Lots.

In response to my post about Proposition 8, the referendum to overturn a Supreme Court of California decision upholding same-sex marriage as constitutional, Johnny B left a comment.

It's nothing we haven't heard before and JB is certainly entitled to an opinion on the matter - that's what freedom of expression is all about.

The problem is that the 'freedom' part is missing from the standard arguments against same-sex marriage (it doesn't say you have to be gay to solidify a same-sex relationship through marriage, by the way).

Most of the standard objections amount to personal beliefs backed up with unsubstantiated bromides.  These beliefs are relentlessly pushed by religious groups and are nothing more than after-the-fact rationalizations based on an emotional response to a widely misunderstood issue.

To say that legislating based on religious or personal beliefs is a slippery slope is to put it mildly.  Like most people, I don't personally care what people choose to believe or what they are propagandized to believe.  It only becomes a problem when they insist on forcing others to live according to these notions in the absence of any logical or scientific foundation for them.

Can you imagine if laws were enacted on the basis of satisfying special interests?  What if one religion supports rights for women and another doesn't?  How about cutting your hair or not?  Working on Saturday?  Talk about opening a  can of worms.

That's why we have governments, courts and other secular institutions to protect citizens' rights.

Marriage is a secular institution.  It can only be contracted through civil means and it can only be dissolved the same way.  If a church, temple, ashram or synagogue wishes to 'bless' a marriage that is entirely up to them.

Marriage offers citizens many benefits, tax and otherwise, so everyone should be entitled to full citizenship; ie, everyone should be treated equally under the law.

With respect to the "ZOMG! What about the children?" angle, this concern is specious and is used as a distraction to support a personal belief, not a substantial objection.

In the comment, JB basically says that girls are hard-wired to nurture and boys are hard-wired to hunt.  Putting aside the fact that evidence for this assumption is unavailable, to then argue that children raised by same-sex parents will become gender-confused completely contradicts the writer's own point.

Either children are hard-wired by gender or they are not.  The usual point that children should be raised by one man and one woman is another personal belief that's easy to refute.

What about single parents?  Are they not able to raise children?  What about people who don't want children? What about people who are too old to have children?   What about children who go to boarding school?  Is the 'traditional' Mormon scenario of polygamy therefore harmful to children?  What if the same-sex couple is not gay?  Does that change things?  What if the child is gay?  Wouldn't it be confusing for a gay child to be raised by opposite sex, heterosexual parents?

And so on.

We see the same kinds of specious arguments and what-if questions, used to justify dog banning.

Should a dog attack a cat or another dog we inevitably hear from a bystander that 'it could have been a child'.  Yes, that's possible but it's not what happened and in fact it rarely does happen.  That's why it becomes 'news' although they have been scraping the bottom of that barrel quite desperately over the past few years.  A story screaming about a full-scale mauling resulting in the victim's release from the emergency room a few hours later sounds a little hysterical to me.  Time for media to calm the hell down.

The other common argument that the majority supports something so it is therefore a good idea holds no water when it comes to constitutional issues.  The whole point of a constitution or charter of rights is that safeguards are needed to protect a minority from being oppressed by a majority and to protect the individual from being oppressed by the state.

Obviously, a majority can always drown a minority - that's simple arithmetic.  The problem with putting something such as Proposition 8 on the ballot in California is that the question isn't whether or not you support marriage contracts for homosexual couples.  The question that was really being asked was this:

"Do you believe full rights of citizenship as upheld by the Supreme Court on constitutional grounds should be removed from a minority in our society?"

The question would be the same were dog banning ever put to a referendum: 

"Do you believe that a minority within a minority should be treated unequally under the law for superficial reasons, even though the Charter says otherwise?"

The electorate has its place, which is to vote for people who will represent public interests in an upstanding and ethical manner at different levels of government.

The public, however, is not a constitutional expert, does not seem capable of seeing past red herrings and is not generally qualified to decide an issue as important as that decided recently in California.

I think that putting the question on the ballot may in itself have been unconsitutional but I'm no expert either.  I just have this darned sense of fairness that won't go away.

Considering the fact that only a handful of people have the expertise needed to decide whether or not dogs should be banned by shape (and they all oppose the idea), public opinion on the issue is just as meaningless.  Popular beliefs about dogs are based on mythology, distortion and panic policy-making resulting from cascading penny-dreadful media reports and proselytizing by people who don't have either facts or science on their side but are seeking revenge or affirmation of ill-founded beliefs.

In that way the two issues are very similar.