Monday, January 11, 2010

Thoughts as THE Trial Begins

Opening arguments were made yesterday in Federal Court in San Francisco in the trial attempting to overturn Proposition 8. There are plenty of places where you can read transcripts and reports from the proceedings. What I want to call attention to is how easy it is for people to get distracted from the core issues of the case.

Simply put, it's about equality under the law. Nothing more.

It's not about what children will be taught in school as the Alliance Defense Fund is trying to say. It's not about malice or bad intent on the part of the pro-Prop 8 team, even though their e-mails and internal communications were part of the pre-trial discovery process. I don't care if the anti-equality folks' hearts dripped with pure evil and they rubbed their hands in glee and said "exxx-cellent" as they plotted in their back rooms. It's not even about the rights of Californians to decide for ourselves what "marriage" will be.

The only question that should be at hand is, is it constitutional to deny the rights of civil marriage to any two people who are also willing to take on its responsibilities? Does the US Constitution allow you to treat one group of people differently from another?

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