NYT: For Gay Rights Movement, a Key Setback
The New York Times has a good article on the ruling by New York's highest court against gay marriage.When Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage in November 2003, gay rights advocates imagined a chain reaction that would shake marriage laws until same-sex couples across the nation had the legal right to wed.It's becoming very apparent that the effort to legalize gay marriage - now - is a losing battle. Coming from Massachusetts, I hope that it stays legal here, but I have my doubts.Nowhere did gay marriage seem like a natural fit more than New York, where the Stonewall uprising of 1969 provided inspiration for the gay rights movement and where a history of spirited progressivism had led some gay couples to envision their own weddings someday.
Yesterday's court ruling against gay marriage was more than a legal rebuke, then — it came as a shocking insult to gay rights groups. Leaders said they were stunned by both the rejection and the decision's language, which they saw as expressing more concern for the children of heterosexual couples than for the children of gay couples. They also took exception to the ruling's description of homosexuality as a preference rather than an orientation. ...
posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 9:16 AM
3 Comments:
It was a catastrophe for Judges to assert same-sex marriage as a right.
I remember when the left, including many UUs, thought marriage a sort of bondage, and experimented around with all sorts of alternatives.
We're still sorting out some of that wreckage...
People realize the nature of marriage is something that in fact changes often and is something that should be carefully considered and legislated... it's not a right... it shouldn't be constitutionalized one way or the other.
Bill -- here's a line from the Loving vs. Virgina US Supreme Court case overturning laws banning interracial marriage:
"Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival"
If our legal system has decided that marriage is a "basic civil right," then we should ask if same-sex couples have meaningful access to that right if our governments don't offer equal access to marriage for same-sex couples.
Bill, you wrote that marriage is something that should be "carefully considered and legislated" and that it's not a "right" that should be "constitutionalized."
That comment suggests that you disapprove of the outcome in the Loving vs. Virginia case. Without Loving vs Virginia, we would have waited until 2000 for the last US state law banning interracial marriage to be overturned through non-judicial means in the State of Alabama.
The wikipedia article on this case is very informative:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_vs._Virginia
I've had the Loving Case card played on me often. It's usually brought up by activists who want to compare Gay Rights with Civil Rights for African Americans.
African Americans were stripped of their humanity. They were legally less than fully human, and miscegination laws just continued their sub humanity with false biology.
Gays have never faced that. Homosexual sex has been criminallized. It's been dx'd as an illiness... but Gays never faced the dehumanization African Americans face and continue to face....
...an example I like to cite is if you had two Gay Children, one black, and one white and gay... for which would your worry more? I know such a family and they clearly fear more for the future of their African American child (Parents are two gay men to boot!)
LaShawn Barber wrote a column on this I thought quite good...discussing Loving.
http://lashawnbarber.com/archives/2006/06/12/loving-v-virginia/
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