Eric Bradner, reporting for the Evansville Courier Press has an article entitled Indiana lawmakers could announce wait on measure banning same-sex marriage.
The announcement is expected to come yet this afternoon. The last General Assembly passed a proposed state constitutional amendment defining marriage as being only between one man and one woman and also prohibiting recognition of rights for unmarried couples that are “substantially similar” to marriage. The process of amending the state Constitution requires that this General Assembly pass the same resolution either this year or next year. It would then go to a vote at a general election.
The rationale for waiting is that some similar questions are going to be considered by the U.S. Supreme Court in the upcoming session. If the Supreme Court issues an opinion, it could well have an impact on the proposed state amendment.
Also influential seems to be the waning interest in pursuing this amendment by some Republican lawmakers.
Doghouse Riley says
The rationale for waiting is that some similar questions are going to be considered by the U.S. Supreme Court in the upcoming session.
Y’know, if the General Assembly showed that kind of respect to precedent it’d get to go home in half the time.
Jed says
The General Assembly, the Legislative Branch, is superior to any arm of the Judicial Branch and need never defer to that inferior body.
I wonder:
Is there a right to be gay? From whence does this right come?
If there is no right to be gay, from what fount springs the right to be gay married?
Terry Walsh says
The legislative branch “need never defer to that inferior body”? So Jed believes that Marbury vs Madison was wrongly decided and should be reversed. This is not an uncommon position among right-wingers; Newt Gingerich advocated hauling federal judges who made decisions contrary to the partisan political passions of the moment before Congress and defunding their courts if they couldn’t appease their interrogators.
I wonder:
Is there a right to have brown hair?
Don Sherfick says
The Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constituton fits in there somewhere.
Jed says
Where might it fit, Don? I can find no right to be gay in the document, nor any right to marriage, at all, much less gay marriage.
Terry Walsh says
Jed didn’t respond to my question about hair color, because he knows it demonstrates how invalid his whole line of reasoning is.
Jed, read the ninth amendment to the Constitution(right-wingers love the second and tenth amendments but pretend the ninth doesn’t exist), then the 14th, paying special attention to the equal protection clause.
What his first post indicates is, like most right-wingers, he is either unaware of, or simply rejects, the crowning genius of the founders and the Constitution: rule of the majority coupled with protection for the minority. The Bill of Rights is a list of things the government can’t do, no matter how huge of a majority might want them. The ninth amendment exists because James Madison, among others, foresaw that people like Jed would try to claim Americans had only those rights explicitly named, and none others.
Doug says
Not sure I recall anything about inferiority in the state Constitution. But, leaving that aside for a moment, the rights implicated are the rights to equal protection of the laws and the right not to be discriminated against on an irrational basis.
Jed says
See, this is odd, Doug, because y’all just got through sayin’ how there’s really no such thing as a right, only a momentary government permission. Now y’all want something as esoteric and abstract as “the right not to be discriminated against on an irrational basis” (and it’s one heck of a stretch to cram gay marriage through that tiny keyhole) to be accepted as bedrock of human interaction when y’all are simultaneously yammering from every rooftop that people should be denied the means of self defense. There’s no logical consistency here nor any serious work in Ethics, merely the present wants of modern urban dwellers who accept their desires as conclusions and manufacture whatever premises, insults or social pressures they believe will insulate the desire from challenge. This is anti-logic.
Doug says
I think what I’ve said in the past is that rights don’t exist in the absence of government. Because they don’t. The right to equal treatment under the laws is written into the Constitution.
The bit about yammering about denying everyone the means of self defense is a strawman. Solid work burning it down.
Doug says
Also too, the requirement that laws have a rational basis is not something esoteric.
Jed says
Your first post is tautological.
Your second is false. Laws can have whatever foundation an enacting body desires. In this country, an active judiciary has expanded a footnote in a self-made rationale to allow it risible “levels of scrutiny” in further self-made law. Even in this country, however, it misstates the law to say that every law must have a “rational basis.” That utterly laughable level of scrutiny is not employed on every law, only those that impact a fundamental right. You still haven’t shown how being gay is a right. Further, you’ve established no moral foundation employable in a discussion with Iran to keep that country, and others, from executing known homosexuals on sight. Carolene Products isn’t much in the way of eternal moral theory.
carlito brigante says
Even in this country, however, it misstates the law to say that every law must have a “rational basis.” That utterly laughable level of scrutiny is not employed on every law, only those that impact a fundamental right.
You could not be more incorrect. Rational basis scrunity is employed in any due process of equal protection analysis. Its roots go back to McCollugh v. Maryland.
To fail to regognize this foundational basis for any law would permit a chaos and brutality that even North Korea could not emulate.
Jed says
CB, Please take the time to learn something about the American legal system. “Rational basis” review is, as correctly noted, “not employed on every law.” Try such a review the next time you fight a parking ticket.
Carlito Brigante says
Jed,
I think I know an awful lot about the American legal system. IU does not just hand out JDs CYM laude to any troll that does not understand does not understand the three levels of constitutional scrutiny that even a community college Con Law grad would understand.
I could raise a lack of rational basis review on a parking ticket, bot given that the police power of the state is almost plenary, I would surely lose.
Johnny from Badger Grove says
Another year could mean a big change in popular opinion. They could eventually put this before the people and have it shot down.
Doghouse Riley says
That ship has sailed. (And our new governor is under water.)
Look, if Brian Bosma is out there trying to sound sensible about social issues then there’s a real problem. They’ve got a proposed amendment which as recently as last year was all that was standing between Civilization and Babylonian captivity. Now they want to wait and see? A Court decision isn’t going to change the wording of the amendment, or the supposed principle behind it. So vote, already.
It’s possible, I suppose, that they see this as such a huge winner in ’14 that they wanna hold off until then, but that’s not what the polls say. And even if the rhetoric wasn’t really supposed to mean anything, why take a chance that it could come back to bite you when it counts?
Money. The answer’s money. Who knew major corporations have God’s ear?
Doug says
With respect to the timing of the popular vote, I’m not 100% certain, but I think it would be a November 2014 ballot question regardless of whether the General Assembly passed it this year or next year.
Interested says
The earliest the public vote can happen is 2014 – regardless if they vote this year or next.
Bosma seems confident it will still pass the legislature but there is concern bubbling underneath that this issue could aid turnout for Democrats in the election.
Till next year…
Jed says
So even more Democrats from Mass Ave, Butler Tarkington, Meridian Kessler and Broad Ripple will turn out? Lord, how many additional voters are to be found among this noisome and religiously politically active group?
Doug says
I think what we’re finding is that religion is becoming less and less of a bar to voters believing that same sex couples should be treated equally under the government’s marriage laws. In point of fact, most of my gay friends are much more religious than I am.
Jed says
Indeed, as the novel subject is considered, people have arrived at a multitude of secular reasons for despising and forbidding gay marriage.
Ah, a sneaky move, positing a category. Is there a right for same-sex persons to couple? Can people create their own minorities or groups and then demand equal treatment of same?
While your post was a feint that wasn’t, in any way, responsive to mine, I’m left wondering: You have gay friends? More than one? For straight adult males with straight male lives and straight male interests, the odds of this are statistically slight.
carlito brigante says
Please share a secular reason for “despising and forbidding gay marriage.” I would like to rip the testicles off of your strawman and stick them in his mouth.
Jed says
Well, while your argument is going for my argument’s ‘nads, he sees ’em comin’, draws his .44, puts three large holes in your argument and kills the perp argument dead on the spot. He then ties the felonious corpse of an argument to his trucknutz trailer hitch and drags it around the Circle and Mass Ave., a few times.
All metaphorically speaking, of course.
exhoosier says
I think even this dim-bulb legislature is smart enough to know there is a good chance the vote will lose. Look at the reaction to the people in Sullivan, Ind., who wanted a separate straights-only prom — the backlash, even locally, is against the anti-gay people, particularly the special ed teacher who chirped that gay people had “no purpose in life.”
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2013/02/11/1568631/indiana-school-community-calls-for-gay-free-prom-as-media-sugarcoats-homophobia/
So instead the leg will just keep the ban in place, even though it’s clear THAT is losing support quickly.