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Prop 8 Backers Admit That They Don't Really Believe Their Own Arguments
Oh this Prop 8 stuff just gets hairier and hairier. We were thumbing through some articles about the people who backed Prop 8; that includes groups like the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which despite the word "liberty" in their name wants to wield control over all California marriages -- every single one -- vetoing whichever couples they don't like. They plan to use Prop 8 to continue stopping marriages and to nullify the approximately 18,000 that they don't currently like -- and possibly more in the future. And the Amicus Brief that they filed in Prop 8's favor contained this scintillating quote:
"Although no one expects these religious adherents or their ministers to be required actually to conduct same-sex marriage ceremonies..."
Oh reeeeeeeally! Nice of you to say so. That's certainly at odds with the rhetoric during the campaign, when you assured frightened churchgoers that homosexuals were beating down churches' doors, demanding to be married by everyone in sight; and that Prop 8 was the only thing standing between ministers' freedom to choose whom to wed versus conscription into an chain gang of mandatory gay-marrying labor.
So. Nobody nobody expects ministers to be forced to marry anyone they want? Even the very people who were making that claim just a few weeks ago? Well, that's good to know. We'll keep it in mind.
The argument that the Becket fund makes, incidentally, is terrifying; and it doesn't just affect the gays, but all Californians. They claim that Prop 8 prevents "a systemic, irresolvable conflict between church and state," which is only true inasmuch as the "conflict" in question amounts to "we wanted to control California, and California tried to resist."
The people who crafted Prop 8 don't just want the freedom to choose which marriages they can recognize. They already had that freedom before Prop 8, and they admit as much in their brief. What they want is to control which marriages anyone can recognize.
You can easily test the moral weight of their argument by replacing "gays" with any other suspect class. For example, they write that they don't want to be "sued and otherwise punished for their refusal to treat same-sex and different-sex couples as moral equivalents." How would that argument read with other suspect classes?
"We don't want to be sued and otherwise punished for our refusal to treat Jews and Catholics as moral equivalents. We don't want to be sued and otherwise punished for our refusal to treat Mexicans and Americans as moral equivalents. We don't want to be sued and otherwise punished for our refusal to treat woman and men as moral equivalents. And that is why we must prevent EVERYONE from treating these groups as moral equivalents."
Hm. Yeah. Hard to support sentiments like those. But that's exactly what the Prop 8 people want the Supreme Court to do: to allow the Beckets of the world to force us all -- every single person in California -- to discriminate against a minority.
Disclosure: SFist_Matt is the creator of Stop8.org, a site that monitors the media for reporting on California marriage equality.