EDITORIAL: Loophole Legislation

Imagine telling your teenage daughter she has to be home by 10:00. Well 10 o'clock comes around and there is no sign of her; no phone call, no text message- nothing. At 10:55PM she casually opens the door and comes strolling in like nothing is wrong. "Where have you been? I told you to be home by ten and it's almost eleven." She replies, "I've been in the back yard since ten. You said I had to be home by ten and I consider our entire property to be part of our home." Or how about if she never came home that night and instead showed up at 10AM the following morning? Her explanation might well be, "Well, you said I had to be home by ten, but you didn't specify ten o'clock at night."

Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Of course, children sometimes try these things, looking to find grey areas and loopholes to their advantage, or so they might think. It is ridiculous and unacceptable, yet the judges in American courtrooms are doing the exact same thing with the U.S. Constitution when it comes to making rulings on same sex marriage.

In a recent ruling on the issue, Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughan Walker overturned Proposition 8 (California's voter-approved same sex marriage ban) claiming it was unconstitutional. The part of the constitution Walker is claiming conflict with is the 14th amendment, specifically Section 1. Here it is:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The loophole Walker is using along with judges in Massachusetts, Iowa, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire and Washington, D.C is that same-sex couples should not be deprived of the the privilege of marriage. If these judges were to be intellectually honest, they would have to agree that our founding fathers, those who drafted our constitution, had the understanding that the union of marriage was intended to be between a man and a woman. Though I am by no means an expert on the issue, there is no pertinent legal documentation to my knowledge that supports they believed otherwise.

By applying the reasoning of Judge Walker, a person should be able to marry his own child or sibling if he so chooses. After all, why should anyone be deprived of the privilege of marriage? The basis for Walker's ruling is as ridiculous as your teenage daughter's excuse for coming in at 10AM the next day instead of 10PM the night she went out. And to make it worse, his ruling makes a dangerous mockery of our system of democracy by going against the wishes of the majority of California voters who voted Proposition 8 into effect.

Further, by using the logic of many politicians in that the issue of whether or not same-sex marriage should be legal is something that should be decided by the states, we might as well begin calling our country The Divided States of America. It makes no sense to me for a same-sex couple to be able to legally marry in one state only to relocate to another state where it is illegal, or vice versa.

Though I didn't agree with former President George W. Bush on a number of issues, I did support his effort to have an amendment made in the constitution, defining marriage as between a man and a woman. He was simply trying to bring clarity to what the authors of our constitution took for granted- that people with common sense, including judges, would understand. How foolish they were.