Thought of the Day: SFist

“The argument that the Becket fund makes, incidentally, is terrifying; and it doesn’t just affect the gays, but all Californians. They claim that Prop 8 prevents “a systemic, irresolvable conflict between church and state,” which is only true inasmuch as the “conflict” in question amounts to “we wanted to control California, and California tried to resist.”

The people who crafted Prop 8 don’t just want the freedom to choose which marriages they can recognize. They already had that freedom before Prop 8, and they admit as much in their brief. What they want is to control which marriages anyone can recognize.

You can easily test the moral weight of their argument by replacing “gays” with any other suspect class. For example, they write that they don’t want to be “sued and otherwise punished for their refusal to treat same-sex and different-sex couples as moral equivalents.” How would that argument read with other suspect classes?

“We don’t want to be sued and otherwise punished for our refusal to treat Jews and Catholics as moral equivalents. We don’t want to be sued and otherwise punished for our refusal to treat Mexicans and Americans as moral equivalents. We don’t want to be sued and otherwise punished for our refusal to treat woman and men as moral equivalents. And that is why we must prevent EVERYONE from treating these groups as moral equivalents.”

Hm. Yeah. Hard to support sentiments like those. But that’s exactly what the Prop 8 people want the Supreme Court to do: to allow the Beckets of the world to force us all — every single person in California — to discriminate against a minority.”– SFist columnist and founder of the website Stop Prop. 8 Matt Baume writing that Prop 8 backers don’t really believe their own arguments.