Yesterday's good news from California has already started to weed out the kind of homophobic bigoted assholes who supported this insane law in the first place. We shouldn't be surprised then that the group leading the charge of the intolerant is the Catholic Church. The US Catholic Bishops Conference has reacted to the ruling as a "misuse of the law".
The ruling centres on Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which states:
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 highlighted parts of the passage above are the relevant ones. It seems pretty clear to me that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional on these grounds. Then again, maybe it's just me since I also thought that the above amendment would have prevented racial segregation laws but obviously not.
The Church's problem with the ruling is not a differing interpretation of the constitution. That would almost be acceptable. The Church's problem with the ruling is far more deep-seated. In the words of Cardinal Francis George, President of the US Catholic Bishops Conference:
It is tragic that a federal judge would overturn the clear and expressed will of the people in their support for the institution of marriage. No court of civil law has the authority to reach into areas of human experience that nature itself has defined.
It's interesting to note that by uttering two simple sentences Mr. George has managed to get it wrong twice. Firstly, there are things in this world, such as truth and justice, which are not subject to popular vote. The fact that people believed the earth was flat two thousand years ago didn't make it so, nor does the will of the people justify the denial of basic human rights. Secondly, he manages to fall into the age-old trap of defining homosexuality as "unnatural" or "defying the law of nature". Tackling this level of lunacy is no small task and would take up some considerable column inches and so I direct you to PZ Myers post over at Pharyngula. In this post he responds to the firing of Kenneth Howell from the University of Illinois and puts some very large holes in the "homosexuality is unnatural" argument. Here is an excerpt which distills the debate into one nice simple rebuttal:
REALITY, huh?
Here's reality. A penis fits nicely in the hand, and a hand is usually better at stimulating the clitoris than a penis in the vagina, and our anatomy is such that our arms are of the right length to comfortably reach our genitals. Therefore, masturbation is a moral sexual act. We can extend this to point out that a man's hand can stimulate a clitoris and a woman's hand can stimulate a penis, and therefore, mutual masturbation, as is being practiced by tens of thousands of teenagers on this Friday night, is also a rightful act. There is no practical difference in anatomy or physiology between mutual masturbation between a heterosexual couple and a homosexual couple, so these acts are also entirely natural.
In the end, the happy consequence of this ruling is that it gives the Catholic Church another chance to show themselves for the homophobic fascists that they are. The sooner the world wakes up to this fact the better for society. In the words of Emile Zola:
Society shall not attain perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.
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