This is why we can't have unconstitutional things!

[captainsblog]

I'll be playing Buzzword Bingo over the next few days as I read the Faux News stories and Protect Marriage For Republican Adulterers and Serial Divorcees websites, just to see how many points I can rack up for the following phrases:

activist judge
will of the people/voters
this great nation
Founding Fathers

(other nominees are welcome)

I'm sure their press releases and donation scripts have been written for months and will now be riling up the population of Wingnutistan with these and other cries about the demise of this great nation because we might let two men, or two women, formalize their love for each other in the same way we've always done mix-and-match.

Bullpucky.

The Founding Fathers had it right- the process, anyway. They enshrined a select group of governmental powers and popular rights in the body of the Constitution, and through separation of powers and the amendment process, they made it possible for those powers and rights to be adjusted from time to time, but only through a clear showing of the will of the people manifested in an amendment process that is decidedly undemocratic (at least in terms of requiring way more than just 50%-plus-one of the voters for such a change to take effect).

Face it. Left to their own devices, the voting masses of a third of this country or more would still be enslaving 10 to 20 percent of our population- in schools and homes and transportation if not literally.  Not only would abortion be criminal in similarly large swaths of the country, but so would artificial contraception. People with disabilities would be begging to be merely ignored, rather than mistreated, marginalized and denied the basic rights of everyday living that we take for granted, just because we get "uncomfortable" around people different than us.  And ask Stanley Milgram about how majorities and mobs dish out pain in the literal sense before arguing with me over how they'd handle the metaphorical kind of pain in a pure democracy.

The activist judge is the one who ignores these limits on the government's reach into our lives. Who takes a purely fictional creature of legislation known as a "corporation" and endows it with the rights of an individual to "speak" while still protecting it and its owners from the criminal and financial consequences of their words and actions.  Who ignores half the text of the Second Amendment while adding all kinds of extra requirements for an individual to invoke his or her rights under the Fifth. Hell, who decides that he's bored in the last few weeks of football season and says, hey, why don't we just decide this Presidential election ourselves? It's not the one who looks at two people symbolically brought before the Court, asks them what they want, and can't countenance treating them differently than another pair of people who differ from that first couple only in that one has an odd-numbered pair of penises and the other one an even one.

Wow- I worked in all the buzzwords myself! It's a bingo if I get credit for the Free Space- which, at least for today, this country is once again a little bit closer to being.

Comments

[fangirlsays.livejournal.com]

Turns out the activist judge was a Republican appointee. I plan on reminding people of that a lot in the coming months. ;)

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

As were Earl Warren (author of Brown), Lewis Powell (author of Roe) and Warren Burger (author of the United States v. Nixon decision on executive privilege that essentially deposed the old Dick).

Mindless ideologues? UR DOING IT WRONG!

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

Buzzword wise, I think we'll get the classic arguments about procreation, sanctity, etc, too.

I... damn, man, now I _really_ need a girlfriend.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

At dinner just now, we told the dogs that they could now legally marry each other.

They seemed less than impressed.

[bluevicksen11.livejournal.com]

Hear hear!!

You'll also see "slippery slope", or various forms of that, um... argument? Can you really call it an argument?

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

I think they want to wait for further legal rulings, because this case is so funny exactly because the people arguing for Prop 8 were astoundingly inept, and did not manage to get people you could actually call experts on why gay marriage might be wrong. Those people still exist! They didn't get them! I do not know how this happened.

But that's a battle for another day, for now I'll just go read the opinion and laugh my ass off.

[nentikobe.livejournal.com]

Beautifully bingo'd !! I am once again proud of California - even the republican governator had something good to say about the overturning. I am pleased.

[shinuhana.livejournal.com]

"sanctity"

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

Oooooh, good one!

I can tell you, though: I've taken Constitutional Law, and there's no such thing as a Sanctity Clause.

[bktheirregular]

Never stops people from thinking they see one in between the lines. I remember that from Con Law as well.

Beeps need to remember their Niemoller, anyway.

[khuckie.livejournal.com]

Silly Ray...Don't you know that we're only supposed to follow and protect the parts of the Constitution that Fox News tells us to?

Now they're looking to change the 14th amendment. Jerks.