The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has, in a 2–1 ruling, struck down California’s bigoted Proposition 8 (via). Hence, unless a stay is issued, same–sex couples will be able to marry in the 9th circuit’s jurisdiction California again. Personally, I expect a stay to be issued and the appeals process to continue, hence I don’t think same–sex couples will be allowed to marry.
In the decision is granted the proponents of Prop 8 standing to defend, and it rejected the claim that the trial judge, Vaughn Walker, should have disqualified himself because he is gay. The striking down was the correct decision. And in reaction to the ruling, I expect the wingnut and homophobe types to freak out.
From the decision:
“Proposition 8 served no purpose, and had no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California.”
Update: The actual ruling is an extremely narrow, California–specific ruling, and I have therefore corrected that error. Also, the Daily Dish has a mini–roundup of reactions.
John Cole has written a brilliant post about the negative influence of fundamentalism and conservative Christianity on US society (via). An excerpt (links removed):
But from where I stand these days, the only thing I see religion doing in the public sector is gay bashing and telling women, mostly poor and desperate and in deplorable financial and personal situations, what to do with their bodies. I see busybodies deciding what drugs they can dispense to which customers, or deciding that they don’t have to issue a marriage license because of some petty deity that I don’t believe in told them to hate their fellow citizens and ignore the law. In a country in dire financial straits but still spending billions and billions of dollars on education, I see religious folks actively and openly working to make our schoolkids dumber. I see them shooting people who provided a medical procedure, and I see others rummaging through people’s personal lives to find out who hasn’t lived up the word of God. I see glassy-eyed fools running for President claiming that vaccines that save lives actually cause cancer, or that if you get raped and are pregnant, you should just lie back and think of Jeebus and make the best of a bad situation. In fact, everywhere you look these days, if Christianity or religion is getting a mention, it means something ugly is happening and someone somewhere is being victimized, marginalized, or otherwise abused. Go read some of the arguments against integration and you’ll see the same bible verses used today against homosexuals. Fifty years from now, they’ll be recycling them again to trash someone else they don’t like or who isn’t good enough for them.
Today is 
NARAL Pro–Choice America’s annual Blog for Choice Day. This year’s question is “What will I do to help elect pro–choice candidates in 2012″?
Well, strictly speaking, since I’m Canadian I can’t vote in any US election. If there happens to be a by–election here, I’d easily vote for the pro–choice candidate, even though it likely wouldn’t make much of a difference (I live in a safe Conservative seat). The only influence I really have on the US election is indirect, via convincing others to vote in favour of reproductive freedom.
My best option would be to continue doing what I am already doing. Arguing in favour of reproductive rights, such as by showing why it is moral, why the faux–life movement is not really anti–abortion, and so on. It is hard to convince someone as closed–minded as an anti–choicer. After all, they generally really are fighting a war on women. The best way would be to convince those who have been misled into supporting abstinence ignorance–only sex education, pharmacy refusal clauses, and so on. I hope those are simply not as vocal as the misogynists, and are instead a quiet sheep–like majority. But the real misogynists are by far the most vocal. Update: To clarify and provide more info, the point is to show that the politicians who make the biggest issue about abortion are the ones most likely to be causing abortions due to those people’s opposition to reproductive freedom. Convincing those who aren’t against sex education, birth control, and so on is the point, although it is still far better to convince those people to become pro–choice and I will of course attempt that.
My biggest fear is somehow not doing enough. Allowing reproductive rights to be eroded around the edges (this covers more than just abortion) to be rendered so that it still nominally exists while being made impossible to utilize is, in practical terms, no different from not having that right in the first place.
For people who claim to hate government spending so much, they sure had no difficulty finding the money to triple the budget earmarked for defending the Preservation of Bigotry Defense of (heterosexual) Marriage Act.
The goal is to get government money out of the abortion process and if contraceptive services have to suffer a bit of collateral damage in the process, so be it. When The Texas Tribune asked state Rep. Wayne Christian (R-Nacogdoches), a supporter of the family planning cuts, if this was a war on birth control, he said “yes.”
“Well of course this is a war on birth control and abortions and everything, that’s what family planning is supposed to be about,” Christian said.
Family planning clinics are routinely referred to by many Texas Republican legislators as “abortion clinics” even though none of the 71 family planning clinics in the state that receive government funding provide abortions. Texas and federal law prohibits that, but most women’s health clinics will refer women or teens who want an abortion to a provider.
“They’re sitting here, referring women out to receive abortions,” Christian said in an interview with NPR. “Those are the clinics, including Planned Parenthood, we were targeting.”
If he truly wanted to eliminate abortion, he’d be pushing birth control endlessly.
When people like me say that the religious right and faux–lifers are really motivated by a desire to control women, we’re not kidding. People like Wayne Christian really are reactionaries who want women back in their homes.
Former GOP congressman Mickey Edwards has an excellent column at The Atlantic about fixing the broken processes and partisan control of the United States’s political system. I’m finding myself in agreement with him on a number of issues. Eliminating partisan gerrymandering, open primaries, and reduced partisanship in committee assignments are all excellent ideas.
