Awhile back City Hall started marrying gay couples like they were people entitled to equal rights.
Mayor Gavin Newsom thought it a good idea to give gay-marriage the green-light after meeting with Pres. George W. Bush, whose supporters on the right may not agree with Gavin, our boy mayor. Something the prez said ticked off da mayor.
When the resulting case was tried before the Hon. Richard Kramer, of the San Francisco Superior Court, a conservative Republican, he ruled in favor of gay marriage. Why would he do that? Well, this is San Francisco, after all. The mayor calls it "49 square miles surrounded by sanity," but he's just joking. It's the rest of the country that needs a trip to the shrink.
Kramer's boss, the presiding judge, lived with her female life partner, raising a couple of kids. The judge has kids. The kids all go to school together. The kids and the parents are friends and visit each others homes. When you do that there's a tendency to see each other as human beings pursuing a common goal, raising kids. Maybe you forget some of the prejudices we're all exposed to growing up in America where the melting pot may be a bit of a myth. Salad bowl may be more like it.
Kramer wrote a nice opinion holding that gays had an equal right to the benefits of the civil law, such as marriage, to straights. Equal protection of law and liberty rang loudly in the conservative judge's scholarly opinion.
Have you ever wondered how one person could hold views deemed conservative by some, liberal by others, and just a matter of equality by others?
Look at your views today. Let's say you are a conservative person, politically and morally, but you think that Master Race slavery, whites over blacks, is outrageous, immoral, and all kinds of wrong.
That would make you, circa 1859, a raging abolitionist, the worst sort of liberal, a hated radical, in fact. Abraham Lincoln himself, the man who freed the slaves, did not count himself as an abolitionist. He didn't abolish slavery the first chance he got upon entering the White House on March 4, 1861. He waited until the North won a battle, Antietam, in the third year of the war. Then he freed the slaves in the one place in the country that he had no control over, the South. The South had an army that was fighting Union forces. Lincoln could no more tell the South what to do than Pres. Bush can tell North Korea what to do. The more you tell such people what to do, the more they flaunt what they're doing that you don't like. Iran comes to mind.
At any rate, Kramer got reversed by the California Court of Appeal, First Appellate District, two conservative judges to one more or less liberal, Anthony Kline. No marriage for gays because there's always been no marriage for gays. Great. If something is one way long enough, it's going to stay that way, right or wrong, because why change now just because people want it, right?
Reason doesn't enter into it.
Straight people don't imagine themselves threatened if gay people get together, live together, travel together, buy homes together, visit each other in the hospital together, pay taxes together, and vote together. Well, maybe not the latter. Ten percent of San Francisco voters are said to be gay. The rest deal with it. Those who don't want to deal with it move to Novato.
Do people from all over the country flock to Novato to live? Or Milpitas? Or Tracy, Stockton, Vallejo or Fairfield?
No. They come to San Francisco to visit and settle, just as I did four decades ago last August. From Staten Island, New York, where we learned how to get along with all sorts of folks.
My attitude on gay marriage, admittedly not my first attitude, is that it's okay as long as it's confined to gays. I don't want to see any straights marrying gays, or gays marrying straights. This way I don't feel threatened. I look at it like this. Marriage isn't mandatory. Or even womandatory. You can hook up with whom you want and people should leave you alone. Especially rednecks. They should leave you more alone and everyone else can leave them alone. Seems like a fair deal to me.
This evening's news had a clip from today's opinion by appellate court judge William McGuinness, joined by Joanne Parrilli, a former prosecuting attorney from Alameda County. Judge McGuinness wrote that he didn't believe that courts had the power to change the rules on such a fundamental institution such as marriage. Leave this to the legislature, he ruled. Great. Meanwhile, Governor Schwartzenegger, our state champion of civil rights (he vetoed legislation requiring fair line-ups and video-taping of alleged confessions and interrogations in criminal cases this week, with the election for governor coming up in weeks) vetoed a gay marriage bill, saying that this wasn't something for the legislature but the courts.
I'm beginning to suspect that the usual suspects are kicking the hot potatoe along, as we usually do in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Meanwhile we had eight U.S. soldiers and marines killed in Baghdad the other day. Pres. Bush is being criticized for jumping into a war we didn't need. It's like Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor, and in response, we attacked Bolivia, wrote Ron Fimrite, Jr., a writer for the S.F. Chronicle.
The president doesn't like all the war criticism. People marched all over the country against the war today. "Soft on national security," is the president's rejoinder.
How about "the president is soft on lies?" Or "lacking in reality?"
I never hear his critics come back with anything good. Where are the Mort Sahls and George Carlins when we really need them?
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What's your attitude on gay marriage?
God doesn't like gays? Maybe ancient tribes didn't like gays, but my God made gays, just as he made everything else. He did make everything else, didn't he? Then why not gays?
Do you recall seeing a gay exception to the Ten Commandments? I don't.
I could go on. This case is going up. Someday gays will be getting married in San Francisco and more folks will be moving to Novato. Housing is less expensive there. I wonder whether Novato has gay bars. Probably.
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