Are you for or against gay marriage.
This is a yes or no question. This relates to another thread whereby Dive and Charles believe 'some' conservatives are against it as opposed to most/majority are.
I submit that the majority are...
I voted yes, But I must clarify That I want to see it done right. Either by States making it legal individually or by A federal Constitutional Amendment, and not by Judicial Fiat.
you don't need an amendment to permit equal protection under the law. equal protection is already guaranteed.
and appropriately defining the term equal protection to include gays is not 'judicial fiat' it is constitutional construction and its what the court is supposed to do.
why should anyone wait around for a constitutional amendment to enforce a right they already have under the law.
No. The courts are in place for redress. Courts do not exist to make law. That is the job of legislatures. That is clearly in the US and all Constitutions of each of the 50 states.
CRS/LII Annotated Constitution Fourteenth Amendment
The Development of Substantive Due Process
Although many years after ratification the Court ventured the not very informative observation that the Fourteenth Amendment “operates to extend . . . the same protection against arbitrary state legislation, affecting life, liberty and property, as is offered by the Fifth Amendment,”34 and that “ordinarily if an act of Congress is valid under the Fifth Amendment it would be hard to say that a state law in like terms was void under the Fourteenth,”35 the significance of the due process clause as a restraint on state action appears to have been grossly underestimated by litigants no less than by the Court in the years immediately following its adoption. From the outset of our constitutional history due process of law as it occurs in the Fifth Amendment had been recognized as a restraint upon government, but, with the conspicuous exception of the Dred Scott decision,36 only in the narrower sense that a legislature must provide “due process for the enforcement of law.”
The 14th Amendment provides for "equal protection under the law"..
In the above annotation from the Lousians butcher case( see link) there is no gurantee of "equality" under the law...
Issues such as gay marriage MUST be decided by the legislatures of the States. The courts can offer redress to parties which claim to be harmed. However no single judge or panel of judges should be permitted to supercede the legislative process.
That is how our government is supposed to work.
No one or no group is entitled to a "short cut" just because they feel strongly about an issue and want a resolution "now".
