The Rude Pundit, having read the entire Prop 8 decision, notes that it’s pretty obvious, reading the entire thing, that the justice who wrote the majority opinion was having a bit of fun at the bigots’ expense:
Judge Stephen Reinhardt, writing for the two of three judges on the panel who overturned Prop 8, was obviously f***ing with the evangelicals and Mormons who tried to strip away the designation of “marriage” from gays and lesbians.
He says more than that, but this is a Family Friendly Blog, and if you click that link, you know what you’re getting into. He picks out five quotes from the opinion that prove his case, and these are my two favorites:
4. “In order to explain how rescinding access to the designation of ‘marriage’ is rationally related to the State’s interest in responsible procreation, Proponents would have had to argue that opposite-sex couples were more likely to procreate accidentally or irresponsibly when same-sex couples were allowed access to the designation of ‘marriage.’ We are aware of no basis on which this argument would even be conceivably plausible.”
5. “There is a limited sense in which the extension of the designation ‘marriage’ to same-sex partnerships might alter the content of the lessons that schools choose to teach. Schools teach about the world as it is; when the world changes, lessons change. A shift in the State’s marriage law may therefore affect the content of classroom instruction just as would the election of a new governor, the discovery of a new chemical element, or the adoption of a new law permitting no-fault divorce: students learn about these as empirical facts of the world around them. But to protest the teaching of these facts is little different from protesting their very existence; it is like opposing the election of a particular governor on the ground that students would learn about his holding office.”
OUCH.
This is one of the reasons it’s fun to take these bigots to court and force them to defend themselves there: on top of it being the right way to do things, the anti-gay set makes such a mockery of themselves in these situations that it’s simply impossible not to make fun of them. Even for federal appellate judges, apparently.
Click over for the rest.
