Sunday, November 09, 2008

From yesterday's Washington Post


Sigh.

3 comments:

PG said...

I think in fairness to the California egg producers, there should have been a simultaneous ban on eggs being sold in California that were NOT produced under the same conditions that California chicken farmers are required to observe. I don't understand why they should have to compete unequally with out-of-state or Mexican eggs that still can be produced under abusive conditions, particularly at a time when the economy will make people more price-conscious.

Comrade Kevin said...

Just as our parents had to wait to see the first black president, so to we will have to wait to see same-sex marriage legalized across the board. And I still think it will take a SCOTUS ruling to do so.

PG said...

comrade kevin,

That's one of the interesting things about the In Re Marriage cases -- the decision that California must recognize same-sex marriages was based on the California constitution, which does not have a provision specifying that the law cannot discriminate on the basis of sex, and so far as I know the state constitution also hasn't been interpreted by the courts to prohibit sex discrimination by the law.

Contrast this with Perez v. Sharpe, the 1948 CA Supreme Court decision that legalized interracial marriage in California, but did so based on the *federal* constitution (state courts are free to use the federal constitution as a basis for decision making). This was almost 20 years before the U.S. Supreme Court got around to legalizing interracial marriage in the Loving case.

In my opinion, same-sex marriage is the inevitable next step after interracial marriage; if the government cannot limit our marriage partners by race, nor can they limit our partners on the basis of sex. (The Constitution does not protect against discrimination based on numbers or family relationship, however, so polygamy and incest are still out.) However, if we figure that the U.S. Supreme Court will get around to ruling for SSM on the same schedule it took them for interracial marriage -- 13 years after Brown v. Board -- I would estimate that SCOTUS will so rule in 2016 at the earliest (13 years after Lawrence v. Texas).