The Fourteenth Amendment: It doesn't exclude gays, you know.

[originalpckelly]

"Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

It doesn't say except for LGBT folks, now does it?

There is no way, under that text, that you could even think of discriminating against LGBT folks. It's just not legal.

By that text, the precedent set in Loving v. Virginia applies to my people too. That is all one can say.

[ejpoeta]

1. but it doesn't explicitly say gay or LGBT either. and apparently unless it

specifically includes you then it excludes you. I always wonder, though when I hear women and black people saying they want to get back to the original intent of the the framers... because I am a woman, and we weren't included in any of it... and i am sure blacks weren't either beyond being 3/5ths a person.

[justiceischeap]

2. Yet state after state are allowed to pass laws that deny us equal protection

So either the entire LGBT*.* legal community is stupid or you're missing something. I would think someone would have gone down this avenue already if they could. :)

[originalpckelly]

4. There have been people who argued it...

and those who opposed it said that the former meaning of marriage was SO incredibly different from people who are gay being married, that they cannot at all think of applying this to marriage of gays.

However, if you look at the arguments against interracial marriage, there is a striking similarity to the argument used there.

Stuff to the effect of: if God placed all the different races on different continents, it's against his will to allow them to "mix". :eyes:

And what of people who are intersex? You know, there are all kinds of people who are not male or female, and because the laws do not apply to them and don't allow them to engage in a marriage, because only one man and one woman can get married, these "one man and one woman" amendments and laws are not equally protecting the population, they are left out. The argument used that people who are gay could always go out and marry a person of the opposite sex is not tenable for them, because the laws have binary sex, when there are not just two.

[TheWraith]

14. Serious constitutional cases are very hard and take a long time to accomplish.

They require meticulous preparation, finding the exact right case to pursue, and some very high powered lawyers. It's not just a matter of "either someone's done it, or it can't be done."

[xchrom]

3. Recommend

[originalpckelly]

7. I actually when and read about the anti-interracial marriage (anti-miscegenation) laws...

and it's striking just how similar the arguments are. From it being against nature, in the case of LGBT folks it's sex. In the case of anti-miscegenation laws, it was that the people of different skin tones were on different continents.

OH YEAH, and they also wanted to protect the institution of marriage. :rofl: Where have we heard that shit before, right?

[RKP5637]

5. Recommend!!! n/t

[MineralMan]

6. I think that's the key to the eventual end to that discrimination.

It may take a different SCOTUS, but the argument is very clear and so simple it cannot be ignored.

The state-by-state process is slowly working, but the real key will be to make it simply unconstitutional to engage in any such discrimination. A SCOTUS ruling will settle that issue, eventually. This SCOTUS? I'm not as confident.

[originalpckelly]

9. For it to really work, even if DOMA is gone...

you'll have to have a court case about it, stating plainly that all laws dealing with this are not accurate when they ban marriage like that.

[MineralMan]

11. I'm sure that case will be brought, as soon as it's likely

that it will see its way clear through the SCOTUS. There are a couple of cases working through the system even now that could be interpreted by a friendly court in that way. Problem is that the current SCOTUS isn't a friendly court. We need to change that.

[KamaAina]

8. It doesn't?!

What the hell were they thinking??!! Of course, you've gotta wonder about those Civil War types, like Gen. Winfield "Old Fuss and Feathers" Scott, if you know what I mean.

:sarcasm: :sarcasm: :sarcasm:

[Sirveri]

10. I believe that the argument is that it doesn't prevent gays from getting married.

After all, you can still marry, it just has to be someone of the opposite sex. They then typically also talk about marrying a horse or a dog.

In a way they are however correct, the law is applied equally to everyone. The law doesn't say you can marry who you want, just that they must be of the opposite sex. This obviously has issues with regards to interracial marriage. However race is a protected class while sexual orientation is not. Since one can't change sexual orientation, I believe it should also be a protected class, doubly so since it doesn't cause any harm to society.

[originalpckelly]

12. And anti-miscegenation laws that applied to whites and blacks were legal...

because of that idea. "Well, it's legal because both BLACKS AND WHITES are punished."

It's not a real argument, it's just an argument to falsely allow something awful.

It may allow us to get married to a person of the opposite sex, but it doesn't allow an intersex person to get married AT ALL, unless they are assigned a gender at birth and forced to go through a surgery that may damage them for life.

[Sirveri]

15. That's my assessment as well.

Sexual orientation needs to become a protected class, at which point the 14th applies. As for intersex, I think they stamp whatever your genitals look like. But they might have changed that to be whatever you're supposed to be genetically since they can now test for that and then assign based on that. Intersex is strange and I'm really not sure exactly what the proper approach on that one is, much easier to simply focus on homo/hetero sexuality and clean those up first before getting into subjects like that. If you have an easy problem and a hard problem, solve the easy problem first, then you have less to think about and the hard problem becomes a bit easier.

[marginlized]

13. Delmas had it right in 1885

Speaking of the 14th Amendment:

It's mission was to raise the humble, the downtrodden, and the oppressed to the level of the most exalted upon the broad plain of humanity - to make man the equal of man; but not to make the creature of the State - the bodiless, soulless, and mystic creature called a corporation - the equal of the creature of God...