Thursday, August 5, 2010

How Gay

No one should be surprised that a Federal Judge in San Francisco has ruled that California’s ban on gay marriage - the ban approved by 7 million California and federal tax-paying citizens - is unconstitutional.

Judge Vaughn Walker cited two reasons the ban was unconstitutional: due process and equal protection.

Let me give you my thoughts on the equal protection argument.

The concept of equal protection is designed to assure citizens that no matter what their station, or race, or physical incapacity, for example, they’ll be treated by the law just the same as everyone else.

But homosexuality isn’t in any of those categories. It’s characterized only by a set of behaviors, and laws mostly regulate behaviors because that’s how you identify and can enforce standards that the community has established. Using laws to regulate behavior usually results in discriminating against a minority of people whose behaviors might offend the majority. Thieves, for example, have behavior that is regulated. You can be a thief and exist in society with all the rights and privileges of a non-thief, as long as you don’t steal. You can even live with another thief and pretend to steal. You just can’t actually steal with society’s blessing because it’s offensive - some might say “immoral”.

No one has yet argued that laws against thieves should be changed because thieves are a class of people who WANT to steal and therefore should not be denied just because the majority don’t want to. It probably wouldn’t fly.

Homosexuals want to be a class of individual who receive protection for their behaviors in the way protection is usually granted to others in a situation of being unrelated to behavior - a handicapped person, for example.

A woman might be discriminated against if she is not permitted to join a public group, say a Men’s Club, just because she is a woman. Being a woman, however, is not characterized by a set of behaviors. it is characterized by physical gender attributes - her sex, not her sexuality. For homosexuals to argue that they deserve the same considerations as women, therefore makes their argument absurd. A homosexual woman could therefore argue that she could be discriminated against both because she is not allowed to join the Men’s Club and because she does not have the right to take a wife. It shows how troubled her thinking really is and how twisted the Judge’s reasoning.

This is not an argument about the rights of homosexuals. It is an argument about the rights of Society and its need to defend against the tyranny of the minority. The score so far is 1 to 1.


  1. Religion is a behavior in the same way then. Therefore, based on your arguments, I propose that no one should be allowed to go to church.

  2. In societies where "going to church" was regarded as offensive to the majority, you would prevail. Thank you for reinforcing my assertion.