The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the state from depriving ANY PERSON of life, liberty, or property without due process of law or equal protection under the law. Due process means that states may not arbitrarily deprive people of their liberty interests. The Constitution doesn't mention hats or bedtimes, but the government doesn't have the power to arbitrarily deprive people of the right to wear a hat or the right to decide for themselves what time to go to bed. Insisting that the entire universe of rights must be listed in a constitution before it can be protected against government deprivations is foolish. We are not a pure democracy. A group of people cannot abuse the power of the state to impose their morals on the rest of society. No one cares that you personally think the private sexual practices of two consenting adults is deviant. We are not ruled by missionaries who command the natives engage only in missionary style sex.
You make some valid points. But on counter point. Society as a whole should decide what is to be considered right and wrong and moral and immoral. Those decisions should be made by everyone based on votes, not by 5 unelected old farts in black robes.
the SC decision on gay marriage WILL be used as a valid precedent for multiple marriage, polygamy, sibling marriage, and all other forms of human grouping.
Moral disapproval alone is not a legitimate government basis for restricting rights or doling them out to special groups while denying those same rights to others. The people don't want the morality police nosing about in every intimate corner of their lives.
Talk about hypocrisy. you say that but support mandating that people accept gay marriage as normal. YOU are the ones intruding on people's lives.
I agree, I don't give a shit what you and your partner or partners do in private. But I don't want the government telling me that I must condone it.
You don't have to "accept" anything. You can believe other people's sex lives are perverted. They might believe your sex life is perverted. All of you can just keep your noses out of other people's bedrooms. Minding your own private business isn't the same thing as condoning someone else's private business. If you're a government official standing behind a counter serving the public, do your job. Hand out the marriage licenses, the driver licenses, the fishing licenses, etc., to people who are entitled to them in accordance with the law.
bedroom privacy and government sanctionin gay marriage are two totally different things.
This is true.
The government is telling all americans that the MUST accept gay marriage as a normal human activity.
This is not true.
The government is telling all Americans that the institution of marriage is legal and valid with respect to the government.
Every American is still free to believe that gay marriage is lolfritterz.
That is no different than the government telling all americans that they MUST accept that homosexuality is a mental disease.
This is not true either.
The point, which you seem to dense to get, is that the government should not be telling us what we must believe.
It's true that the government should not be telling us what we must believe, and everyone (but the superstitious retards) pretty much gets that.
What you may be too dense to understand is that for whatever dopey reasons (probably to tell other Americans what to believe, right?) we have (illegitimately) empowered the government to license people to keep pets, own guns, practice dentistry, paint toenails, drive taxis, cut hair, etc., ... When the licensing requirement is
premised upon some Biblical bullshit to begin with, the illegitimacy of that licensing bullshit is just exacerbated.
When a government official--
acting as an agent of the government--refuses to issue any license (for reasons other than those proscribed by law) they are simply not doing their job, and are in fact denying law abiding folks exercise of their rights and/or legal privileges, and certainly the benefits thereof.
Requiring Kim Davis to do the job she earnestly sought to do and freely chose to accept, is no infringement of her rights, religious or otherwise. She is not personally sanctioning these marriages that she personally finds repugnant... she's certifying that licensees have met the legal requirements (of the government she freely chose to be the agent of) for obtaining said license. Using her office to impose her bullshit religion upon others is illegal--this is not a theocracy--no matter how badly the superstitious retards in this country demand that this is a Christian nation--and Kim Davis is not the Grand Priestess of any religion that this country is allegedly founded upon. When she interposed her bullshit religion into the bullshit state licensing machine, she did not make things better for anyone. Not for herself, and certainly not for her religion.
She made things worse.
She was wrong. On every level.
She is wrong.