Some Conservatives Backing Gay Marriage

Yahoo ^ | Feb 14th 2004 | Justin Pope

[tahiti]

"NOPE, because the very people that wrote the Constitution made Sodomy a crime in their own states. EXPLAIN that."

At the beginning of the republic, the U.S. Constitution had no jurisdiction with the boundaries of a sovereign state.

It was only after the ratification of the 14th amendment that the U.S. Constitution had jurisdiction within the boundaries of state.

The founding father's would have supported the states deciding on their own whether to acknowledge homosexual unions or marriages. Some states would have sanctioned it, others would have not. Just like slavery.

[tahiti]

"A society is a group of people who get together and draw up a covenant to govern the group."

Are sure you should have not put this remark in quotations?

I would have attributed it to Hillary Clinton, the socialist/communist.

Reread my post about being inconsistent in your support of the Bill of Rights.

We are not a democracy. The "group" does not deny or disparage inalienable rights. Rights are not to be negotiated in the political arena.

Anything to the contrary is tyranny of the majority.

[Celtjew Libertarian]

Thats a red herring. The issue is whether the men the wrote the Constitution intended the 9th Amendment to protect homosexual marriage.

Not specifically. However, they wrote it with the knowledge that their list of rights was incomplete, in order to protect rights that they had not thought to enumerate.

Marriage, in a legal sense, is nothing more than a legal contract to share assets and responsibilities within an household. The right of consenting adults, in any combination, to enter such a contract should be protected.

The problem is that we've conflated an economic agreement with emotional commitment and sexual cohabitation. The wisest course, IMO, would be to strip the term "marriage" completely out the legal code and replace it with a term like "civil union" or "joint household agreement."

Whether homosexuals in such a shared household should be considered married, should be left to individual belief and societal consensus.

[gawd]

The wisest course, IMO, would be to strip the term "marriage" completely out the legal code and replace it with a term like "civil union" or "joint household agreement."
Whether homosexuals in such a shared household should be considered married, should be left to individual belief and societal consensus

bravo, you've said it better than I could. I agree.

[hunter112]

Anyone- no exceptions- who backs homosexual union to be defined as marriage is NOT conservative.

Pardon me, I must have missed the election that was held to determine who could define who is and is not a conservative. Congratulations on your apparent victory.

Here's a few reasons as to why some conservatives might not be actively resisting gay marriage:

1) That mucking about with the Constitution thing, heavily discussed on other threads, so I'll leave it alone for now.

2) Sizing up the battle, and deciding that the time to have stopped gay marriage with an amendment was during the Reagan or first Bush administrations. Relying on a DOMA signed by Clinton, who promised his friends that it wouldn't mean squat to a SCOTUS that had Ginsburg and Breyer on it, as well as Souter, Kennedy and Stevens, plus whoever he had the chance to appoint in a second term, was not enough. No serious challenge to civil union was mounted after Vermont, and while the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court might have surprised some people, it was bound to happen eventually anyway. I don't remember GWB making it a campaign issue, and he certainly didn't rush to put an FMA into law either after he assumed office, or after 9/11, when he was politically stronger.

What resources do we really want to throw into this battle, anyway? It's probably not worth giving up tax cuts, spending increases, or whatever else it would take to add Rat votes to get to a two-thirds majority to move this out of the Congress. Add in the horse trading it would take in many states, and the cost of this becomes enormous, with only thirteen states being able to make it all for naught.

3.) A general unease that the mushy middle has on the subject of gay marriage could resonate with votes in the fall. I'm presuming that MA will do nothing when they get back to work on this in March, after two days of being absolutely unable to come up with an amendment this last week. If, indeed, MA voters are going to punish their legislature for allowing gay marriage to go absolutely unchallenged, they might make MA a more Republican state.

This could also happen throughout the country, as well. It's been pointed out that this will be a big liability for Kerry, who at this point in time, is still the presumptive Rat nominee, and even if he isn't, the actual nominee will not have views anywhere to the right of Kerry on this subject. Why not let the left defend it, while Republicans talk about national defense, and when asked about gay marriage, simply say, we need more people in our party to have a hope of challenging it?

4) There's the freedom issue here, too. You can label all conservatives who don't share your views on homosexuality as libertarians, but it doesn't change the fact that there are people who believe in small government, lower taxes, a strong military, and the right of the people to bear arms, who are not uncomfortable with gay marriage. They know gay people who are not the nasties that ride on floats in gay pride parades, and while they decry promiscuity in both hetero and homosexual relationships, they want to lend their approval for fidelity in the people who society has marginalized. They probably know some gays who share their beliefs in all of the above normally conservative views, who would vote Republican if the gay issues that the Rats support were off the table. I'm pretty sure that the rabidly anti-gay folks here find that hard to believe, but if they had any associates who were gay, those associates would not let them know about it.

5) Perhaps you disagree, but it is not necessary to be a Christian, or an Orthodox Jew to be a conservative. Unencumbered by a strict religious view against homosexuality, these conservatives fear the establishment of a theocracy, or at least having the Republican Party being viewed as wanting to establish theocracy.

In five years, I assure you, we'll all have moved on from this, some of us are just ready to do it now.

[little jeremiah]

Homosexual Agenda Ping.

Misleading headline for sure. Check out this quote:

The conservative course is not to banish gay people from making such commitments. It is to expect that they make such commitments," David Brooks wrote recently in The New York Times, praising the virtues of fidelity. "We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage."

Brooks has been joined by a few fellow pundits on the right, notably Andrew Sullivan, and a handful of libertarian bloggers who say the government has no place meddling in the relationships of its citizens.

They call Brooks and Andrew Sullivan CONSERVATIVES????

If anyone wants on or off this ping list (which I predict will become stratospheric next week) let me know.

[little jeremiah]

The thing is that homosexuals already can make any kind of legal contracts they want regarding inheritance, hospital visitation, final directives (the documents authorizing selected people to make medical decisions in the event of one's incapitation) and so on.

The reason homosexuals want to have "gay" marriage is best stated by one of their own:

"Homosexual activist Michelangelo Signorile, who writes periodically for The New York Times, summarizes the agenda in OUT magazine (Dec/Jan 1994) :

."A middle ground might be to fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely, to demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society's moral codes, but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution... The most subversive action lesbian and gay men can undertake --and one that would perhaps benefit all of society--is to transform the notion of family entirely."

"Its the final tool with which to dismantle all sodomy statues, get education about homosexuality and AIDS into the public schools and in short to usher in a sea change in how society views and treats us."


In other words, they have as their stated goal to dismantle the natural family and marriage.

In case one of you may say, well, that's just one homosexual, not all of them. My rebuttal: He is a noted spokesman for the homosexual activist elite, there are numerous others that have said virtually the same thing (I can paste them here too if you want). And if he's an extremist, it's funny I don't hear a bunch of homosexuals denouncing him or his views.

[longtermmemmory]

Those that "fear"amendments either have no understanding of how judicial rullings can be overcome. This was no a ruling based on law, the SJC interprited the Mass constitution. only a constitutional amendment can override the SJC to establish them as wrong.

Law are overturned all the time and subsequent laws put in their place. However if a constitution is ruled to do something only an amendment can undo that something. (or ofcourse a subsequent rulling overturning the first rulling. see lawrence.)

It is too late for cowardice now. The planes have hit the buildings and the planes have torpedoed the ships. Time to rumble.

[longtermmemmory]

Yahoo is trolling for homsexuals by posting this.

[longtermmemmory]

actually you do not even have to bring religion into the debate to be opposed to homosexual marriage. Logic and reason provide more than enough reasoned argumetns that homosexual marriage is wrong. Marriage based on sex alone is wrong for a normal couple, marriage based on sex alone is wrong for a homosexual couple.

Marriage is a public act for society. Not for public acceptance of how sombody pops an orgasm.

[little jeremiah]

Maybe you have your personal nouns mixed up - substitute "gawd" for "yahoo".

[longtermmemmory]

feel free to use both.

I always look at the publisher of the article.

[arthurus]

How can anyone possibly be called conservateve who advocates radical change in the most basic foundation of society? There is no choice involved, no election here. We do not choose what to include in such a category. It is the language itself that determines this. And, I suppose, it is not fair to include communists under the rubric of conservative either, or coercive vegetarians. It is discrimination. Or is it your position that words have no meaning at all but what you or Bill Clinton choose to ascribe to them at some moment? If you support gay "marriage" then you cannot be a conservative because all of your other views must be derivative from that basic desire for fundamental change in the basic millenia old institution. Eliminating marriage as a basic foundation for the society(which is what gay-marriagists advocate) totally undermines all other systems in our constitutional republic. How can one a conservative be an advocate for the overthrow of the Republic? Conservatives do not carry rewd flags or black.

[TalBlack]

I'm not going to reread your post. Iread it once and there is nothing wrong with my comprehension.

For instance I comprehend that when you have no answer to an argument you run to calling names. Linking a GENERIC description such as the one you quoted from me to PIAPS and her socialisim is a DESPERATE stretch.

[tuesday afternoon]

Bump.

[Antoninus]

But there is at least a small block of conservatives who are on the same page, often for different reasons: They're loath to tinker with a constitution, for one, or they want to see more people — gay or straight — make commitments.

This "news" article is the equivalent of a "push poll." It's full of misinformation and its point is to make it look like normal people support gay "marriage."

In fact, it's the homo-promo contingent that's tinkering with the Constitution--and two thousand plus years of Western civilization. They are cultural terrorists who must stopped. If our courts and the liberals in government are too stupid to understand that marriage is only between one man and one woman, then we'll have to make sure the Constitution spells that out for them in very simple terms.

[Voice in your head]

Where did the babies come from? Or are those guys just baby-sitting?

[Coleus]

GAY NJ Candidate Running on the Republican Ticket

[biblewonk]

There are no, repeat, NO conservatives backing gay marriage.

Yes there are. There are many types of conservatives out there. A very large percentage are only fiscally conservative and are socially liberal.

[Abcdefg]

I'm not buying into your argument. They may TELL people they are conservative, but they surely are NOT.