Gay judge's same-sex marriage ruling upheld

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A federal judge has a message for those trying to salvage California's gay marriage ban: Sure, the judge who threw out the measure last year is in a long-term relationship with a man, but he could still be fair to them.

Chief U.S. District Court Judge James Ware's ruling Tuesday rejected arguments that former Chief Judge Vaughn Walker would potentially benefit from declaring the ban unconstitutional.

In his 19-page decision - a response to the first attempt in the nation to disqualify a judge based on sexual orientation - Ware had a bigger message. Gay judges, he said, are just like minority and female jurists: They can be impartial, too, even in cases that might affect them.

"We all have an equal stake in a case that challenges the constitutionality of a restriction on a fundamental right," he wrote. "The single characteristic that Judge Walker shares with the plaintiffs, albeit one that might not have been shared with the majority of Californians, gave him no greater interest in a proper decision on the merits than would exist for any other judge or citizen."

The argument that the gay judge had a conflict of interest was not the best approach here. Why not continue to insist that marriage is a state's rights issue that has no place being decided in a federal court of any kind? Another federal judge in Massachusetts, in upholding government-sanctioned same-sex unions there, ruled that this is a state's rights issue.

Personally, I think the best approach would be for the government to get out of the relationship racket altogether. Marriage should be something left to the religious sector, and government should have no more business knowing a person's marital status than it should knowing a person's income.

Judges are a lot like the mafia, they protect other “made” men. It is virtually impossible to get a judge to overturn on grounds such as this no matter how strong your argument is. The fact of the matter though is gay marriage is going to be decided by the Supreme Court and I'm not terribly confident about the outcome considering the swing vote is Anthony (Pro-sodomy) Kennedy who was the swing vote in overturning all sodomy laws a few years back. I think the best outcome we can hope for is that the Supreme Court, not wanting to create a new national “right” to gay marriage and overturning a slew of state laws in the process, which would be another Roe v. Wade debacle that will tear the country apart for decades, will issue a very narrow ruling that would only apply in this particular case or send it back to the lower court on a technicality

The darned sodomite judges are forcing us to accept their reprobate lifestyle. This country led by Californication can lead us to Pompey, but God’s laws never change!

IMHO...

This gets to the heart of the issue, which even some posters here on FR have accidentally drank enough koolaid to not see.

Our legal framework is based largely on Great Britain's and therefore also to European Christendom. Before Christianity in Europe, law was largely been based on tribal traditions and customs, which derives from the power of leaders, i.e., what the King says goes. The only other source of morality, i.e., what is right and wrong, stems from philosophers. Western law has a sense of derivation from Greek and Romans, whose sense of right and wrong was based on the thoughts of philosphers. Hence, that morality springs from "because the philospher says so", i.e., because he is really smart and he's got it figured out.

Christian Biblical morality is vastly different when contrasted with those other two origins, tribal and philosophical. It is rooted in the ancient Israelites and the law given to Moses by God - and this record was preserved for thousands of years, while early European culture is lost to history. Ancient Israelite prophesies of a messiah were realized in the person of Jesus Christ and the eventual New Testament canon of Christianity, and both New and Old Testaments of the Bible are in harmony with each other. What makes the Bible different from the other two sources, though, is that the Bible states that it is God-breathed, that it is not the creation of man, but written down by men who were divinely inspired.

Christianity came to Europe when rulers converted, thereby making their respective realms officially Christian. Of course, this began to push civil laws to come into conformance with Scripture - since the King was professing Christian faith and was claiming legitimate Christian authority over his kingdom based on acceptance by the Church, this would be expected over time.

The intelligentsia of old Europe were mostly inside the Church hierarchy and the Church came to wield considerable political power even over monarchs, who exerted dictatorial power over their realms. It is easy to see how the law, and even every concept of what is right and wrong, over hundreds of years, came to be defined by Biblical precepts.

Many of our modern American intelligentsia, for the last 150 years or so, have been steadily moving philosophically farther and farther afield from the Bible-based morality of the past 5,000 years, favoring the worship of the idol of their own intelligence over the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In doing so, they only demonstrate the fact that their education is lacking the all-important foundation of Scripture so prevalent in that of America's leaders during the settlement of our land and the founding of our government, and that it also lacks the study of pre-Revolution European history. These deficiences foster their tiresome and childishly stubborn opposition to acknowledgment of the Biblical origins of the moral foundation for American law - despite the depiction of the Ten Commandments on the very doors to the Supreme Court courtroom !

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