Oral Arguments End in Gay Marriage Court Case
After last Thursday’s nice, legalistic hearing on the legality of gay marriage, Friday’s hearing, the last of the two-day hearing, took a turn to the not so nice as the two conservative legal groups arguing against gay marriage said that gay people can’t get married because it would go against the whole point of marriage. Attorneys for the Alliance Defense Fund and the Campaign for California Families argued that since the whole point of marriage is to have kids, gay people can’t get married because they can’t have kids. And besides, won’t somebody think of the children? They further argued that not allowing gay people to marry isn’t discrimination because, as the aptly named Rena Lindevaldsen of the Campaign for California Families put it “they can't perform the basic functions of marriage, therefore it's not discrimination." When the city of San Francisco tried to poke holes in their argument, Lindevaldsen accused the city of San Francisco of “mocking her arguments.” SFist has to wonder, however, if by mocking she means “poking holes in an argument as flimsy as a Tara Reid dress” (and yes, if this looks like an attempt at increasing traffic by mentioning Tara Reid and her proclivity towards nipple-slips, you would be correct).
To prove their point, the conservative groups (arguing, we might add, without much help from Bill Lockyer and the State of California, who it sounds like were very, very quiet during all this) brought in a bunch of “experts” to show that gay people aren’t up to the task of being parents. Experts included a Princeton lecturer and psychiatrist who argued that being gay is in fact a mental disorder; leaders of Exodus International, the group that tries to convert Gay people to straight-hood through the power of prayer; and several other people who claimed scientific evidence that having two daddies is bad for the children. Unfortunately, when the lawyers for the city of San Francisco tried to get an extra day added to the two-day hearing to respond to the “hateful” charges, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer refused to allow it, stating that he intends to base his rulings on the legality of the issue, not “the facts”, whatever that means. Court experts say that in not allowing the city to defend the charges, Kramer is tacitly giving his approval to the statements.
Photo courtesy of the USA Today
From here, the two sides have until Jan. 14th to write their written arguments and then the judge will have 90 days after their arguments are presented to issue his ruling.
In reading about the trial, SFist can’t help but think of that play Inherit the Wind which we read in High School and was based on the Scopes Trial way back in the last century. In it, there was a climatic smack-down of a debate between the Clarence Darrow figure and the William Jennings Bryan figure over the truth of Creationism. The Bryan figure argued that Creationism was indeed a fact because the Bible said so and the Bible is always right. But when confronted by various flaws in that argument by the Darrow figure, the Bryant figure collapsed in a blubbery heap of a mess upon the realization that his logic had no logic. We think of the play only because we keep on waiting for that scene to play out in this debate as one of the anti-gay marriage activists gets turned into a blubbery heap of a mess when confronted on just how stupid most of their arguments are. Someday…