Thanks David for correcting Neal on the issue of the 14th amendment.> Neal Krasnoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Wrong. The 14th Amendment was passed to ensure that black people enjoy > the same rights as whites under the law. There is no historical > precedent for same sex marriage in Anglo-American jurisprudence, nor in > our culture. The judges and petty officials are making it up as they go > along. > > Corrected to: "There is no historical precedent for same sex marriage > in Anglo-American jurisprudence,"
Neal is repeating what I believe is a fallacy. The words "race," "black," "white," "Caucasian," etc. are nowhere to be found in the 14th Amendement.
Section 1 plainly refers to equal protection, without qualification:
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
In our system (at least since Marbury vs. Madison) courts decide how the Constitution's electorally ratified principles apply. You can argue whether gay marriage is guaranteed by equal protection (I believe it is, Neal doesn't), but you can't limit the 14th amendment to race, sorry.
Let's litigate! In Mpls and elsewhere!
O'Connor's concuring opinion on Lawrence V Texas (sodomy laws) used a 14th amendment, equal protection argument here.
There's also an excellent critique of the "activist judge" red herring at:
http://www.indegayforum.org/authors/sanders/sanders2.html
from the article:
Every student knows the law is full of open-ended questions. What did the legislature �intend?� Does text �bear the weight� of a
given reading? Did the court below �abuse its discretion?� When is stare decisis inappropriate? What is �reasonable?� The idea
that conservative judges aren�t as capable or willing to manipulate these fudge factors as avidly and effectively as liberals
sometimes do is the essential lie of the conservative legal movement.
Take one example: In the 1996 Hopwood case, the Fifth Circuit gave a major victory to conservative agitators and struck down affirmative action at the University of Texas, overthrowing longstanding legal, legislative, and social consensus. The arguments for doing so may or may not have been persuasive. But don�t say this wasn�t activism.
How about Justice Scalia�s ongoing obsession with overturning the settled law of Roe v. Wade? Roe may well have been flawed as a matter of legal reasoning. But Scalia, a Federalist high priest whose �textualism� is often confused with judicial minimalism, has no interest in �interpreting� that decision. He wants to blow it up.
The Federalists can�t have it both ways � grooving to every cranky Scalia eruption, yet publicly claiming to want more disinterested judicial drones, and all the while praying for the retirements of actual independent-minded moderates like O�Connor and Kennedy.
EY: I've always thought it ironic that the anti-gay Minnesota Family Council is whining about activist judges in Massachusetts - because the judges ruled in a way that the MFC supported. What about when the "activist judge" overturned Minneapolis's Domestic Partner registry.
Keith Boykin of the National Black Justice Coalition also weighs in on the same sex marriage/interracial marriage comparison - and refutes many of Neal K's points:
http://www.keithboykin.com/arch/000967.html
In a <http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=357546>speech at Harvard this week, Rev. Jesse Jackson said he supported full rights for gays and lesbians but suggested he was not inclined to support gay marriage. Jackson said, "No slave was ever enslaved because he was gay." Jackson, whose 1984 Rainbow Coalition reached out to gays and lesbians, now seems unwilling to support the LGBT community on marriage.
With friends like these, you know the rest. I like Jesse Jackson, and I don't necessarily have anything against John Kerry, but let's be honest. If you don't support marriage equality, then you don't support full equality for gays and lesbians. Civil unions are a step in the right direction, but they perpetuate the discredited doctrine of "separate but equal." If I drink from a "colored" water fountain and a white person drinks from the main fountain, we may be getting our water from the same pipe, but it can never be equal. I'm still a second-class citizen.
And we don't need any more history lessons about the suffering of black people that neglect the presence of black gays and lesbians. Not all blacks are straight and not all gays are white. They didn't have the names to describe themselves then, but there were slaves who were gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered.
If the civil rights movement was just about black folk getting our own, then it was a colossal waste of time. When some blacks urged Dr. King to focus only on racial injustice, he rejected their pleas and expanded his campaign to address poverty and war and other social maladies. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," he said.
That's why Jesse Jackson's comparison between blacks and gays misses the point. There's no virtue in black people positioning ourselves at the top of the hierarchy of oppression. It matters not which group is most oppressed, or which is first oppressed, or whether they are identically oppressed. What matters is that no group of people should be oppressed.
EY: I hope that Keith Boykin's organization the National Black Justice Coalition runs some ads here.
www.nbjcoalition.org
From About NBJC:
The National Black Justice Coalition is an ad hoc coalition of black lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered leaders who have come together to fight against discrimination in our communities.
The goal of the organization in 2004 is to build black support for marriage equality and to educate the community on the dangers of the proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution to discriminate against gays and lesbians.
EY: This organization is trying to raise $100,000 to run ads in the Black Press. This organization has already convinced Coretta Scott King and Julian Bond to oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment.
I think Minneapolis's African American legislators: Neva Walker and Keith Ellison - for standing up to some of this. Keith Ellison in an email to me has said he doesn't see that gay marriage threatens his marriage - and that he supports gay marriage. Certainly there continues to be significant anti-gay bigotry in some of the black churches in Minneapolis. However the Spokesman recently has been covering the issue of homosexuality in the black community. There have been some very honest and personal explorations of this subject.
Eva Young
Near North
Minneapolis
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Blog is up:
http://lloydletta.blogspot.com
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