A guy calling himself BroKen writes this about Judge Walker’s ruling:
Are you religious? Then you should be offended by the federal ruling on California’s Proposition 8. Maybe you’re not very religious. But do you believe in morality? That is, do you believe that some things are wrong and some things are right? If you do, then you should be offended by the decision. Even if you agree with the conclusion, you should be offended by its “rationale”….
Walker writes in his decision, “The evidence shows conclusively that moral and religious views form the only basis for a belief that same-sex couples are different from opposite-sex couples.”(emphasis mine) Now, I didn’t hear the evidence. It does seem that the proponents of Proposition 8 saved their big guns for the inevitable fight before the Supreme Court. (Actually, they did present evidence, not in the form of expert witnesses, but tons of other evidence, of just the sort BroKen describes. JRM) But couldn’t the judge find one piece of biological evidence like, I don’t know, reproduction maybe, as a basis for differences that even a child can see?
Walker concludes, “Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license.”(emphasis mine) Got that? Walker can see only religious and moral reasons for Proposition 8 and those reasons, according to his conclusion, are irrational. Every religious and moral thinker should find that offensive.
Yet he doesn’t stop there. Walker divorces himself not only from moral and religious thought, but also from logic itself. A bedrock of logic is that a thing is what it is and not something else. A bird is a bird. Trees are trees. The technical name for these statements is “tautology”. They are so obvious that we rarely think about them. They must be true.
Lawyers for the amendment argued that the state should uphold the traditional definition of marriage. But Walker writes that the “asserted state interests in tradition are nothing more than tautologies and do not amount to rational bases for Proposition 8.”(emphasis mine) Things have to bend in the mind in order to call that which is not a marriage, a “marriage”. So truth and logic twist underneath the judge’s powerful decree. Logic’s foundations do “not amount to rational bases.”