It looks as though prop 8 has passed and will (barring last minute legal wrangling) outlaw same sex marriages in California. This is a law that is clearly about a certain part of the population just not liking another part. In my mind, any law that can be translated to, “Even though it has no effect on anyone else, I do not think that those people should be able to do that,” is on very shaky ground. No one has been able to show me any effect on heterosexual couples from a married homosexual one.
Of course all of this is missing the big point. Why is government involved in marriages at all? In point of fact, the government can’t stop anyone from being married, they can only deny privileges to the ones that it doesn’t approve of. This is a classic case of the government causing problems in something that should really be a private matter. All of the issues involving taxation, visiting rights, insurance, parental rights, etc. do not have to resort to the government giving a blessing on a partnership. This is the real problem. Laws are written that assume that the government must be involved, and no one seems to see the alternative. Instead of forcing your beliefs on others (and that could go either way I suppose), live and let live. Do your own thing and mind your own business. There would be far fewer problems if we allowed people to do their own things that do not involve other people and kept the government out of it, or at least kept the government neutral on it…
BTW, I can’t figure out Obama on this. He is clearly not in favor of gay marriages. His opposition to prop. 8 seems an awful lot like partisan posturing. The irony of people voting against prop.8 and voting for Obama was not lost on me. The people in California need to discover the Libertarian party…