Insert Ubiquitous Churchill Quotation Here

The majority of our office took time out of our busy day to sit down and watch President Bush's statement on gay marriage and his proposed constitutional ammendment to "entrench the traditional definition of marriage." I'm going to say right up front that this isn't about whether gay marriage is good or bad. That's not my business, and it shouldn't even be your business unless of course you plan on marrying a gay person.

I'm just afraid that if I don't go on a rant, nobody will.

For the purposes of making something readable, I'm not going to get into the difficulty that the President is going to have getting this ammendment passed. In brief, it's possible but not likely, considering that it won't likely get the support it requires in the senate. My problem is with how the President justified the need for a ban. He claimed that "activist judges" were rolling back referendums within states that ban gay marriage. This bothers me on two levels. First, it bothers me that he would use such a stupid, illogical, and simply incorrect excuse, and second, because he's actually getting away with it, proving that people just don't know shit and democracy has failed us all again.

Here's my beef: in the case of minority rights, there's no such thing as "activist judges," only judges that do their job. Issues of minority rights always have been and always should be a matter left up to the courts, not the people. There weren't any referendums when they wanted to grant women or African Americans the right to vote, the courts just up and did it, and if you didn't like it, tough. It's their job to defend minority rights because minorities can never win in a vote. That's why they're minorities: there's less of them than there are of us. This isn't an opinion or even an interpretation of the constitution, it's math. You can't argue with math. Just try. I'll wait.

Two plus two still four? Thought so. Moving on.

So, in the US legal system, the courts have a pretty solid hold on their status as the place to go for all your minority rights decisions. They've been doing it for literally hundreds of years. So now all of a sudden when some idiots allow a minority rights issue onto a ballot we somehow think that we should just toss out tradition because the people know best and it's democratic?

Fuck democracy, and fuck the people too. The people don't know their collective asses from a hole in the ground, and I should know; they write me every day to tell me so. By all means, put as many decisions as humanly possible into the hands of the judiciary, because the majority of the people are pretty stupid, especially when it comes to people who are different and therefore scary. Sorry George, but I don't buy your comment on "activist judges." They're doing their job and you know it. Don't lie to us, just admit that you're doing it to paddle-back to the right wing religious conservatives or to distract from a bad foreign policy and worse economy, or whatever other reason you may have for it. Just don't pin it on the judges who are just out there trying to do their job.

In the worst-case scenario, this ammendment passes. That would be a big problem if there wasn't a big country next door with lots of houses for sale, liberal gay marriage laws, and a dollar that's going to over-take the American dollar in short order. George, if you figure that you can afford to alienate a surprisingly large percentage of your population (a percentage that has a lot of disposable income and spends an awful lot, which is so valuable in this time of economic uncertainty) then we are more than happy to take them off your hands.