Quite frankly, I'm rather appalled that religious institutions are legally allowed to upfront donate to political campaigns at all. Individual members of various religions? Sure. Religious institutions themselves? Uh, whatever happened to that crazy "separation of church and state" idea people were throwing around, huh?
On a more personal level, I'm pretty disgusted that in this particular case so many religious organizations that claim to value honesty are donating to a campaign that has taken to outright lying in their advertising and cold calls about the consequences of the proposed law (after a socially conservative judge ruled that they couldn't put those same lies in the voter information packet because they were legally complete BS, no less). I realize it's naive to assume that people are always going to act in accordance with their own stated morality, but this level of disconnect was not something I expected to run into, and I can't help feeling very saddened by it.
In general, I think that decisions about state law should stay within the state, but in addition to agreeing with you on taking the high road on that point being a bad idea (at least when it comes to civil rights issues), there is absolutely no denying that Prop 8 has national consequences. The US Constitution guarantees that each state shall recognize and respect the property rights granted in every other state. The Defense of Marriage Act grants every state the right to refuse to acknowledge marriage other than one man/one woman performed in another state. CA's joint property laws mean that as long as gay marriage is legal in CA, the DoMA is in conflict with the US Constitution, and it's only a matter of time before that issue is raised. None of the other states where gay marriage is legal have property laws that would cause the same conflict. So, yes, this is a state measure, but it has some rather substantial national consequences, so it's hard to argue that this is a cut-and-dried state-only issue.
Also, point of linguistic pendantry, "marriage" has only been around as a term for about 700 years, so it's doubtful that it's had it's religious meaning for thousands of years.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2008-10-20 09:43 pm (UTC)Quite frankly, I'm rather appalled that religious institutions are legally allowed to upfront donate to political campaigns at all. Individual members of various religions? Sure. Religious institutions themselves? Uh, whatever happened to that crazy "separation of church and state" idea people were throwing around, huh?
On a more personal level, I'm pretty disgusted that in this particular case so many religious organizations that claim to value honesty are donating to a campaign that has taken to outright lying in their advertising and cold calls about the consequences of the proposed law (after a socially conservative judge ruled that they couldn't put those same lies in the voter information packet because they were legally complete BS, no less). I realize it's naive to assume that people are always going to act in accordance with their own stated morality, but this level of disconnect was not something I expected to run into, and I can't help feeling very saddened by it.
In general, I think that decisions about state law should stay within the state, but in addition to agreeing with you on taking the high road on that point being a bad idea (at least when it comes to civil rights issues), there is absolutely no denying that Prop 8 has national consequences. The US Constitution guarantees that each state shall recognize and respect the property rights granted in every other state. The Defense of Marriage Act grants every state the right to refuse to acknowledge marriage other than one man/one woman performed in another state. CA's joint property laws mean that as long as gay marriage is legal in CA, the DoMA is in conflict with the US Constitution, and it's only a matter of time before that issue is raised. None of the other states where gay marriage is legal have property laws that would cause the same conflict. So, yes, this is a state measure, but it has some rather substantial national consequences, so it's hard to argue that this is a cut-and-dried state-only issue.
Also, point of linguistic pendantry, "marriage" has only been around as a term for about 700 years, so it's doubtful that it's had it's religious meaning for thousands of years.