Gay marriage ruling about to come down

[*bfine32*]

(06-28-2015, 10:51 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: My guess would be that we spend more time remembering the immorality behind slavery and have developed a national guilt around it while we often do not even acknowledge the fact that we threw thousands of Americans into internment camps when we remember WWII. Slavery is also much worse. That and there are more people in this country whose ancestors were directly affected by slavery than there are people who were affected by internment.

Some thoughts. I'm not really outraged at what he said. I understand the philosophy behind it and, while I disagree, I don't think it was inflammatory.

As for the question posed to Matt, I thought Kennedy was dead on when he repeatedly said that the right to marry is protected by the Constitution. He said that the "Court has long held that the right to marriage is protected by the Constitution". He then goes on to say that the 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law, explaining that this promise that our rights won't be infringed upon means the government cannot deny this right of marriage to same sex couples.

Justice Thomas disagrees with the notion that a guarantee of due process means that the government has to protect the right for same sex couples marry the same way it has to protect it with opposite sex couples. He sees this use of due process as "creating" a right, something Kennedy does not say. Thomas has a philosophical issue with substantive due process versus procedural due process. So, people are not executing a 180, but rather agreeing with Kennedy that this right is protected and disagreeing with Thomas that this right is being created. The majority opinion didn't suggest that this right was just now created, only the dissenting opinions have.

Kenndey wrote a love story, not a judicial opinion. Color me surprised that you agree with his writings. 

Quote:"The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.…The Court, like many institutions, has made assumptions defined by the world and time of which it is a part."

Obviously Kennedy didn't attempt to introduce new things to the Constitution; it was Thomas and his bunch.