Obama administration will no longer defend DOMA

What's interesting to me on all this is Obama's continued waffling on gay marriage -- personally he is still coming to grips with it or something.

I'm an Obama fan, but come on -- the dude has no problems with gay marriage, except for the political consequences of supporting it. And everyone knows that and gives him a pass (Which is fine, by the way, I just think it's funny.)

 

I think he's for it, too. Just like I think he's a closet agnostic or atheist.

But, for argument's sake, you can certainly be against gay marriage as policy and still think it's unconstitutional as a violation of equal protection.

I'm the opposite. I am 100 percent in favor of gay marriage as policy. I am not 100 percent convinced that it is a constitutional right.

 

This is what I don't get.

He's "still wrestling with his own views"?

Come on.

That's like when John Edwards said that he was against gay marriage, but hoped that his kids generation would approve of it. (Or something similarly stupid.)

Stop trying to have it both ways and just come out and support it.

It's inevitable. Most people don't give a shit, and as Mizzou pointed out, it's not even a straight left/right issue.

 

I wish the government would get out of the marriage business entirely.

 

Amen to that. Marriages are for churches. Let everyone have a legal civil union with anyone/anything they want. There shouldn't be any benefits to those civil unions, but let them do it. Unite with your buddy, your couch, your Weber grill, your labrador, whatever.

 

Private contracts?

 

Government has to be involved if just to help mediate things when it goes bad, esp. when kids are involved. Maybe there's a different way about it, but I don't mind government being involved.

I do mind government using religion to decide who can and can't be married. I've yet to hear an argument against gay marriage that doesn't boil down to religion.

And being in Oklahoma, there are plenty of conservatives who see this as a political issue, and a major one for them.

 

It's amazing you made it. By now, your heterosexual should've fallen apart to be replaced with a hedonistic gay marriage. You're a very lucky man.

 

How is it not? How can the government sanction marriage based on sexuality/gender for one subset of people but not the other without it being, on its face, discriminatory? How can government institutions (like colleges/universities) approve domestic partner benefits for one subset of people and not another without it being, on its face, discriminatory? It flies in the face of "equal protection."

 

Not sure I'd go quite that far. I think I would limit it to consenting human adults ... of whatever gender rocks your world.

In all seriousness, I'm a pretty conservative smallish-town Southerner and I don't have a problem with gays entering into a legally-recognized union.

 

It's funny cuz it's true.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/future-us-history-students-its-pretty-embarrassing,19099/

 

Because homosexual people are not necessarily a protected class. They have not been recognized as such, as race has been (and to a lesser extent, gender), because race was what the framers of the 14th Amendment had in mind when it was written.

Even the California decision that struck down Prop 8 under equal protection did so under a "rational basis" review, saying there was no rational basis for the law, not under "strict scrutiny," which would find that homosexuals were a protected class under the Constitution.

Here is a decision from New York that says there are indeed rational bases for gay marriage bans:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=15855574883010333779&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr