Selwyn Duke over at the American Stinker, with his case for how to win the debate on marriage and keep gays and lesbians from ever experiencing what it’s like to be an equal citizen:

The big news on the culture-war front is a federal court’s striking down of Proposition 8, California’s constitutional amendment protecting marriage. In a two-to-one ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit wrote, “The people may not employ the initiative power to single out a disfavored group for unequal treatment and strip them, without a legitimate justification, of a right as important as the right to marry.”

Now, I’m not sure why the judges mention a “disfavored group,” as if singling out a “favored” one for unequal treatment would be okay. As far as I know, the 14th Amendment, on which the court based its ruling, doesn’t offer equal protection to only those the current fashions deem “disfavored.”

Semantics. Meant to distract from the fact that no argument has been proffered, and none is forthcoming.

Speaking to bias, some may point out here that the Ninth Circuit is the most overturned court in the nation and that the two judges who ruled against Prop. 8 were appointed by Democrats. Yet the reality is that they’re hardly alone: virtually everyone — including conservatives — misses the 800-pound gorilla with the pink tutu and rainbow flag in the middle of the marriage debate.

I know that it makes wingnuts feel better to trot out the line about the Ninth being the most overturned court in the nation, but as with most sound bites, it doesn’t give us a lot of information. Here, let Cerberus at Sadly, No! explain [a little bit of language because it’s S,N!]:

You know, every conservative and their mom loves to throw this quote around as if it was their love doll. Of course, looking deeper it tends to refer to yearly overturn numbers in the current court. Which a) the Supreme Court reviews like balls all cases per year, so most overturned isn’t exactly “this court is terrible”, b) most of the overturns have to do with a bitch fight between the Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court on prisoner’s rights so is a deliberate action on both parties to call the other a bag of dicks, and c) this Supreme Court.

Ding ding ding! But keep using that line, wingnuts, if it makes you feel safe. Back to Selwyn:

But what really is the central issue here? It isn’t whether marriage is a right or a privilege; it isn’t whether it is covered under the Constitution. It isn’t even whether or not homosexuals have a right to “marry.” The crux of the matter is this: what is this right or privilege?

If the court rules that there is a right to a certain thing, it must know what that thing is.

Simple. It’s marriage, an institution that has evolved over centuries and is now understood, at least from a governmental perspective, as a recognition of a relationship of a certain kind between two people, where their lives are indeed joined together, so that it makes sense to offer certain benefits, rights, privileges and responsibilities to that couple as a unit. It’s taken many forms, from chattel marriage to “polygamist rape factories” [which Cerberus points out is the true “traditional model” that wingnuts are always talking about] to more egalitarian structures which recognize things we now understand, like the equality of women and the nature of sexual orientation. So that is what “that thing” is. Selwyn will now surely explain why gays and lesbians should be denied the right to share in this institution, right?

Er, no. He wants to get lost in definitions:

Yet if the court accepted that the thing called “marriage” is the union between a man and woman, there would be no debate. The judges would simply state that, just like anyone else, homosexuals have a right to marry — to form that time-honored union between themselves and a member of the opposite sex.

Yes, Selwyn, if the courts were simply bigots with no grasp of scientific reality, things would be easier and the wingnuts would win.

Now, some will say the court accepts that there has been a redefinition of marriage. If so, they had best tell us what it is. Because, you see, our leftist marriage engineers have not redefined marriage.
They have undefined it.

They have not said that marriage is the union between any two people. If they did, they’d render themselves just as “exclusionary” and “discriminatory” as those they decry and relinquish a hammer with which they bludgeon tradition. They have not offered any alternative parameters for marriage. They’ve simply implied that the correct definition — the one accepted for millennia in Western civilization — is wrong.

Yet if these leftists cannot say what marriage is, how can they be so sure about what it isn’t?

So many words, so little content. Has he made an argument yet? Did I miss it? And, I’m not kidding here, he goes on for seven or eight more paragraphs on how if everybody would just accept Selwyn’s definition of marriage, it would all be fine and the American public could go on hating gays or something.

Our opposition has gotten pretty sad, y’all.