From The Onion

Proposition 8 Overturned

Last week, a federal judge ruled that California’s same-sex marriage ban was unconstitutional, leaving many proponents of Proposition 8 scrambling for new ways to stop gay marriage. Here are some of their strategies:

Launching a nationwide movement to redefine heterosexual marriage as “super-marriage”

Nonstop purity balls

Allowing students to shower with opposite-sex peers in gym class

A cap-and-trade system in which homosexual couples can buy marriage credits when heterosexual couples get divorced or die

Proposition 233, a new law requiring all couples who seek a marriage license, regardless of their sexuality, to submit a detailed plan for returning California to fiscal solvency

If any of your uncles feel weird about it, the wedding’s off

Spend $90 million on a bold ad campaign for Oregon that highlights the state’s quaint scenery, abundance of antique shops, and many nonjudgmental communities

Just keep the protest signs in front yards comin’

The Huffington Post reports the latest from the premier scientist/thinker of our age:

Stephen Hawking: God NOT Needed For Creation

LONDON — Physicist Stephen Hawking says God wasn’t necessary for the creation of the universe.
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Roger Ebert has written in his Chicago Sun-Times blog a strong indictment against the purveyors of subtle (and not so subtle) lies in today’s political process.

This is the best line: “Our political immune system has only one antibody, and that is the truth.”

Put up or shut up

This many Americans did not arrive at such conclusions on their own. They were persuaded by a relentless process of insinuation, strategic silence and cynical misinformation. Most of the leaders in this process have been cautious to avoid actually saying Obama is a Muslim. They speak in coded words and allow the implications to sink in. I recently watched Glenn Beck speaking at great length about Obama’s Muslim father, but you would not have learned from Beck that the father, who Obama met only once, was not a practicing Muslim in any sense.

Rush Limbaugh has told his listeners he can find “no evidence” that Obama is a Christian. In Paul Krugman’s op-ed column in the New York Times on 8/29, Limbaugh is quoted: “Imam Hussein Obama, is probably the best anti-American president we’ve ever had.” Limbaugh obviously doesn’t believe Obama is an imam. How many of his listeners realize that? Is he concerned that his words will be taken seriously?
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My friend Mike pointed out this CNN article as a legal balance to the religious argument in my previous post.

On Prop 8, it’s the evidence, stupid

Editor’s note: Lisa Bloom is the managing partner of The Bloom Firm, where she practices civil and criminal law.

(CNN) — There’s a big difference between a political debate about same-sex marriage and the recent hard-fought court challenge to the California ban, Proposition 8.

In politics, anything goes: Vague, sinister comments about same-sex marriage threatening children or undermining the sanctity of heterosexual marriage were prevalent during the Prop 8 campaign. In court, same-sex marriage opponents needed solid evidence to back up these and other claims.

Despite “able and energetic counsel,” they never produced it. That’s why they lost, resoundingly, in the federal district court. And that lack of evidence should dog opponents up through the chain of appeals that is now beginning, because appellate courts are required to review only the evidence in the court record and to give great deference to Judge Vaughn Walker’s findings of fact. He was there, after all, presiding over the trial, and the appellate judges weren’t.

And what a lopsided trial he presided over. All the anti-same-sex marriage arguments imploded when subjected to the rules of evidence.
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This exposition by Rita Nakashima Brock was published in today’s Huffington Post. It’s worth a read.

Prop 8, Judge Walker and the Biblical View of Marriage Equality

Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision Thursday to allow resumption of legal same-sex weddings in California has right-wing Christians claiming his ruling against Proposition 8 threatens “Bible believing Christians.” I’ve read the Bible pretty carefully myself (I read it cover to cover when I was in high school) and even taught it as a college professor. It is not a source I’d turn to in order to defend traditional marriage, but I think it does offer ways to think about ethical marriage.

The Bible presents multiple views of marriage, and most actual marriages it depicts are terrible by modern standards. “Traditional marriages” in ancient biblical times were arranged as transfers of the ownership of daughters. The tenth commandment lists wives among properties like houses and slaves: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor” (Exodus 20:17, also found in Deuteronomy 5:21). Marriages occurred via deception, kidnapping, adulterous seductions, theft, rape, and murder, and were often in multiples so that the pater familias could amass land, flocks, and progeny and cement political alliances. Abraham, David, and Solomon had marriages that would be illegal today. The book of Hosea likens the mercy of God to a husband who has the right to beat or kill his adulterous wife, but spares her — for this, she was supposed to be grateful. When women seek marriages, such as Naomi arranged for Ruth, it was to avoid an even worse fate such as destitution.
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