California high court will hear appeal of gay marriage measure - CNN.com

(CNN) — California’s Supreme Court said Wednesday that it will hear the appeal of a challenge to Proposition 8, a voter-approved measure outlawing gay marriage.

California’s voter-approved measure banning gay marriage has sparked protests throughout the state.

In a written statement, the court said it will not block the implementation or enforcement of the law in the meantime.

Proposition 8 passed with about 52.5 percent of the vote, making California one of several states to ban gay marriage in the November 4 elections.

But unlike the other states, California had already been issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples since May, after a state Supreme Court ruling legalized the unions.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights filed legal challenges to the vote, asking the high court to rule the ballot-initiative process was “improperly used” to strip away a right protected by the state constitution.

The court said arguments in the case could be heard as early as March.

In its May 15 ruling legalizing gay marriage in California, the justices seemed to signal that a ballot initiative like Proposition 8 might not be enough to change the underlying constitutional issues of the case in the court’s eyes.

The ruling said the right to marry is among a set of basic human rights “so integral to an individual’s liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process.”

In the hours after the proposition’s apparent passage, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Los Angeles and other cities across California in protest.

Observances in support of gay marriage were held in cities across the country Saturday.

It’s been more than two weeks since the election, and still no one has been able to tell me why the majority should be able to suppress the rights of the minority, when both the California and US Constitutions are supposed to be designed to protect the rights of all people, both majority and minority.

I think, however, that even if the California Supreme Court overturns Prop 8 as an unlawful constitutional revision, we won’t have heard the last of this issue; whether it goes back in front of the legislature to be voted on before going back on the ballot a third time, or whether it gets appealed to the US Supreme Court, this issue is not going to go away anytime soon.

And that’s a good thing. Issues like this need to remain as visible as possible until all people in the United States are affording the same rights and privileges.

Thousands protest LDS stance on same-sex marriage - Salt Lake Tribune

Opponents of a measure that banned gay marriage in California took their outrage to the spiritual hub of Mormonism on Friday.

More than 3,000 people swarmed downtown Salt Lake City to march past the LDS temple and church headquarters, protesting Mormon involvement in the campaign for California’s Proposition 8. The measure, which defined marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman, passed this week.

A sea of signs in City Creek Park, where the march began, screamed out messages including, “I didn’t vote on your marriage,” “Mormons once persecuted . . . Now persecutors,” and “Jesus said love everyone.” Others read, “Proud of my two moms” and “Protect traditional marriage. Ban divorce.”

Former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson and three openly gay state legislators, Sen. Scott McCoy and Reps. Jackie Biskupski and Christine Johnson, spoke out in support. At one point, the crowd took up the mantra made famous by the country’s new president-elect: “Yes, we can!”

Then, the masses headed west, weaving between cars, waving at those who watched from windows in the LDS Church Office Building and shouting chants such as: “What do we want? Equality! When do we want it? Now!”

The comments after the article can be very telling. One commenter asked:

What’s wrong with calling marriage and civil unions just that ?? Why do we have to use the word marriage in both cases when most feel that marriage is between husband and wife ??

Simplistic yes — but that’s the way that I want it and most of the Calif. voters feel the same way — there is a differance.

The problem with maintaining the fiction of “marriage” and “civil unions” comes down to the segregationist concept of “separate but equal”; which as was proven time and time again during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was never equal.

I can understand people having moral/religious qualms against marriage between two people of the same sex, but for me personally it’s about NOT legislating and especially not Constitutionalizing morality. Morality comes from within. It should not be imposed on others.

No one has ever been able to give me a rational non-religious reason for why gay marriage should be banned; no one has been able to tell me how allowing two men or two women to get married to each other damages their own marriage to the point that it needs to be “protected” by law.

If someone can give me a coherent argument on that side, maybe I’ll reconsider; but until then, personally, I must choose to support equal rights for everyone, regardless of race, creed, religion or sexual orientation.

Other people are calling for the revocation of the Church’s tax-exempt status.

The problem there is that the LDS Church is well within its rights to speak out on socio-political issues.

501(c)(3) prohibitions state that a church may not make statements that directly support or oppose a candidate or slate of candidates in a “sermon, church bulletin, on a church website or in an editorial in a church publication.” The bottom line is that § 501(c)(3) prohibits charities—including houses of worship—from endorsing or opposing candidates “either expressly or by implication.”

However, this does not mean that church leaders are not permitted to voice their opinions regarding important socio-political matters that could have profound impact on their congregations. Church leaders have always been free to speak out on moral and ethical issues at stake in pending legislation or public referenda. They may take stands on political issues such as abortion, gay rights, gun control, and health care, to name a few.

Taking away the Church’s tax-exempt status could have a profoundly negative impact on other tax-exempt organizations, such as the American Cancer Society, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR), and a host of other organizations’ ability to lobby Congress or support ballot initiatives to increase funding for research.

The Church’s position will never be changed by direct attacks; this will only bolster their opinions. What needs to happen is for active members who disagree with the Church’s position to speak up, rationally and calmly and over and over and over again. Challenge the Church to change from within.

Elsewhere, the focus should be on challenging the legality of Proposition 8 itself in the Courts. Does it constitute a Constitutional revision (which requires approval of both houses of the California State Legislature) rather than an amendment? Does it put the California Constitution into direct conflict itself, by banning same sex marriage, when the Courts have ruled that bans on same sex marriage violate the equal protection clause?

There have also been calls to boycott Utah … I need to think about this one a bit more, but part of me says that rather than boycotting Utah, gay rights activists should start organizing trips to Utah. Most Utahns are isolationists already. Boycotting may just give them a sense of relief. Instead more gay people should travel to Utah, move to Utah, and keep the issue front-and-center in Utah.

And to think I was worried about how I’d spend my post-election blog time.

The drive to defeat Prop 8 isn’t completely dead yet … seems the proponents of Prop 8 didn’t get legislative approval for a Constitutional revision before placing the prop on the ballot; so it’s possible that Prop 8 constitutes an unlawful amendment.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

Same-sex marriage ban wins; opponents sue to block measure - SF Gate

After a heated, divisive campaign fueled by a record $73 million of spending, California voters have approved Proposition 8, which would change the state Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Opponents promptly filed suit to try to block the measure from taking effect.

With 96 percent of the vote counted, Prop. 8 was winning by a decisive 400,000-vote margin, 52.2 percent to 47.8 percent. It piled up huge margins in the Central Valley and carried some Democratic strongholds such as Los Angeles County. The measure lost in every Bay Area county but Solano.

As the vote counting continued this morning, opponents of Prop. 8 filed a lawsuit directly with the state Supreme Court - whose May 15 ruling legalized same-sex marriage - asking the justices to overturn the measure.

The suit argued that Prop. 8 would change the California Constitution in such fundamental ways - taking important rights away from a minority group - that it amounted to a constitutional revision, which requires approval by the Legislature before being submitted to the voters. The case was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Lamda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

The same groups asked the court before the election to remove Prop. 8 from the ballot on those grounds. The justices refused, but left the door open for a post-election challenge.

“A major purpose of the Constitution is to protect minorities from majorities,” said Elizabeth Gill, an ACLU lawyer. “Because changing that principle is a fundamental change to the organizing principles of the Constitution itself, only the Legislature can initiate such revisions.”

Marriage should be for everyone … nobody has been able to give me a coherent argument based on legal (not religious) grounds as to why discrimination should be written into a state’s Constitution.

I’m tempted to say that I refuse to get married again unless/until all people have the right to get married to the person of their choice, regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation. I refuse to say sexual preference, because I knew several gay people in the Bay Area who would have preferred to be heterosexual rather than gay.

Well, as many of my friends used to say, “Never straight, always gaily forward!” and “It’s not over until the bulldyke sings.”

While I certainly expected Sarah Palin to run for the top spot of the ticket in 2012, I didn’t expect her campaign to start before the 2008 election was over.

McCain’s name nowhere to be seen at Palin rally - CNN.com

POLK CITY, Florida (CNN) — At a boisterous Sarah Palin rally in Polk City, Florida on Saturday afternoon, one name was surprisingly absent from the campaign décor — John McCain’s.

Looking around the Fantasy of Flight aircraft hangar where the rally took place, one could see all the usual reminders that it was a pro-McCain event. There were two large “Country First” banners hung on the walls along with four enormous American flags meant to conjure the campaign’s underlying patriotic theme. Many of the men and women in the audience wore McCain hats and t-shirts.

But on closer inspection, the GOP nominee’s name was literally nowhere to be found on any of the official campaign signage distributed to supporters at the event.

Members of the audience proudly waved “Country First” placards as Palin delivered her stump speech. Those signs were paid for by the Republican National Committee.

The other sign handed out to supporters read “Florida is Palin Country,” but those signs were neither paid for by the Republican National Committee nor the McCain campaign. In small print, the signs were stamped with the line “Paid for and authorized by Putnam for Congress” — as in, the re-election campaign of Florida congressman Adam Putnam, whose district skirts Polk City.

In fact, Putnam’s name was considerably more prominent than was McCain’s — his campaign had placed a number of large “Putnam for Congress” banners around the event site.

This is truly frightening. A Sarah Palin presidency scares me more than Dick Cheney … at least Cheney understands the document he’s trying to undermine; but Sarah Palin’s grasp of what the Constitution (and the Bill of Rights) stands for is tenuous at best, and non-existent at worst.

Political Radar: Palin Fears Media Threaten Her First Amendment Rights

In a conservative radio interview that aired in Washington, D.C. Friday morning, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin said she fears her First Amendment rights may be threatened by “attacks” from reporters who suggest she is engaging in a negative campaign against Barack Obama.

Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama’s associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks.  Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate’s free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.

“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin told host Chris Plante, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”

Snicker. Only one problem there Sarah … you obviously don’t know what the First Amendment says. Here, let me quote it for you:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.“

See that? CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW … ABRIDGING THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH, OR OF THE PRESS. It does not say “I have the right to attack my opponent without being criticized in return”, or “The press shall not have the right to criticize an idiot who thinks she’s ready to run the country.”

You have the right to say whatever you want as long as it is not libelous or slanderous. You have been toeing that line awfully close, and personally, I think you’ve crossed it a few times, but it is an election, and a little more leeway maybe should be allowed.

However, we the people, the bloggers, and the press, have the right to criticize you, to mock you, and to laugh at you, and to attack you and your policies right back. The beautiful thing about the First Amendment is that it’s a two-way street.

And guess what … thanks to New York Times Co. v. L.B. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), since you are now a public figure, the actual malice standard, which requires that the plaintiff in a defamation or libel case prove that the publisher of the statement in question knew that the statement was false or acted in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity, comes into play.

The irony? If you’re actually elected, there are several million of us “fake” Americans who fear for our own First Amendment rights … so if you want this job, then you better be prepared to put up with the crap that comes with it.

Now, I’d like for you to shut-up and go away, but I can’t force you to do so. What I can do is to continue to tear apart everything you say to expose and ridicule your naiveté and ignorance.

A repost from March, prompted by various Twitter and other assertions that the United States was founded on “Christian principles” … nothing could be further from the truth.

The only part of became the United States that was founded on “Christian” principles was the original Plymouth colony in Massachusetts, by the Puritans who were escaping religious persecution in England … and of course, they promptly started inflicting their own warped sense of Christian values on the Native Americans and amongst themselves (Salem Witch Trials, anyone?).

In any case, back in March mother sent me more mom-spam, this one being a purported re-write of the Preamble of the Constitution, accompanied by a series of articles. Some of the articles are basic pleas to common sense. But one in particular really got my goat.

ARTICLE XI: You do not have the right to change our country’s history or heritage. This country was founded on the belief in one true God. And yet, you are given the freedom to believe in any religion, any faith, or no faith at all; with no fear of persecution. The phrase IN GOD WE TRUST is part of our heritage and history, and if you are uncomfortable with it, TOUGH!!!! GET OVER IT!!!

The problem is that this nation was NOT founded on the belief in one true God. Far from it; when asked about it, Alexander Hamilton once flippantly responded that the United States was not in need of “foreign aid.”

Please show me, in the original Constitution, where it makes mention of God. Please!

Unfortunately, you can’t, because the word does not appear once in the entire document.

The word God did not appear on US money until the Civil War, and did not appear in the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954, as a reaction to the McCarthy-driven anti-Communist hysteria.

Oh, sure, there are two brief mentions in the Declaration of Independence (cf. the phrases, “Laws of Nature, and Nature’s God” and “endowed by their Creator”), but the Declaration of Independence is not the document on which our nation is based … the Constitution, which was drafted 11 years later, holds that estimable position.

Heck … most people think that George Washington was the first President, too … but he wasn’t.

There were several Presidents of the United States prior to George Washington. Under the Articles of Confederation (drafted in 1777 and ratified in 1781), the following men served as President of the United States in Congress Assembled:

• Samuel Huntington (March 1, 1781 – July 9, 1781)
• Thomas McKean (July 10, 1781 – November 4, 1781)
• John Hanson (November 5, 1781 – November 3, 1782) — the first to serve a full one-year term, and the first selected after the surrender of the British Army … but not the first.
• Elias Boudinot (November 4, 1782 – November 2, 1783)
• Thomas Mifflin (November 3, 1783 – October 31, 1784)
• Richard Henry Lee (November 30, 1784 – November 6, 1785)
• John Hancock (November 23, 1785 – June 5, 1786)
• Nathaniel Gorham (June 6, 1786 – November 5, 1786)
• Arthur St. Clair (February 2, 1787 – November 4, 1787)
• Cyrus Griffin (January 22, 1788 – March 4, 1789)

By the way … the word “God” isn’t mentioned in the Articles of Confederation, either.

And because some people weren’t clear on the concept, the first 10 words of the First Amendment to the Constitution specifically state: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

If God isn’t an establishment of religion, I don’t know what is.

Furthermore, in the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified in 1797 in one of the Senate’s only unanimous votes, Article 11 famously states:

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

In 1802, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.

Note that Jefferson did not even capitalize the name of God in his letter. He, along with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine were not Christian, although they were Deists … they believed in one Supreme Being, however, but rejected many elements of the Christian church. James Madison, primary author of the Constitution once wrote on Christianity:

What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.

For what it’s worth, I do believe in God, or rather that there is a higher power within all of us, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist alike … even in the fuckwit currently inhabiting the White House. I guess that makes me a Deist, like Jefferson, et al.

But God, in whatever form, has NO place in official government, by design. Please try to remember that when you cast your ballot over the next 6 days.

On the bike, however, is a different story all together … when I’m on the bike, I’m constantly praying … if only to make it to the top of the next rise without my lungs exploding. And I wear my Madonna del Ghisallo … now without a rash, since I finally got a nickel-free chain. And as a legally-ordained minister in the Universal Life Church (and member of The Church of the Big Ring), I feel like that’s acceptable.

Lost amongst the wreckage of the current financial crisis is the latest news of the Bush Administration’s utter disregard for civil rights.

Feds give customs agents free hand to seize travelers’ documents

(09-23) 17:06 PDT SAN FRANCISCO — The Bush administration has overturned a 22-year-old policy and now allows customs agents to seize, read and copy documents from travelers at airports and borders without suspicion of wrongdoing, civil rights lawyers in San Francisco said Tuesday in releasing records obtained in a lawsuit.

The records also indicate that the government gives customs agents unlimited authority to question travelers about their religious beliefs and political opinions, said lawyers from the Asian Law Caucus and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They said they had asked the Department of Homeland Security for details of any policy that would guide or limit such questioning and received no reply.

How can anyone find this even remotely acceptable under the Constitution? Note that it doesn’t appear to even limit the policy to foreign (non-American) travelers. When you combine this with the Ninth Circuit’s earlier decision, the Bush Administration is blatantly ignoring the Fourth Amendment which states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.