NYT Editorial: Prop 8 "Obliterated the Rights of a Targeted Minority"

An excellent editorial in The New York Times laser-focuses on the central challenge to the constitutionality of California's Proposition 8, the voter-approved ban on same sex marriage. The editorial questions the initiative process to "obliterate an existing right for a targeted minority."

The case turns on whether Proposition 8 is a constitutional amendment, requiring only approval by a bare majority of voters, or a more far-reaching constitutional revision, requiring a two-step process: either a constitutional convention or a two-thirds vote of the State Legislature followed by voter ratification. The court, which has struck down several measures before, should not lightly overturn the will of the people. But it has not confronted a revision this far-reaching in terms of upsetting basic rights and the state’s constitutional structure.

The court has correctly determined that the equal protection clause prohibits governmental discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, which extends the right of marriage to same-sex couples. But the issue goes well beyond gay rights. Allowing Proposition 8 to stand would greatly limit the court’s ability to uphold the basic rights of all Californians and preclude the Legislature from performing its constitutional duty to weigh such monumental changes before they go to voters.

Almost anytime the rights of a minority are put to a popular vote, they will lose. Prop 8 is a dangerous precedent that demonstrates this all-too-well. That's probably why the nation's leading civil rights groups—including the California NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund—rejoined the marriage equality fight and are suing Prop 8.

In other Prop 8-related news: The California Fair Political Practices Commission will investigate the role of the Mormon Church, which heavily bankrolled the campaign to ban same sex marriage.

California’s Legal Tangle [NYT]
CA to Investigate Mormon Aid to Prop 8 [P1Q]

Did You Read ...
NAACP Rejoins CA Marriage Fight, Suit Against 8 [R20]
CA Speaker Bass: No on 8 "Bypassed Black LGBT Leadership" [R20]
Dan Savage Pulls Racist Column Before Appearance on "Colbert" [R20]
Not One Black Gay/Lesbian Couple in "No on Prop 8" Ads. Why? [R20]
N-Word Hurled at Blacks During Prop 8 Protest[R20]
OMG The Gays Are Trying To Get Gangsta With It [Cannick]
N-Bomb Is Dropped on Black Passerby [PHB]
Stop Scapegoating Black Folk on Prop 8 [JJP]
WeHo Marriage Rally Attracts "Noah's Arc" Stars [R20]
"Yes We Can" to "YES on 8": Blacks Overwhelmingly Approve Prop 8 [R20]
Anti-Gay, Black Pastors Use Children for Prop 8 [R20]
Blige, Etheridge Raise $3.9M for No on Prop 8 [R20]
"Noah's Arc" Cast Urges "No" on Proposition 8 [R20]
"Noah's Arc" Actor Doug Spearman, Black Ministers Urge "NO" on Prop 8 [R20]
SCLC Leader Criticizes Anti-Gay, Black Pastors [R20]

Comments

[Nathan James]

The gay-rights movement and the civil-rights movement of the Sixties are not only connected, they are inextricably linked. When Dr. Martin Luther king sought guidance at the beginning of the civil-rights years, he turned to Bayard Rustin, a strategist who was known to Dr. King to be a gay black man. When the civil-rights movement needed to find its literary voice, there was James Baldwin indicting white America for its ignorance, and Langston Hughes crying for the restoration of black people's dreams. Paul Robeson put into poetry the anguish of the generations. Without them and countless other gay and lesbian people of color, we can say immediately that the civil-rights movement would have been greatly diminished, or delayed by decades. The contributions of the gays and lesbians of that era made the election of Barack Obama as President possible.

Now we live in a time when the marriage and adoption rights of gays (to name just a couple) are denied them. As Rod astutely points out, if certain other rights we enjoy today were on the ballot in the Sixties, they would also lose. My parents, like Barack Obama's, would be in violation of the miscegenation laws in 17 states, had they tried to marry in the time when I was born. It ultimately took the Supreme Court to rectify thois, in 1967.

I daresay that's where gay marriage will eventually end up, before that august body. I hope, in the interim, that people across America, gay and straight, will wake up and rediscover that "injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere". I also pray we are reminded that our history puts us much closer to onwe another than many wil ever admit.