If it weren’t front page, I’d be recommending it!

Please keep up these excellent political cartoons . . . IMHO, you should be on the Op-Ed pages of newspapers everywhere.

Take Care, mailloux

nt

Equal Protection Clause

And of course there’s this: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…

But can the Mad Mr. Hatter find that in “Moby Dick”?

“I don’t want to be married. I’m very happy with a civil partnership. If gay people want to get married, or get together, they should have a civil partnership. The word ‘marriage,’ I think, puts a lot of people off. You get the same equal rights that we do when we have a civil partnership. Heterosexual people get married. We can have civil partnerships.”

but…

(even though I’ve been drawn into the gay marriage debate here) the cartoon is more a statement on how the left looks at the constitution as a “living, breathing” document, and will find in it anything they wish to find.

but I’m having the darndest time finding where the Constitution says that heterosexuals have the right to marry. Could someone point it out to me?

If people want to form a domestic partnership regardless of their sexual orientation, then they should file a domestic partnership agreement containing the aspects of a prenuptial agreement. Then, instead of divorce, the parties would go through a dissolution of partnership that would be governed by the covenants contained in the original agreement.

This means that we would not have “marriage ceremonies” conducted in city halls. Marriages would be conducted by religious organizations or in whatever goofy fashion the participants wanted to celebrate the signing of their domestic partnership agreements.

Domestic partnership agreements could be performed by however many people agreed to join in. As such, what we call bigamy, polygamy, etc. would be more like general partnerships.

Our society wastes too many resources in divorce court and we are wasting way too much energy trying to define and control the “holy state of matrimony” through legislative and judicial processes.

now all that stuff we otherwise thought unconstitutional makes perfect sense.

Not like Liberals pay any attention to what is in the Bible (or whatever Religious text they pretend to care about, for Public consumption) either.

Thanks TobyToons.

It’s about time to decipher the Constitution more carefully “to the LETTERS”.

This one is an amazing Work deserving to be featured in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not… better than the brains of the thousands of liberal lawyers combined.

Congratulations!!!!

The Iowa court decision was based on the IOWA Constitution. That’s the U.S. Constitution in your cartoon. This betrays a basic misunderstanding of how constitutional law works.

Further, the Equal Protection Clause is the relevant section in both the Iowa and the federal constitutions. It nowhere says “you’re allowed to be Christian,” either, but we infer that from the EPC too.

Moving on for a second, no gay man or woman has ever presumed or argued for a right to equal social equality. In fact, no minority ever has either. Look back to the debates on the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment: the law cleanly bifurcates civil rights, which the government can and must afford, from social equality, which the government cannot touch. Unless your contention is that someone else’s marriage assumes, by its government authorization, your personal and direct approval of the marriage, your text is way off-base too.

As to the argument that, because men can marry women and women can marry men, there’s no equal protection violation, you’re missing the point. This same type of argument was tried to defend anti-miscegenation laws: “black men can’t marry white women, and white women can’t marry black men, etc. See! Perfectly equal application across races!” That didn’t work either. The question is whether the law’s insistence on formal equality permits substantive inequality, and in Loving v. Virginia, the Court answered emphatically no.

There IS NO legal case for banning gay marriage. The law does not allow one group of people to stipulate how the other should live, based on religious law alone.