Posted by
Playful Walrus on Thursday, October 09, 2008 4:19:41 PM
Los Angeles Times staff writers Maura Dolan and Jessica Garrison take a look at “gay rights” in California, noting that the state is the “nation’s leader” in providing “legal protections to gays and lesbians”.
This has happened not just because of high-profile gestures like San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's decision to issue the nation's first same-sex marriage licenses in 2004 but also because of a carefully crafted campaign to enact laws in the state Legislature and push for court decisions to support and enhance the new rights.
New rights? If rights come from God, as our founders maintained, how can they be new? Is God bestowing new rights as we go along? Perhaps “rights” isn’t the appropriate word.
Schools must protect gay teenagers from being taunted about their sexual orientation.
But it is okay to taunt them. Just not about who gets them hot? As if straight people aren’t taunted all of the time over their crushes? How often are straight teens "protected" using this law?
Churches that receive state funds for nonreligious services such as day care can't refuse to provide those services to gays and lesbians -- even if the church's doctrine opposes homosexuality.
Why would a same-sex couple go through the trouble of making kids in a lab, or in a third party, or through adoption only to warehouse them in a day orphanage? (This, of course, doesn’t apply to all same-sex couples with children in the home.) Why are taxpayers paying for day care? What if the babysitters teach the church’s beliefs?
And doctors must extend the same kind of fertility treatments to lesbians hoping to conceive that they do to heterosexual women.
Ah yes – something I’ve blogged about before.
In 1914, when Long Beach police arrested 31 men accused of being part of a gay sex ring, most went free thanks to a California Supreme Court ruling that oral sex was not "a crime against nature," Yale law professor William N. Eskridge Jr. wrote in a legal brief.
They should have never been arrested, as long as they were all consenting adults and doing whatever it was they were doing in private and as long nobody outside of the group had to deal with any consequences of their actions.
In 1951, California's high court became the first in the country to rule that police could not shut down bars simply because gays frequented them.
A good decision, with my qualifiers.
In 1961, it invalidated police spying in men's bathroom stalls and held in 1969 that public schools could not fire teachers for being gay.
Public restrooms should not be used for sex. Private restrooms – it should be up to the owner. As far as teachers, you have to keep in mind that teachers once had to be unmarried, and presumably, chaste. I also believe in the separation of state and school and that employers should be able to hire or fire people for ANY or NO reason, absent a contract that says otherwise.
In 1948, the court became the first in the country to strike down a law that barred interracial marriage, ruling that people have a fundamental right to marry the person of their choice.
Not true. Brothers could not marry their sisters, and notice that the court did not neuter marriage. People could not marry someone who was currently married to someone else. So much for a right to marry the person of their choice.
Early on, the legislators made a decision to push for incremental changes rather than plunge straight into polarizing issues like same-sex marriage.
Yep. Boil that frog. And do it by lying, too, telling the public that you are just trying to get that small change and nothing more. It’s amazing how much attention is given to such a small percentage of the population, with all of the problems in California.
If you read the whole article, you can see the bigger picture of how we got to this point in California. There are some missing aspects, though including more about how things have been handled in the media and academia.
The state should not care which adults you find attractive, or choose to share time or anything else with. It should protect your person and your property from those who would harm you - regardless of your identity.