CAN I VOTE ON YOUR MARRIAGE?

That’s the question recently wed Newsweek writer what David J. Jefferson saw emblazened on a gay man’s t-shirt, and that’s how he sums up his feelings on the impending vote on Proposition 8 in California. If a mere 50% + 1 vote go in favor of Proposition 8, the California Constitution will be altered so as to invalidate marriages between same-sex couples.

If you take a moment to think about it, that’s rather remarkable. Breath-taking, really.

Our country was founded by religious and political radicals. They were keenly aware of the dangers of majority rule, and when we won our independence, they took pains to guard against these dangers in formulating our constitution. The founding fathers made the threshold for amending the US Constitution high as a buffer against the vagaries and manias that they knew will seize a society now and again.

But California, in its infinite wisdom, allows (potential) tinkering with it’s foundational documents whenever someone can muster enough signatures to get a Proposition on the ballot. It’s not hard to see the danger in this approach, well beyond marriage equality.

Which brings me to an short essay I wrote last year while fighting on behalf of ASHLEY & KISHA, “Community Standards Fail When Communities Fail.”

More after the jump:

Community Standards Fail When Communities Fail, first published on Sept. 26, 2007

From Fancies and Fuckeries:

“Community standards as we all know are densely hypocritical, fluently contradictory, and more then often severely corrupt. Going on the basis of using an example of road rules, everyone knows that speeding kills, that it is a thoughtless act, and finally an offense, yet one only has to look at the figures for those booked speeding per year to realise that our community standards towards road safety are incredibly low. Using community standards to measure anything is the most shallow and thoughtless method of regulating anything.”

I count myself lucky that when I was about 18, my mother received a small fellowship to spend four weeks at University of Indiana studying James Madsion. Says Madison about the danger of majority rule:

“A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

I wonder what Madison would have to say about the Miller Test, most especially its first prong:

Would the average person, applying contemporary community standards, find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest.

I’d venture there’s a good chance he’d say that using community standards to measure anything is the most shallow and thoughtless method of regulating anything. I’m quite sure he say it’s terrible, dangerous imposition on freedom of speech.

——

This Tuesday, if Proposition 8 pass, the will of the majority will be imposed upon the most intimate and fundamental of our liberties: the right to decide whom, in the name of a deep erotic bond, we would call “spouse”. Will California fail it’s gay and lesbian citizens? We’ll soon find out.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 8:00 pm and is filed under Censorship, Prop 8. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.