Posted by
Playful Walrus on Saturday, May 17, 2008 5:41:42 PM
These couples act as though they haven’t been allowed to see each other –as if they’re waiting for a marriage license before sharing a bed. All of this comes from yesterday’s Los Angeles Times.
Joe Mozingo, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, has a piece that has this heading:
After Disappointments, Couple hopes for Dignity and a Ceremony
For Jim Smith and Frank Reifsnyder, the ban on gay marriage was another example of gays and lesbians being treated 'as less than human.'
They could have had a ceremony before. And the law in no way treated homosexual people as less than human, any more than it treated bachelors as such. If you're relying on the law to make you feel good about yourself - good luck.
The slights are mostly small, but cumulative. Maybe it's the blank, slightly confused expression on someone's face when Jim Smith introduces his "domestic partner."
I see – and, as a man, introducing another man as your husband won’t elicit such expressions? People know what domestic partners are.
Or the extra fee that rental car agencies charge if they both want to drive the car, because they are not married.
Sounds like a problem to be worked out between the rental car agencies and their customers. There’s no need to reorder a basic building block of society. It’s like going after a fly with nuclear bomb.
Or the tax forms they cannot file jointly.
So changing marriage about all of these peripheral things, huh? Yeah, sounds like a good reason to try to change an institution that’s at least thousands of years old.
Each instance is a little reminder that society sees them, according to Smith, "as less than human."
Oh please. Are widows less than human?
He and his partner, Frank Reifsnyder, have been a couple for 10 years. They have graduate degrees and lucrative careers and a beautiful Spanish colonial home in Toluca Lake, with fountains and tiled terraces and vaulted ceilings with hand-hewn beams.
Sounds like the man has been holding them down big time, doesn’t it?
They have 14-month-old twins, Milo and Kaylee, whom they adore.
Huh? Sorry, where did the egg(s) come from? Where was the womb? Where is the mother in this equation? These guys intentionally brought children into a situation that deprives them of a mother? Are women really that disposable? I guess so.
In their eyes, they have all the trappings of a happy marriage -- just not the marriage itself. And they want it.
In other words, they have everything they need, but they want to force me to issue them a marriage license without a bride being involved.
In a 4-3 vote, the state's high court ruled that language in the law "limiting the designation of marriage to a union 'between a man and a woman' is unconstitutional and must be stricken from the statute."
The law was recognizing marriage, not creating it. Society and nature “limited it”, or if you believe as I do, God did. It’s like saying that law should not limit the designation of a circle to something that is round.
Smith and Reifsnyder won't get substantially more legal rights from the ruling. Same-sex couples who register as domestic partners in California have many of the legal rights accorded to married couples, and the ruling will have no effect in the federal domain, including Social Security and income taxes.
But Smith was ecstatic. He said the significance of the ruling is much deeper.
"I think this signals the beginning of the end of ostracism and bullying and all the things used to make people feel less human than others," Smith said.
He’s deluding himself into thinking this will force people to ignore their instincts and what they plainly know to be true.
"Having a majority of the people you live with say you are less worthy of participating in this economy and society," said Smith, "that would make it pretty hard to stick around."
Let me clear this up for you, buddy: YOU ARE PEFECTLY WELCOME TO LIVE BY THE SAME RULES AS THE REST OF US. What the court is doing is changing the rules for everyone when there is no need to. Just because you prefer biking to driving a car doesn’t mean you don’t have access to freeways, just like people who prefer driving.
Smith and Reifsnyder always knew they wanted a family.
Then they should have found wives.
They found an egg donor and a surrogate mother.
Ah, a rent-a-womb and a buy-an-egg. How nice. Gee, why can't any of these same-sex make their own babies? Oh, that's right. Mother Nature is a bigot.
They moved from West Hollywood to a tree-lined street in Toluca Lake.
"In West Hollywood, we saw one kid in a three-block radius," said Reifsnyder.
Uh, that’s because, in case you haven’t noticed, it takes both a man and a woman to make a baby naturally. So they want the kids to have a kid-friendly environment, but not a mother? Interesting.
John M. Glionna and Francisco Vara-Orta, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers, report, in a piece headlined with:
San Francisco, West Hollywood Celebrate the Supreme Court's Gay Marriage Ruling
One couple said they had long wanted to say 'I do' but had been stymied by those who said 'You can't.' Now they could.
They could have said “I do” all along. This is not “gay marriage”. This is “same-sex marriage” which is still an oxymoron. But two heterosexual men can also get “married” under this ruling.
One man talking on his cellphone announced, "Hey guess what? Gays can get married in California. And that means me."
You could have gotten married before, too. Just not to another man.
Robert Denos, 43, and partner Wil Wilcox, 50, who were [“]married[“] in San Francisco in 2004, dressed up their three small boys -- including a 6-month-old named after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom -- and brought them out to celebrate.
Where did those kids come from? Where is their mother?
"They'll have the respect of other families," Wilcox said.
From a judge. That doesn’t mean everyone else support this sort of thing.
Gavin Newsom, the adulterous mayor of San Francisco who has been in on this scheme to subvert the will of the California electorate from the start, wrote this commentary.
In that spirit, yet one more barrier gave way when the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday that all Californians, regardless of sexual orientation, have the right to marry.
Again, licensed marriage is not a right, but when I went to get my license, nobody asked me my sexual orientation.
It was 60 years ago that the state Supreme Court ruled in Perez vs. Sharp that the ban on interracial marriage was unconstitutional -- 19 years before the U.S. Supreme Court would come to the same conclusion in Loving vs. Virginia.
“Race” is incidental to marriage. Sex is inherent to it. It’s like saying that ban on blue circles in the past means we should allow for square circles now.
So in February 2004, when I ordered San Francisco's county clerk to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, it was with full recognition that as goes California, so goes the nation.
You don’t respect marriage, and you don’t respect the law, and you don’t respect the American system. You simply counted on some judges to overreach.
The same groups that sponsored Proposition 22, the ballot measure the court just overturned, are close to placing a measure on the November ballot that would write discrimination against gays and lesbians into our state Constitution. This effort would not only nullify Thursday's ruling, it could overturn existing laws granting the most basic rights to same-sex couples.
Licensed marriage isn’t a most basic human right. If it was, single people could also get marriage licenses.
It is one thing to have an intellectual discussion about marriage equality. It is quite another to sit down with a loving couple of nearly 50 years and try to explain to them why they are being discriminated against by a government they help fund with their tax dollars.
Emotion makes for poor law. They know full well why things are they way they are – they’ve been this way through all of human history. It isn’t like some right-wing group came along and stopped an established tradition of two men marrying and getting a license. They could have chosen licensed marriage, but they chose not to participate, or they couldn’t find the right spouse.
His piece is a rambling appeal to emotion with very little logic or reasoning. It is self-serving and designed to boost his chances of being Governor, and just maybe enough loons in San Francisco and Los Angeles will vote for him.
Then the Los Angeles Times, figuring this wasn’t enough, ran this editorial.
Marriage Rights for All
Again, everyone had the same access to marriage.
'Marriage," the U.S. Supreme Court ruled more than 40 years ago, "is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival."
Why our survival? Because marriage brings the sexes together. That ruling was at a time where people could be barred from living together unless they had a licensed marriage. That is no longer the case. This is wholly inappropriate to invoke when talking about two men or two women. Society would still exist if there were NO same-sex pairings. The same can't be said about both-sex pairings.
And yet that right has been routinely denied to American men and women based on their sexual orientation.
Wrong again!
But the court recognized that rights must supersede customs, that just because marriage traditionally has been defined as a union between a man and a woman, it cannot be denied to same-sex couples by "tradition alone."
Well, you need not look to the past to confirm that men and women are still different.
I’m not surprised. This was from a newspaper that decided to publicize and celebrate the fact that one of its sports reporters decided to have his genitals hacked off and get female hormones injected into him, and to dress like a woman. He’s still got a Y chromosome, so he’s still a man. Just one who is mutilated by his own choice.