-college grads vote "yes" at a higher clip? Yes. And did I claim education was the only factor?

I don't understand how I'm giving religion a "pass" for one ethnicity and not another. Religious idiocy is the biggest problem here in my opinion, and unfortunately that CNN data does not have data that cross-references race with religion. I bet that would be rather telling, as supported by this statement that a quick internet search revealed concerning religious/racial demographics:

"Of all the major racial and ethnic groups in the United States, black Americans are the most likely to report a formal religious affiliation. Even among those blacks who are unaffiliated, three-in-four belong to the 'religious unaffiliated' category (that is, they say that religion is either somewhat or very important in their lives), compared with slightly more than one-third of the unaffiliated population overall."

If it seems like I'm passing the buck to the white portion of California's population, that's because whites easily comprised a majority of the electorate (63%). Combine all the Latinos and all the African-Americans (28% total), and they still have less voting power than white men (31%) alone. Consequently, many more white men voted in favor of Prop 8 than any segment of African-Americans or Latinos.

This is a hyperbolic analogy, but blaming minorities for Prop 8 seems akin to me to holding a poll of 10 people (one of whom is African-American) that splits 6-4 with the African-American person as one of the 6 and blaming that person for the result because of his or her race.

Apologies - revise that one sentence: almost as many white men voted in favor of Prop 8 as all the Hispanics and Latinos that voted for it combined. Again, though, that's rather incidental to me. I don't see this as an issue of race or gender. A man is more likely to be homophobic than a woman, but that fact in itself is not because he is a man, just as any homophobic prejudices in the African-American or Latino communities are not directly caused by race. This is about taught cultural idiocy.

No, Twitter is useless. Nothing important can be said in 140 characters by anything less than a genius. And, while I love all of you guys, I would never want to read some unproof red shit that you wrote in a hurry.

I will never accept Twitter.

why are they passing out keyboards to 12 year olds now?

go play outside.

The last comment hit it right on the head, and someone said the same thing in Pajiba Love today. People think same-sex marriage destroys the sanctity of the institution, yet they're fine keeping reality shows on the air that treat it like some sort of joyride?

I know, I know, it's not the court's fault and blah blah blah. It's not the court I'm angry with, I'm just so disgusted with PEOPLE.

This is a blessing in disguise for the gay community. Why do you want to bring the hell that is marriage down upon yourselves so much?

OK, OK, I'm just joking... mostly.

A lot of things piss me off about Prop 8, but the only thing I can even assert right now (without exploding) is how wrong the assumption is that the California vote was based upon party lines. Hell, I know plenty of Republicans who voted for gay marriage.

agent bedhead>> You might know a lot of Republicans who voted otherwise, but take a look at that polling link I posted above. Party lines and especially Republicanism were more or less the strongest predictor of any demographic breakdown for Prop 8. Sorry, but the party still has a lot to do in terms of being socially progressive. Those people you know would seem to be representative of only 18 percent of the party.

DarthCorleone I could care less if my comments offend you, the gay community offended me when they blamed the Prop 8 vote on African Americans and Hispanics, so why should I give a fuck about the gay community? You mock me for bringing up the word “Plight,” tell you what, when a whole group of people are targeted just because of the color of their skin give me a call. You bring up Matthew Shepard, please, the African American community is filled with Mattew Shepards, thousands to be exact that were killed for no other reason than for being black. Once again, I don’t give a fuck who a person marries, if two homosexuals want to marry, god bless them they have a right two. But if homosexuals want to blame blacks and Hispanics for Prop 8, I say motherfuck them.

Blaming Republicans for Prop 8 passing seems sort of like blaming the Penguins for Carolina losing.

You are right Darth, I did go overboard. I have a brother that’s gay and I love him with all my heart, I wish I was half the man he was. I’ve also seen him struggle with himself before he came out, I couldn’t imagine being a gay man and trying to live in a homophobic society. I’m sorry for cursing at you, you don’t deserve my ignorance. Deep down I think everyone should be allowed to marry whomever they please. As a black man I do tend to go overboard when I hear criticisms about the African American community, I can honestly say that at this midway point in my life I’m still trying to differentiate between a suggestion and a criticism.

A confused American:

I love lists. Let's take this point by point, shall we?

1. I don't think any gay marriage proponents wanted Prop. 8 on the ballot, seeing as how, ya know, it was a proposition brought about by social conservatives to ban gay marriage.

1B. The rights of a minority should never be put up for popular vote. On some issues, you just gotta say, "Fuck the people." See: segregation. (We'll get to the rest of the race stuff in a second.)

2. How dare people react badly to oppression based on religious beliefs in a country that's ostensibly secular! They should take the rights that the Moral Majority gives them and say, "Thank you, sirs! This'll do just fine!"

3. Discrimination is discrimination. It doesn't matter how long a group suffers or how "significant" their plight is. Denying people rights based on the fundamental, unchangeable characteristics of their personhood is WRONG. And no one should know that better than other oppressed minorities.

(This next part is for what you should have labeled "4" but didn't for some reason. So I will.)

4. People are allowed to think that fags should die of AIDS and burn in Hell. That's the wonderful thing about the First Ammendment. You can say and think whatever your atrophied little heart desires. Living in America means that we have to tolerate this level of intolerance.

But when hate becomes codified as law, then intolerance becomes intolerable.

Let's put it this way: if gay marriage becomes legal, you still have the right to not marry gays in your church. The government can't make you do anything that's against your religion. It's in the Constitution.

But when gay marriage is made illegal, I can't marry gays in my church, even though it's not against my religion. I can't even marry gays in my courthouse, even though religion doesn't come into play there. (And there is no secular argument against gay marriage. None. Don't even try your "intelligent design isn't biblical creationism" style arguments against me, hypothetical social conservative who I'm arguing against rhetorically.)

Get it?

Guess Who! >> No worries, my friend.

Confused / Not so confused >> I'm not going to flame you. A friend of mine went to the big protest in Fresno today. I don't know if you heard about it, but the aim is to bring the protest to the portion of California that is most like middle-America - the segment most responsible for holding back same-sex marriage across the nation. As such, I encouraged her to keep the confrontational tone of the protest at a respectful level. If hearts and minds are to be genuinely changed, then negativity is not the path of least resistance. In my mind, this debate is simply a case of ignorance, and I can't fault someone for ignorance (a trait of which I have plenty). I can only hope that given the opportunity those people are willing to open their minds to inquisitiveness and curiosity rather than just dismissing ideas based on edicts that they are parroting.

And just to reiterate - although I agree with Eric that the "magnitude" of plight is not the issue here - this isn't merely a "20 to 30 year" fight. The legal aspect of it might be relatively new, but if anything that's because the prejudice is so deep and it took that long for society to even address the topic. Active discrimination and persecution of gays has a very long history.