Challenging Proposition 8

The Los Angeles Times reported on Nov. 18 that "as more lawsuits against Proposition 8 landed before the California Supreme Court, Attorney General Jerry Brown and the anti-gay-marriage campaign urged the court Monday to review the suits, but allow the measure to remain in effect during that review."

This may sound like a compromise in some ways, but a more accurate description (hopefully) would be the slow and hissing bitter end to the church-backed flames of hatred that came (this time) in the form of Proposition 8.

It is almost impossible to understand the hatred that must live in these people's hearts that has created a scenario in which something like gay marriage could even be an issue.

Proponents of the new amendment protect their conscience by saying a tired and trite line that begins "I don't hate gays, I just believe that…" In reality, it's a matter of common sense: if you hate someone, odds are extremely good that you would like nothing more than seeing them unhappy, you would like nothing more than taking away what is for many people one of the most important and beautiful days of their entire life.

Furthermore you would like to see them treated as less than human, as even animals achieved more rights in this election, and homosexuals had theirs taken away. If taking away someone's happiness, and his or her right to be truly happy does not mean that you hate them, then it would be even more shocking to see what you would do to someone you actually hate.

For the sake of all mankind it is with strong hopes that I wish you to be simply lying, and this to be the full extent of your hatred so that it need not progress into anything further. After all, if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck…

Those adorned with this hate in their heart have been hiding behind their church in a land that is supposed to remain secular. It is in our constitution that "congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

But instead they decide to say that our country was based on religious values, and that the founding fathers were Christian, which couldn't be farther from the truth since many of the founding fathers denounced organized religion and were considered by more accurate scholars to be deists.

Read Thomas Paine.

But still, the people involved in the anti-gay-marriage campaign have had the audacity to impose their beliefs on others in a free country.

The only hope has come in the form of a public outcry; mass protests, online petitions, and a long string of lawsuits have begun to take hold in a fight for true freedom. In a fight for homosexual people's rights and their happiness, in a fight that in all actuality should not be even be remotely necessary in a nation that pats itself on the back all too often for civil rights.

This outcry has caused the California Supreme Court to decide on the legality of Prop 8 in the first place. It would take a two thirds vote by the court to put a revision of the state constitution on the next available ballot, but making the right choice has never been easy. The earliest that the hearings on the lawsuits could commence would be in March of next year.

So should people put their lives on hold as this hate group would apparently have them do? A hate group that was funded mainly by members of the Mormon Church who do not even live in the state of California. To even for one day enforce the law passed on that ballot measure is not only irresponsible, unethical, and immoral, but it is plain wrong.

You don't steal, you don't kill, and you don't cheat on your spouse or help someone else do it. That's not a religion, that's common sense. Another piece of common sense is that you don't ruin people's lives and then say you don't hate them, you do not interfere in lives that do not concern yours.

It is cowards who behave like that, as they would rather see a group of citizens alienated and turned into a lesser class of people, than admit that their beliefs do not have a place in our judicial system, regardless of their inhibitions.