Colonel_Reb
Hall of Famer
James Edwards, co-founder and main host of The Political Cesspool radio show, has a new blog that can be found here:
http://www.thepoliticalcesspool.org/jamesedwards/
He wrote on the California homosexual marriage ruling, among other things. I wanted to post a couple of his blogs here.
May 20-Gay marriage was inevitable
I haven't written about the big gay marriage ruling by the CA Supreme Court yet. I'm sure you're all aware of it, so I didn't need to bring it to your attention. I've been more interested in reading the reactions of Christians and conservatives all over the internet. Needless to say, they're outraged and disgusted, by and large. Not to mention shocked. Because California's the big one. Eleven percent of the entire American population lives in California, and it has an inordinate amount of influence on the rest of the country. As goes California, so goes the nation. That's the old saying, and there's a lot of truth in it.
And that's one of the reasons the right wing culture warriors are so shocked. They know that if this ruling stands, it likely means that gay marriage is here to stay, and soon will be the law of the land throughout the country. They're mounting a campaign to pass an amendment to the California constitution in November, but that's by no means a guarantee of reversing this ruling. First, they could fail to get the amendment ratified by the voters. Second, the amendment could be ratified, and then be found unconstitutional itself by the courts. A lot of people are under the impression that an amendment to the CA constitution is automatically "constitutional", but many legal scholars are warning that that's not the case. You can't pass an amendment barring Asians from voting, for example; it would be nullified as conflicting with the CA constitution, not to mention federal laws. So, the amendment route to reversing gay marriage is hardly a sure thing. On top of that, November is months away, and even if the amendment passes, it will take weeks or months to take effect. But in a little over three weeks, homosexuals can begin marrying in California. By the time November rolls around, thousands and thousands of gay marriages will have taken place. If the amendment passes, these existing marriages are going to have to be taken into account, and it's going to be a real mess. My guess is that if the amendment passes, the courts will basically say it's a violation of the constitution, and/or that the thousands of existing gay marriages make it an unworkable law and a moot point, and they'll throw it out. (Opponents of gay marriage recognize that, and they're going to ask the court for a stay of their ruling, but many observers think it's unlikely to be granted.) I think a lot of the culture warriors know this, too. They're talking tough, but they're whistling past the graveyard. The ones with any sense know the battle to ban gay marriage is pretty much over.
Well, the Christians and conservatives may be disgusted and outraged, but they shouldn't be shocked. Race realists have seen this day coming for a long time. It was inevitable given our mad national lust for equality, the 14th amendment to the US Constitution, and the precedents set by court cases concerning interracial marriage. If a person actually sits down and reads the rulings from courts that have thrown out laws against interracial marriage, it's difficult to understand on what grounds the CA and MA courts could have ruled otherwise than they did on gay marriage. The surprising thing isn't that they ruled that gay marriage should be legal; on the contrary, it's that it took them so long to do it.
The cultural conservatives like to say that the courts in MA and CA have begun tinkering with the age old definition of marriage, but that's not the case at all. The courts in this country began tinkering with the commonly accepted definition of marriage way back in 1948, when the California Supreme Court declared the state law banning interracial marriage unconstitutional on the basis of the 14th amendment to the US Constitution in the Perez case. At that time, interracial marriage was extremely rare, and the vast majority of states didn't allow the practice. After the ruling, Gallup took a national poll, and 95% of white Americans said they disapproved of interracial marriage. They were as disgusted and outraged with interracial marriage as today's Christians and conservatives are with gay marriage. Even in 1967, when the US Supreme Court invalidated all anti-miscegenation laws anywhere as unconstitutional in the Loving vs. VA case, the vast majority of white Americans still disapproved of interracial marriage.
The Focus on the Family types also like to say that homosexual marriage came about because of our rejection of God, and flows naturally from the same judicial activism that gave us legal abortion. But they never mention the rulings on interracial marriage that set the very precedents that the gay marriage ruling are based on. They can't; unlike previous generations of Christians, today's evangelicals profess to love interracial marriage. They condemn anyone who opposes it as a "racist" or a "hater" or a "bigot". (Never mind that that means just about 100% of the Christians in America in 1948 were racists and haters and bigots.) So they have to deny the obvious, and they do - they claim that legalizing interracial marriage was not only just and fair and the Christian thing to do, but also that it in no way led to gay marriage being legalized.
Which is simply absolute nonsense. Anyone can go read the full opinion of the case in Massachusetts that led to gay marriage being legal there. Here's the ruling. Go through and see how many times the judges refer to Loving vs. VA. I'll save you the trouble - it's 25. (They also refer to the Perez case 12 times.) It's no exaggeration to say that the Goodridge ruling was clearly based on the precedents set in Loving and Perez rulings. And not only are the rulings the same, the arguments of the plaintiffs and defendants are almost exactly the same in both cases.
In 1948, and 1967, the legal argument for interracial marriage basically boiled down to this: Laws against interracial marriage are unconstitutional because the 14th amendment says everyone should be treated equally. If a white man can marry a white woman, but a black man isn't allowed to marry a white woman, then they aren't being treated equally, and the law is unjust.
The argument against repealing laws against interracial marriage went like this: No, the laws against interracial marriage are perfectly constitutional, and treat everyone equally. Everyone is free to marry within their race, whether they're black or white. There's absolutely no discrimination.
In the gay marriage cases, the legal argument in favor of it boiled down to this: Laws against gay marriage are unconstitutional because the 14th amendment says everyone should be treated equally. If a man is allowed to marry a woman, but a woman isn't allowed to marry a woman, then they're not being treated equally, and the law is unjust.
The argument against repealing laws against gay marriage went like this: No, the laws against gay marriage are perfectly constitutional, and treat everyone equally. Everyone is free to marry someone of the opposite sex, whether they're male or female. There's absolutely no discrimination.
That may sound simplistic, but when you strip away all the "whereas's" and the "wherefore's", that's pretty much the gist of it. The argument for allowing interracial marriage was precisely the same as the argument for allowing gay marriage. Given the precedents of Perez and Loving, judge's hands are pretty much tied, and gay marriage was inevitable. And it's not just me saying it - here's the New York Times:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
In the 1948 case of Perez v. Sharp, the California Supreme Court struck down a ban on interracial marriage.
Chief Justice Ronald M. George quoted from the Perez decision three times while the current court was ruling on the legality of a ban on same-sex marriage. It seemed that the chief justice accepted that the struggle for same-sex marriage closely paralleled that of the struggle to legalize interracial marriages, reports the New York Times. When the California Supreme Court majority found Thursday that same-sex couples had a right to marry, they cited Perez.
Opponents of same-sex marriage are uncomfortable with the analogy, reports the New York Times. Monte Stewart, president of the Marriage Law Foundation, says the parallel only works on the surface. "Marriage in its deep logic has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the union of a man and a woman," said Stewart.
The Perez decision came long before the rest of the nation started desegregation, as another six years would pass before Brown v. Board of Education, where the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that segregated schools violated the Constitution. Thirteen years would pass before the U.S. Supreme Court would also strike down bans on interracial marriage in the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, according to the New York Times.
As the Perez decision occurred so long before the rest of the nation's attempts at equality, the history of interracial marriage restrictions can be viewed in two ways. The Perez court can be said to have started the wave of equality with an early decision in the right direction. Or, it can be said that the court overrode the democratic process in making a decision most of the country was not yet willing to embrace.</BLOCKQUOTE>
Here's more from the NYT:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
The Supreme Court was the first state high court to strike down a law barring interracial marriage, in a 1948 decision called Perez v. Sharp. The vote in Perez, like the one in Thursday's decision, was 4 to 3. The United States Supreme Court did not follow suit until 1967.
At present, six of the seven justices on the California court, including all the dissenters, were appointed by Republican governors.
The decision was rooted in two rationales, and both drew on the Perez case.
The first was that marriage is a fundamental constitutional right.
"The right to marry," Chief Justice George wrote, "represents the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with a person of one's choice and, as such, is of fundamental significance both to society and to the individual."
Chief Justice George conceded that "as an historical matter in this state marriage has always been restricted to a union between a man and a woman." But "tradition alone," he continued, does not justify the denial of a fundamental constitutional right. Bans on interracial marriage were, he wrote, sanctioned by the state for many years.
In a second rationale from the interracial case, the court struck down the laws banning same-sex marriage on equal protection grounds, also adopting a new standard of review in the process.
When courts weigh whether distinctions among people or groups violate the right to equal protection they generally require just a rational basis for the distinction, a relatively easy standard to meet. But when the discrimination is based on race, sex or religion, the courts generally require a more substantial justification.
Discrimination based on sexual orientation, the majority ruled on Thursday, also requires that sort of more rigorous justification. The court acknowledged that it was the first state high court to adopt the standard, strict scrutiny, in sexual orientation cases.
Lawyers for the state identified two interests to justify reserving the term marriage for heterosexual unions  tradition and the will of the majority. Chief Justice George said neither was sufficient.</BLOCKQUOTE>
Here's The Boston Globe:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
CONGRATULATIONS TO California and all its lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender citizens who have been recognized as equal citizens by the state's Supreme Court. The California court affirmed its 1948 Perez decision recognizing that the choice of one's marriage partner is a fundamental right, regardless of race or, in Thursday's ruling, gender.</BLOCKQUOTE>
Here's The Sacramento Bee:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
Gay marriage ruling has roots in landmark race-based case
By Stephen Magagnini - smagagnini@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Tuesday, May 20, 2008
The California Supreme Court's historic ruling legalizing gay marriage has its roots in the case of a Mexican American woman who 60 years ago fought for the right to marry an African American man.
Andrea Perez and Sylvester Davis were denied a marriage license in Los Angeles County because state law at the time banned interracial unions.
So Perez took her case to the California Supreme Court. In October 1948 judges struck down California's anti-miscegenation law, which had stated: "All marriages of white persons with negroes, Mongolians, members of the Malay race, or mulattoes are illegal and void."
Last Thursday, state Chief Justice Ron George, in his majority opinion, cited "this court's landmark decision 60 years ago" in the Perez case, which upheld "the fundamental constitutional right to marry" regardless of race.
George noted that the court didn't just strike down laws against interracial marriage that had existed since statehood. The Perez decision focused on "the importance to an individual of the freedom 'to join in marriage with the person of one's choice.' "</BLOCKQUOTE>
No, there's nothing shocking about gay marriage. The only people who were surprised were the ones who haven't been paying attention, while they've been busy praising interracial marriage and equality to high heaven. Which pretty much describes most conservatives and Christians for the last 30 years. And they shouldn't be shocked in a few years, when the same courts start stripping away their tax exemptions for violating public policy with their anti-gay marriage stance, just like they did to Bob Jones University for banning interracial dating.
But that's another post.
May 25-PBJ strikes out?
There is no joy in Mudville today.
It's been almost eight years since I served as a delegate for the Pat Buchanan presidential campaign. He's one of the main reasons I got into political activism, and, frankly, I consider him one of my heroes. But his May 23rd column is a real disappointment. It's bases loaded, two outs, bottom of the ninth, and Pat's batting cleanup. They tossed him three big, fat pitches right down the middle, and he never lifted his bat.
And it's not the first time that my jaw has dropped while reading a recent PJB column. Three weeks ago he wrote "Whites Down To 10% Of World Population By 2060 Does It Matter?" It was a hard hitting column about the demographic nightmare white people are facing in the very near future. Buchanan is one of the few pundits who even care about what's happening to white people, let alone with the guts to write about it, and it was great to read someone of his talent describe what we're up against so forcefully and eloquently. But then, in the next to last paragraph, he threw this shocker out there:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
Hopefully, the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, who are about to inherit the earth as we pass away, will treat us better than our ancestors treated them in the five centuries that Western Man ruled the world.</BLOCKQUOTE>
Huh? Excuse me, Pat, but I think, all things considered, the white man has treated the other races pretty darn well. How many other races have rolled over and played dead while inviting blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and Arabs to move to their countries and take over their cultures?
But back to his latest column, "Post Christian America", which is about the California gay marriage ruling. Buchanan says a lot of good things in the column. Yes, it's true that the very idea of gay marriage is disgusting and utterly unnatural. Yes, the idea that two men can make a marriage is absurd. Yes, the ruling flies in the face of the Christian underpinnings of America. Yes, yes, yes...and yes. There's a lot to agree with in this column.
So far, so good. But anyone can hear that stuff on James Dobson or FOX News. Heck, you can even read it in The Weekly Standard or National Review. But there's a lot more to the gay marriage story than what's bad about it. Like, how we got here. There are millions of Americans out there right now shaking their heads going "Good Lord! How did this country ever get to a place where we're allowing men to marry men?!"
And that's where Pat struck out. He had a golden chance to show these folks exactly where gay marriage came from - interracial marriage. They're not just tangentially connected. The rulings legalizing interracial marriage led directly to gay marriage. It was inevitable and inescapable. Nothing could be plainer. But Dobson won't tell 'em. Their preacher won't talk about it. And the last thing the neocons at FOX and National Review and The Weekly Standard want is for white people to start connecting the dots. Liberals don't mind shouting it from the housetops - all these glowing editorials, such as the one Pat linked to in the New York Times, openly gloat that the gay marriage ruling is just an extension of the interracial marriage rulings.
Yes, it was a golden opportunity to reach some people, to wake some of our folks up. A lot of them feel guilty even reading Pat. They hear such pillars of society as Alan Dershowitz and Donald Trump calling him names like "nazi" and "anti-semite." Their preachers probably don't like him much, either. Yet they keep reading him, because they've got a nagging feeling that Pat's right about a lot of this stuff, no matter what people say about him. He seems more like "one of them" than a lot of the "conservative" pundits they read, and a lot more concerned about their kind of people. And Pat could've used this column to help them make connections, to show them just what this equality business that MLK preached is really all about.
But he didn't. Although, there for a minute it looked like he was going to:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
Homosexual marriage is not in the California constitution, else someone would have discovered it in 160 years. Where, then, did the state Supreme Court find this was a right?</BLOCKQUOTE>
Here we go, I thought! Pat's gonna lay the whole deal on them - the 14th amendment, the Perez ruling, the Loving ruling, etc. But no. To hear Pat tell it, the judges simply made this ruling up out of whole cloth, just pulled it out of their rear ends:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
Four of seven justices unearthed this right by consulting what Orwell called their "smelly little orthodoxies." They then decided to overturn the expressed will of the voters, declare their opinion law and order the state of California to begin recognizing homosexual unions as marriages. And they did it because they know the Times types will hail them as the newest Earl Warrens.</BLOCKQUOTE>
I'm still stunned every time I reread this passage. For the life of me, I can't figure out what Pat was thinking. This isn't just wrong; he's not just mistaken. He knows better. He's well aware that the ruling was based directly on the Perez ruling that legalized interracial marriage. And he clammed up rather than spill the beans.
Why, Pat? Why?
I can't figure it out.
Don't get me wrong - I still love and revere PJB, and I'd love to have him back on my radio show. He's paid a price for defending our people, and I have no doubt that he'll still continue to speak up for us. I just hope that next time he comes out swinging for the fences!
http://www.thepoliticalcesspool.org/jamesedwards/
He wrote on the California homosexual marriage ruling, among other things. I wanted to post a couple of his blogs here.
May 20-Gay marriage was inevitable
I haven't written about the big gay marriage ruling by the CA Supreme Court yet. I'm sure you're all aware of it, so I didn't need to bring it to your attention. I've been more interested in reading the reactions of Christians and conservatives all over the internet. Needless to say, they're outraged and disgusted, by and large. Not to mention shocked. Because California's the big one. Eleven percent of the entire American population lives in California, and it has an inordinate amount of influence on the rest of the country. As goes California, so goes the nation. That's the old saying, and there's a lot of truth in it.
And that's one of the reasons the right wing culture warriors are so shocked. They know that if this ruling stands, it likely means that gay marriage is here to stay, and soon will be the law of the land throughout the country. They're mounting a campaign to pass an amendment to the California constitution in November, but that's by no means a guarantee of reversing this ruling. First, they could fail to get the amendment ratified by the voters. Second, the amendment could be ratified, and then be found unconstitutional itself by the courts. A lot of people are under the impression that an amendment to the CA constitution is automatically "constitutional", but many legal scholars are warning that that's not the case. You can't pass an amendment barring Asians from voting, for example; it would be nullified as conflicting with the CA constitution, not to mention federal laws. So, the amendment route to reversing gay marriage is hardly a sure thing. On top of that, November is months away, and even if the amendment passes, it will take weeks or months to take effect. But in a little over three weeks, homosexuals can begin marrying in California. By the time November rolls around, thousands and thousands of gay marriages will have taken place. If the amendment passes, these existing marriages are going to have to be taken into account, and it's going to be a real mess. My guess is that if the amendment passes, the courts will basically say it's a violation of the constitution, and/or that the thousands of existing gay marriages make it an unworkable law and a moot point, and they'll throw it out. (Opponents of gay marriage recognize that, and they're going to ask the court for a stay of their ruling, but many observers think it's unlikely to be granted.) I think a lot of the culture warriors know this, too. They're talking tough, but they're whistling past the graveyard. The ones with any sense know the battle to ban gay marriage is pretty much over.
Well, the Christians and conservatives may be disgusted and outraged, but they shouldn't be shocked. Race realists have seen this day coming for a long time. It was inevitable given our mad national lust for equality, the 14th amendment to the US Constitution, and the precedents set by court cases concerning interracial marriage. If a person actually sits down and reads the rulings from courts that have thrown out laws against interracial marriage, it's difficult to understand on what grounds the CA and MA courts could have ruled otherwise than they did on gay marriage. The surprising thing isn't that they ruled that gay marriage should be legal; on the contrary, it's that it took them so long to do it.
The cultural conservatives like to say that the courts in MA and CA have begun tinkering with the age old definition of marriage, but that's not the case at all. The courts in this country began tinkering with the commonly accepted definition of marriage way back in 1948, when the California Supreme Court declared the state law banning interracial marriage unconstitutional on the basis of the 14th amendment to the US Constitution in the Perez case. At that time, interracial marriage was extremely rare, and the vast majority of states didn't allow the practice. After the ruling, Gallup took a national poll, and 95% of white Americans said they disapproved of interracial marriage. They were as disgusted and outraged with interracial marriage as today's Christians and conservatives are with gay marriage. Even in 1967, when the US Supreme Court invalidated all anti-miscegenation laws anywhere as unconstitutional in the Loving vs. VA case, the vast majority of white Americans still disapproved of interracial marriage.
The Focus on the Family types also like to say that homosexual marriage came about because of our rejection of God, and flows naturally from the same judicial activism that gave us legal abortion. But they never mention the rulings on interracial marriage that set the very precedents that the gay marriage ruling are based on. They can't; unlike previous generations of Christians, today's evangelicals profess to love interracial marriage. They condemn anyone who opposes it as a "racist" or a "hater" or a "bigot". (Never mind that that means just about 100% of the Christians in America in 1948 were racists and haters and bigots.) So they have to deny the obvious, and they do - they claim that legalizing interracial marriage was not only just and fair and the Christian thing to do, but also that it in no way led to gay marriage being legalized.
Which is simply absolute nonsense. Anyone can go read the full opinion of the case in Massachusetts that led to gay marriage being legal there. Here's the ruling. Go through and see how many times the judges refer to Loving vs. VA. I'll save you the trouble - it's 25. (They also refer to the Perez case 12 times.) It's no exaggeration to say that the Goodridge ruling was clearly based on the precedents set in Loving and Perez rulings. And not only are the rulings the same, the arguments of the plaintiffs and defendants are almost exactly the same in both cases.
In 1948, and 1967, the legal argument for interracial marriage basically boiled down to this: Laws against interracial marriage are unconstitutional because the 14th amendment says everyone should be treated equally. If a white man can marry a white woman, but a black man isn't allowed to marry a white woman, then they aren't being treated equally, and the law is unjust.
The argument against repealing laws against interracial marriage went like this: No, the laws against interracial marriage are perfectly constitutional, and treat everyone equally. Everyone is free to marry within their race, whether they're black or white. There's absolutely no discrimination.
In the gay marriage cases, the legal argument in favor of it boiled down to this: Laws against gay marriage are unconstitutional because the 14th amendment says everyone should be treated equally. If a man is allowed to marry a woman, but a woman isn't allowed to marry a woman, then they're not being treated equally, and the law is unjust.
The argument against repealing laws against gay marriage went like this: No, the laws against gay marriage are perfectly constitutional, and treat everyone equally. Everyone is free to marry someone of the opposite sex, whether they're male or female. There's absolutely no discrimination.
That may sound simplistic, but when you strip away all the "whereas's" and the "wherefore's", that's pretty much the gist of it. The argument for allowing interracial marriage was precisely the same as the argument for allowing gay marriage. Given the precedents of Perez and Loving, judge's hands are pretty much tied, and gay marriage was inevitable. And it's not just me saying it - here's the New York Times:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
In the 1948 case of Perez v. Sharp, the California Supreme Court struck down a ban on interracial marriage.
Chief Justice Ronald M. George quoted from the Perez decision three times while the current court was ruling on the legality of a ban on same-sex marriage. It seemed that the chief justice accepted that the struggle for same-sex marriage closely paralleled that of the struggle to legalize interracial marriages, reports the New York Times. When the California Supreme Court majority found Thursday that same-sex couples had a right to marry, they cited Perez.
Opponents of same-sex marriage are uncomfortable with the analogy, reports the New York Times. Monte Stewart, president of the Marriage Law Foundation, says the parallel only works on the surface. "Marriage in its deep logic has nothing to do with race and everything to do with the union of a man and a woman," said Stewart.
The Perez decision came long before the rest of the nation started desegregation, as another six years would pass before Brown v. Board of Education, where the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that segregated schools violated the Constitution. Thirteen years would pass before the U.S. Supreme Court would also strike down bans on interracial marriage in the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, according to the New York Times.
As the Perez decision occurred so long before the rest of the nation's attempts at equality, the history of interracial marriage restrictions can be viewed in two ways. The Perez court can be said to have started the wave of equality with an early decision in the right direction. Or, it can be said that the court overrode the democratic process in making a decision most of the country was not yet willing to embrace.</BLOCKQUOTE>
Here's more from the NYT:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
The Supreme Court was the first state high court to strike down a law barring interracial marriage, in a 1948 decision called Perez v. Sharp. The vote in Perez, like the one in Thursday's decision, was 4 to 3. The United States Supreme Court did not follow suit until 1967.
At present, six of the seven justices on the California court, including all the dissenters, were appointed by Republican governors.
The decision was rooted in two rationales, and both drew on the Perez case.
The first was that marriage is a fundamental constitutional right.
"The right to marry," Chief Justice George wrote, "represents the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with a person of one's choice and, as such, is of fundamental significance both to society and to the individual."
Chief Justice George conceded that "as an historical matter in this state marriage has always been restricted to a union between a man and a woman." But "tradition alone," he continued, does not justify the denial of a fundamental constitutional right. Bans on interracial marriage were, he wrote, sanctioned by the state for many years.
In a second rationale from the interracial case, the court struck down the laws banning same-sex marriage on equal protection grounds, also adopting a new standard of review in the process.
When courts weigh whether distinctions among people or groups violate the right to equal protection they generally require just a rational basis for the distinction, a relatively easy standard to meet. But when the discrimination is based on race, sex or religion, the courts generally require a more substantial justification.
Discrimination based on sexual orientation, the majority ruled on Thursday, also requires that sort of more rigorous justification. The court acknowledged that it was the first state high court to adopt the standard, strict scrutiny, in sexual orientation cases.
Lawyers for the state identified two interests to justify reserving the term marriage for heterosexual unions  tradition and the will of the majority. Chief Justice George said neither was sufficient.</BLOCKQUOTE>
Here's The Boston Globe:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
CONGRATULATIONS TO California and all its lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender citizens who have been recognized as equal citizens by the state's Supreme Court. The California court affirmed its 1948 Perez decision recognizing that the choice of one's marriage partner is a fundamental right, regardless of race or, in Thursday's ruling, gender.</BLOCKQUOTE>
Here's The Sacramento Bee:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
Gay marriage ruling has roots in landmark race-based case
By Stephen Magagnini - smagagnini@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Tuesday, May 20, 2008
The California Supreme Court's historic ruling legalizing gay marriage has its roots in the case of a Mexican American woman who 60 years ago fought for the right to marry an African American man.
Andrea Perez and Sylvester Davis were denied a marriage license in Los Angeles County because state law at the time banned interracial unions.
So Perez took her case to the California Supreme Court. In October 1948 judges struck down California's anti-miscegenation law, which had stated: "All marriages of white persons with negroes, Mongolians, members of the Malay race, or mulattoes are illegal and void."
Last Thursday, state Chief Justice Ron George, in his majority opinion, cited "this court's landmark decision 60 years ago" in the Perez case, which upheld "the fundamental constitutional right to marry" regardless of race.
George noted that the court didn't just strike down laws against interracial marriage that had existed since statehood. The Perez decision focused on "the importance to an individual of the freedom 'to join in marriage with the person of one's choice.' "</BLOCKQUOTE>
No, there's nothing shocking about gay marriage. The only people who were surprised were the ones who haven't been paying attention, while they've been busy praising interracial marriage and equality to high heaven. Which pretty much describes most conservatives and Christians for the last 30 years. And they shouldn't be shocked in a few years, when the same courts start stripping away their tax exemptions for violating public policy with their anti-gay marriage stance, just like they did to Bob Jones University for banning interracial dating.
But that's another post.
May 25-PBJ strikes out?
There is no joy in Mudville today.
It's been almost eight years since I served as a delegate for the Pat Buchanan presidential campaign. He's one of the main reasons I got into political activism, and, frankly, I consider him one of my heroes. But his May 23rd column is a real disappointment. It's bases loaded, two outs, bottom of the ninth, and Pat's batting cleanup. They tossed him three big, fat pitches right down the middle, and he never lifted his bat.
And it's not the first time that my jaw has dropped while reading a recent PJB column. Three weeks ago he wrote "Whites Down To 10% Of World Population By 2060 Does It Matter?" It was a hard hitting column about the demographic nightmare white people are facing in the very near future. Buchanan is one of the few pundits who even care about what's happening to white people, let alone with the guts to write about it, and it was great to read someone of his talent describe what we're up against so forcefully and eloquently. But then, in the next to last paragraph, he threw this shocker out there:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
Hopefully, the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, who are about to inherit the earth as we pass away, will treat us better than our ancestors treated them in the five centuries that Western Man ruled the world.</BLOCKQUOTE>
Huh? Excuse me, Pat, but I think, all things considered, the white man has treated the other races pretty darn well. How many other races have rolled over and played dead while inviting blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and Arabs to move to their countries and take over their cultures?
But back to his latest column, "Post Christian America", which is about the California gay marriage ruling. Buchanan says a lot of good things in the column. Yes, it's true that the very idea of gay marriage is disgusting and utterly unnatural. Yes, the idea that two men can make a marriage is absurd. Yes, the ruling flies in the face of the Christian underpinnings of America. Yes, yes, yes...and yes. There's a lot to agree with in this column.
So far, so good. But anyone can hear that stuff on James Dobson or FOX News. Heck, you can even read it in The Weekly Standard or National Review. But there's a lot more to the gay marriage story than what's bad about it. Like, how we got here. There are millions of Americans out there right now shaking their heads going "Good Lord! How did this country ever get to a place where we're allowing men to marry men?!"
And that's where Pat struck out. He had a golden chance to show these folks exactly where gay marriage came from - interracial marriage. They're not just tangentially connected. The rulings legalizing interracial marriage led directly to gay marriage. It was inevitable and inescapable. Nothing could be plainer. But Dobson won't tell 'em. Their preacher won't talk about it. And the last thing the neocons at FOX and National Review and The Weekly Standard want is for white people to start connecting the dots. Liberals don't mind shouting it from the housetops - all these glowing editorials, such as the one Pat linked to in the New York Times, openly gloat that the gay marriage ruling is just an extension of the interracial marriage rulings.
Yes, it was a golden opportunity to reach some people, to wake some of our folks up. A lot of them feel guilty even reading Pat. They hear such pillars of society as Alan Dershowitz and Donald Trump calling him names like "nazi" and "anti-semite." Their preachers probably don't like him much, either. Yet they keep reading him, because they've got a nagging feeling that Pat's right about a lot of this stuff, no matter what people say about him. He seems more like "one of them" than a lot of the "conservative" pundits they read, and a lot more concerned about their kind of people. And Pat could've used this column to help them make connections, to show them just what this equality business that MLK preached is really all about.
But he didn't. Although, there for a minute it looked like he was going to:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
Homosexual marriage is not in the California constitution, else someone would have discovered it in 160 years. Where, then, did the state Supreme Court find this was a right?</BLOCKQUOTE>
Here we go, I thought! Pat's gonna lay the whole deal on them - the 14th amendment, the Perez ruling, the Loving ruling, etc. But no. To hear Pat tell it, the judges simply made this ruling up out of whole cloth, just pulled it out of their rear ends:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
Four of seven justices unearthed this right by consulting what Orwell called their "smelly little orthodoxies." They then decided to overturn the expressed will of the voters, declare their opinion law and order the state of California to begin recognizing homosexual unions as marriages. And they did it because they know the Times types will hail them as the newest Earl Warrens.</BLOCKQUOTE>
I'm still stunned every time I reread this passage. For the life of me, I can't figure out what Pat was thinking. This isn't just wrong; he's not just mistaken. He knows better. He's well aware that the ruling was based directly on the Perez ruling that legalized interracial marriage. And he clammed up rather than spill the beans.
Why, Pat? Why?
I can't figure it out.
Don't get me wrong - I still love and revere PJB, and I'd love to have him back on my radio show. He's paid a price for defending our people, and I have no doubt that he'll still continue to speak up for us. I just hope that next time he comes out swinging for the fences!