Proposition 8

Perhaps more consequential than the presidential race is Proposition 8 in California. This referendum would add to the California Constitution the 14 words of a statute that was passed in 2000 by 61 percent of California voters but was overturned by fiat of the California Supreme Court this year. It reads as follows:

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

The proposed amendment does not touch on same-sex civil unions, and indeed it was the existence of civil unions in California that enabled the Supreme Court to claim that civil-union partners were being treated unequally as compared with marriage partners, and therefore same-sex couples must be allowed to get “married.” Whenever there are homosexual civil unions, there will automatically be the complaint that this constitutes “second class marriage” for homosexual couples. Therefore the only way to stop the move toward homosexual marriage in this country is to ban same-sex civil unions as well as same-sex marriages. This would be done by the Institution of Marriage Amendment:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither the United States nor any State shall recognize or grant to any unmarried person the legal rights or status of a spouse.

Such an amendment is still a long way off. The urgent priority of the moment is so turn back the California Supreme Court’s dictatorial imposition of homosexual marriage on the nation’s largest state.

Visit the Protect Marriage website and keep up with news of what is happening in this vital battle.

The presidential election offers us a choice between two evils. Proposition 8 offers as clear a choice as there can be between good and evil.

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Worth re-reading is a comment Sage McLaughlin wrote on this subject last May:

And so many American (neo)conservatives would allow this Trojan Horse [of homosexual civil unions] through the gates, believing in their unfathomable folly that this will appease the inveterate enemies of the family. If only they could turn their hawkish realism inward, they would see that all their rhetoric concerning appeasement, the futility of negotiating with those who cannot take for granted your right to exist, and so forth, applies all the more readily to certain of their domestic foes. I just cannot imagine how they fail to see it, other than to conclude that they are in fact hopeless liberals. (It was this shocking realization which caused my conversion to traditionalism).

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 13, 2008 09:46 PM | Send