Bizarre testimony and Prop 8

Today the disgusting Proposition 8 had another day in court. As you may remember Prop 8 was thrown out of court as a violation of basic rights. The State of California has standing in the issue but Gov. Schwarzenegger made it clear he has no desire to defend Prop 8. The current Attorney General, Jerry Brown, has said he is not interested in defending this initiative either. Brown is now governor-elect and still has no interest in defending the law and in incoming Attorney General has also said she doesn't want to defend it.

So some of the hateful fundamentalists are petitioning the Court to grant them the right to defend the law on behalf of the State, which doesn't want to defend the law. There really is no limit to how far these Jesus-loves-you types will go to show they hate gay people.

Today's hearing was televised. I rudely neglected a friend from overseas who was visiting to take some time out today to watch the hearing. Some of the mental gymnastics were quite interesting.

The lawyer defending Prop 8 for these Christians argued that marriage is only meant to correspond with the procreative ability of men and women. They really do dismiss the idea that people can marry simply for love. The fundamental purpose of marriage is having babies—this is actually the claptrap the Popes have been pushing for years, only know fundamentalists have adopted it because their own theology didn't used to take this view. So they swapped theologies in because they really, really want to go after gay people.

The attorney acknowledged that there are plenty of couples who marry and can marry who will never be able to procreate. Infertile couples can marry. Elderly couples where the woman is past child-bearing age can marry. A woman without a uterus can marry. Men who can't produce sperm are allowed to marry. There are plenty of cases where heterosexual couples who have NO procreative ability are allowed to marry.

The attorney was asked about them by one the judges of the court. He acknowledged such couples existed but said that the ability to determine who they were was so cumbersome, intrusive and expensive, that it was intolerable for the State to prevent them from marrying.

Of course he could not defend their right in this case; he doesn't want to acknowledge marriage as a right. That would create problems for his case. So he basically seemed to concede that such couples should not technically be allowed to marry either but that the search costs, to determine who they were, would be too expensive and that government would have to intrude far too far into the lives of these people to determine that they can't procreate.

His implication seemed to be that same-sex couples are easy to identify. So it isn't expensive, it isn't cumbersome and it doesn't have to be intrusive. As I read this argument he seemed to be saying that it is alright to deny marriage to gay couples because same-sex couples don't reproduce. Similarly he seemed to concede that the same ought to apply to certain straight couples as well, and that they ought to be denied marriage except it is harder to figure them out. So, to avoid the cost of figuring which straight couples shouldn't marry it is easier to let them all marry, whether they will reproduce or not.

In other words, it's okay to deny marriage only to the gay couples because it is easy to do. Yes, they want to deny marriage to many straight couples but don't want to be bothered figuring out who they are. Gays are just easier to figure out. That is really mind-boggling.