Sean King

My photo
San Juan, Puerto Rico, United States

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Finally, A Gay Rights Protest That Makes Some Sense:

Same-sex marriage advocates urge "Day Without a Gay" to protest ban.


I think the gay rights movement would be better served by placing much greater emphasis on persuading the public and much less emphasis on persuading judges. What gays want, and in my view deserve, is acceptance--acceptance of their lifestyle and acceptance of their spouses.

But, acceptance will never come through the courts.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmm, do you really think it WILL never come through the courts? Or that it SHOULD never come through the courts? Because one could argue that acceptance comes from exposure, and like the civil rights movement, which did go through the courts, people came to accept black Americans after being exposed to them in their schools and lives and businesses because they were forced to do so through laws. Now, the question to me is not whether or not acceptance will come about from being court ordered to be inclusive, because generationally it will out as time goes by if the laws force an "integration" of sorts, but rather whether or not that SHOULD be how it is handled. Semantics and all of that, but still....

-- Your Sister

Sean King, JD, CPA, MAcc said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Sean King, JD, CPA, MAcc said...

My goodness, I hope it never comes through the courts.

This idea that women and blacks somehow won their civil rights through the courts, and that the courts are somehow champions of such rights, is one of the most insidious ideas in popular culture.

For instance, in the case of BOTH blacks and women, the issue of their equal standing was ultimately resolved not by courts, but by clear Constitutional amendments passed by a SUPERMAJORITY of the states(Amendment XIX which granted women the right to vote, and Amendments XIII, XIV and XV which insured civil rights for blacks).

So, contrary to the Left's accepted history, the famous Supreme Court cases that supposedly "created" equality for blacks (such as Brown v. Board of Education) were not activist judicial interpretations promulagated by an enlightened few which eventually came to be accepted begrudgedly by the masses. Rather, they were objectively reasonable interpretations of the wording of these majority-supported amendments. As such, these civil rights cases overturned not the majority's will, as the Left would have us believe, but rather the wholey unreasonable and disingenuous interpretations of these same amendments (e.g., as in Plessy v. Furguson) by prior activist courts who sought to "interpret away" their clear meaning and intent thereby specifically undermining the will of the majority. So, Brown v. Board of Education was not an activist interpretation, rather it was the remedy for prior activist interpretations.

The history is clear: Women's and negro rights were first enshrined in civil law not by courts, but rather by Constitutional Amendments (i.e., the will of the majority). For some background on this, go to wikipedia.org and look up Brown v. Board of Education.

My hope is that gay rights are likewise ultimatley recongized first by a marjority of people, not by a supposedly enlightened and unelected few who seek to impose their legally unsupportable opinions on everyone else by fiat.

Unlike most people, I'm just as hostile to judicial activism when I SUPPORT the utlimate finding of the court (morally, not legally) as I am when I oppose it.