Gay Marriage Ban Upheld

• Gay marriage is like a square wheel - it simply doesn\'t exist. Marriage has been the legal union of a man and woman as husband and wife with the possibilty of producing offspring. This has been the case since the dawn of time. Why is it suddenly ok to change this? If \"gay marriage\" is so important why not take it to the people for a vote instead of engaging in judicial activism?

• I just finished reading both the opinions and the dissents, and I have to say I weap for the people of Washington State. Not because of the decision itself - but for the lack of intellectual honesty in any of the arguments. The main plurality decision is full of so many holes you could drive a truck through them - but the dissents are just as bad. The vast majority of Justice Madsen\'s 62 page decision is spent not establishing a legal framework by which the DOMA withstands constitutional scrutiny, but rather attacking Justice Fairhurst\'s dissent. And don\'t even get me started on Chief Justice Alexander\'s concurrance. Both don\'t simply say the legislature had the right to enact this law - they say the court has no right to review it based on a cockamamie rational basis test. Taken to its logical conclusion - the court seems to say that it doesn\'t have the right to review anything for constitutional muster so long as the legislature had some reason for enacting it. (And what piece of legislation has ever passed without a reason behind it?) I\'m deeply troubled by Justice Madsen\'s insistence that procreation is the centerpoint of marraige - and a throw-away line (page 40) stating \"Heterosexual couples are the only couples who can produce biological offspring of the couple.\" Well, duh - you say. Forgetting genetic alterations and all that other high-tech scientific stuff, she\'s absolutely right. But why say it? Taken in context, Justice Madsen seems to be saying that it was completely rational for the legislature to enact the DOMA because it encourages a couple to have bological offspring. It is not the court\'s place, she seems to be saying, to substitute its wisdom for the wisdom of the legislature in enacting that kind of public policy goal. What would she say, then, to a law that goes to the next logical step - restricting sex to the procreation of children. Would she find that a rational public policy use? Under the analysis presented in this case, I think she would. Justice Fairhurst\'s dissent isn\'t much better - citing unpublished opinions from Alaska and works of fiction to show why the DOMA should have been thrown out - and rendering her own argument absurd by her instence that she has the right to decide what laws are fair or not. I guess this is what you get when your Supreme Court is up for re-election and no one wants to tick anyone off - a lukewarm opinion designed to make everyone happy but really achieving almost nothing in the process. That\'s a shame.

• The government shouldn\'t care about a person\'s sexual habits and preferences. If that\'s all marriage was about, then the government shouldn\'t even be issuing licenses. The government endorses marriage and provides benefits to married couples because married couples make healthy children. The more healthy children, the better our society. What reason does Uncle Sam have to promote gay marriage? None. The government should be neutral on a person\'s sexual preference, but not start handing out money and other benefits based upon it.

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