Prop 8 (relevant? oh yes.)

My great great grandmother was married at 12 yrs old.

I never said the 14th only applies to guns. Read my posts.

Natural law tells us that a male and a female of the species come together to procreate. It is a natural process that a man and a woman come together. The practice of marriage, as we have come to traditionalize it, has come from this concept of a coming together under a natural process. One man and one woman marriage is deeply rooted in our nation's history. This is "marriage" as our nation has defined it. This was the overwhelmingly held view of the concept of marriage at the time the Constitution was written and when the 14th was written.

This is not the deeply rooted definition of marriage that the justice used in overturning Prop 8. The justice has to igore our historical practice and redefine marriage in order to get to get his decision to filter through the 14th.

In Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), SCOTUS decision, the syllabus notes,

The Constitution does not confer a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy. None of the fundamental rights announced in this Court's prior cases involving family relationships, marriage, or procreation bear any resemblance to the right asserted in this case. And any claim that those cases stand for the proposition that any kind of private sexual conduct between consenting adults is constitutionally insulated from state proscription is unsupportable.

Click to expand...

Justice White writes,

It is obvious to us that neither of these formulations would extend a fundamental right to homosexuals to engage in acts of consensual sodomy. Proscriptions against that conduct have ancient roots. See generally Survey on the Constitutional Right to Privacy in the Context of Homosexual Activity, 40 U.Miami L.Rev. 521, 525 (1986). Sodomy was a criminal offense at common law, and was forbidden by the laws of the original 13 States when they ratified the Bill of Rights. In 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, all but 5 of the 37 States in the Union had criminal sodomy laws. In fact, until 1961, all 50 States outlawed sodomy, and today, 24 States and the District of Columbia continue to provide criminal penalties for sodomy performed in private and between consenting adults. See Survey, U.Miami L.Rev. supra, at 524, n. 9. Against this background, to claim that a right to engage in such conduct is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition" or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty" is, at best, facetious.

Nor are we inclined to take a more expansive view of our authority to discover new fundamental rights imbedded in the Due Process Clause. The Court is most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the Constitution. That this is so was painfully demonstrated by the face-off between the Executive and the Court in the 1930's, which resulted in the repudiation of much of the substantive gloss that the Court had placed on the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. There should be, therefore, great resistance to expand the substantive reach of those Clauses, particularly if it requires redefining the category of rights deemed to be fundamental. Otherwise, the Judiciary necessarily takes to itself further authority to govern the country without express constitutional authority. The claimed right pressed on us today falls far short of overcoming this resistance.

Click to expand...

Finally, Prop 8 reiterates the traditionally held, deeply rooted definition of marriage in this country:

Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Click to expand...

This proposition does not prohibit any individual from exercising this long held, deeply rooted family institution of marriage.

I think that some will point to Lawrence v. Texas, but that case involved an issue of privacy, not of a relationship of family. (Besides, this proves my point that SCOTUS is getting more liberal with Kennedy giving the opinion, Stevens, Souter, Ginsberg, Breyer, O'Connor concurring. Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas dissenting.)

Getting back to guns, I find it interesting that in McDonald v. Chicago, Stevens, Breyer, Ginsberg, and Sotomeyer dissented. And in D.C. v. Heller, Stevens, Breyer, Ginsberg, and Souter dissented. Your typical line up of liberal justices.

Sons of Liberty said:

In Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986)

Click to expand...

Two things:

1) Bowers was overturned by Lawrence v. Texas
2) As you noted, both Bowers and Lawrence addressed privacy rights concerning sexual conduct, NOT the fundamental right of marriage (otherwise, this case would not have been needed)

Finally, I would like to note that over 40% of the children being born today are out of wedlock, 1 out of ever 5 people have been divorced at least once, celebrities and politicians screw everything that moves ... and it is gay couples who WANT to get married that are destroying traditional marriage??? I don't think so.

Having said that, we need to focus on more gun rights for more people!


John

Administrator said:

Finally, I would like to note that over 40% of the children being born today are out of wedlock, 1 out of ever 5 people have been divorced at least once, celebrities and politicians screw everything that moves ... and it is gay couples who WANT to get married that are destroying traditional marriage??? I don't think so.
John

Click to expand...

It may not be the ultimate destruction, but it certainly degrades the institution for the devout. A parallel could be drawn to the Amish religion, if say a 10% of them sued over prohibitions of cars, televisions, etc, and the supreme court ruled they could not be denied the same access within their settlements that all Americans enjoyed in their communities. So in comes all the modern conveniences, and there goes the whole Amish experience for the other 90% who will be forced to cohabitate in an environment they specifically avoided.
All of those factors you mentioned are also generally rejected by the majority of traditional family proponents. Children are being born out of wedlock because traditional family values have been belittled, degraded, and dismissed in America. I should also point out the big percentage of unwed mothers are imports ala immigration and border jumping, so that should not be held against American traditional family followers. Soon, your family will be the state, and court rulings will be your father and mother, with the exception of the biological aspect of it. Right now, courts have intruded so heavily into the institution of marriage that it is getting hardly recognizable. It's not forever now, so don't choose carefully or work hard at it; It's not between you and your spouse, it's between you, your spouse, and the California family code.