The Prop 8 opinion is 185 pages long! Insult to injury — first, gays can’t marry, and second, if you want to understand why, you have to print out and slog through 185 pages of court opinion. I’m liveblogging here for you, though — I’ll break it down by page numbers and update as I go:
Pages 1-10: If you’re only going to read one section of this thing, read these pages, it’s the action summary. Basically, the California constitution sucks. You can amend it however you want by popular vote, and nothing in it says you can’t take away people’s fundamental rights. Dude, even Mississippi has a provision in its constitution that says you can’t take away people’s fundamental rights and ours doesn’t have that.
Pages 12-13: Supreme Court’s basically begging us to get rid of initiatives. YES!!! Seriously, we let voters who can’t balance the state budget decide who has equal rights before the law?? Who wrote this thing?? California constitutional convention NOW.
Pages 14-33: History of marriage amendments and litigation. Skip (but we may need to go back to the discussion of the word “marry” at pages 30-31).
Pages 34-43: Discussion of cases (skip) — and then at page 42-43: you still have the right to pick someone to grow old with and be with forever, but you can’t call it a “marriage.” Seriously, I think I’m going to cry just reading this. How is this justice? THE CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION SUCKS.
Pages 45-128: Okay, here’s where the sledding gets heavy. The short answer is that nothing in the California Constitution (which sucks, did I mention?) stops haters from voting out the right to marry by ballot initiative.
Okay, post is now too long, Starting next post!
