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Like I said, when it's not you and it will never BE you, it's easy to trivialize the right of the state to punish some other disfavored minority for consensual act in their own home.
I am not trivializing anything. People who constantly bring up miscegenation laws and segregation in the context of these issues are the ones trivializing. They are trivializing the extremely repressive conditions racial minorities had to endure for generations. Laws that are rarely enforced and have incredibly minor consequences are nothing compared to the various barbarities unleashed upon the African-American population, and other racial minorities for that matter.
I suppose you mean it's the best for those who have nothing at risk and are quite happy with the status quo. For them, there is NEVER a 'dire need' to address anything affecting other people, not them. And can you name ANY major shift/accomplishment that happened with everyone asking nicely?
Actually, it is best for everyone. Gay people aren't being arrested for getting married or facing any impediments not faced by countless long-term unmarried couples. There is no need for them to pursue such an uncooperative means of getting it legalized. Forcing gay marriage on deeply conservative states through court cases is unnecessary and creates the risk of serious backlash.
Court battles aren't in lieu of anything, they are in addition to those other efforts.
Nonsense, they know legalizing it through the legislature is not going to work in these states and so they are trying to get the courts to force them to legalize it.
And the rest is just a version of, "I can get married and secure those very unique rights, benefits and obligations, in 10 minutes in Vegas. That gays cannot get married at all is no biggee to me, so since I don't care about their so called 'right' to marry, they shouldn't care either! Silly gays. And, hey, if businesses want to deny service to OTHER people, they should just get over it. Why should I care that some other people not like me are getting denied services?"
The rest is suggesting that severely upsetting the social order should usually only happen when the need is great. For racial minorities, the serious disruption to social order that came about through the civil rights movement was completely reasonable given the level of abuse. Here you have people attempting to radically alter the social and political fabric of the country for something that, ultimately, is an unnecessary privilege. For something of such minor importance, a gradual and democratic shift is more appropriate.
I think I understand - the Mozilla guy possesses a freedom of conscience to contribute to a fund that is intended to deny his gay employees the right to marry. I'm with you, he has that right. And he also has the right for his acts directed against the rights of his gay employees to be free from protest, and any real world consequences?
Again the "not free from the consequences" schtick, which is basically an excuse for harassing or intimidating people into conforming or shutting up. You can say that "well they can still say and do these things", but the reality is people are much less likely to do or say those things when it results in harassment and intimidation. In that case it basically means people working there who oppose gay marriage realize they either have to keep their beliefs as secret as possible or forget about advancing their careers. People who have done anything that would put them on the public record as opposing gay marriage would realize that they can only advance so far as at a certain point they would risk being driven out of their position by activists. You can say as much as you want that it is about "consequences", but you cannot objectively argue that such consequences mean people are truly free to express their beliefs. When you face the loss of your livelihood and public shaming for expressing a belief, you are not truly free to express that belief.
The whole thing is no more than, "It's 'obscene' for people to protest unless I share their concerns! Laws against discrimination against LGBT do not apply if the person declares a religious reason for breaking those laws!"
Unfortunately, that is the real problem. Unlike with all previous civil rights movements, there is an ironclad religious basis for opposition. Someone who truly cared about rights and democracy would respect that there is an inherent conflict here with religious liberty and try to accommodate that. Requiring someone who feels homosexuality is a serious sin to go and attend a gay wedding to take pictures or to bake and decorate a cake for a gay wedding amounts to the government telling them they can either act according to their faith or lose their business. It hard to not see how that impacts religious liberty. Where people are forced to do things that conflict directly with their faith under threat of losing their livelihood it amounts to official state pressure to abandon closely-held religious beliefs and amount to an interference in a person's religious liberty. Would you suggest a Christian should also be required to attend a Satanist wedding as refusal would amount to religious discrimination?
Failing to recognize a marriage deprives same-sex couples of various liberties. This includes the previously mentioned death benefits, property inheritance, medical power of attorney, automatic child custody, spousal privilege in a criminal or civil case, etc.
Only spousal privilege is something that cannot be gained through existing legal measures. I would not consider it a right either.
Irrelevant.
It is relevant when you invoke the horrific image of Jim Crow as part of your propaganda.
No, but if the state offers them at all, they must comply with the Equal Protection clause.
Under any objective interpretation they do comply. We do not have much in the way of objective judges, though.
Besides, you're wrong. Race and gender are protected classifications under the 14th amendment. Number of persons in a contract is not.
Religion is a protected classification and there are religions where polygamy is encouraged. It is not the same as children or animals as one is an issue of consent and the other an issue of personhood. Fundamentally different legal principles are at issue there. Polygamy bans could easily be argued as a product of morality being enforced through legislation and as discrimination against religions that encourage polygamy.
So you think interracial marriage bans are constitutional?
The ones that were generally on the books were unconstitutional in various ways. I would say that they were not unconstitutional in the sense of violating a "right to marry". Unlike with gay marriage "bans", which are really just legal definitions of marriage that exclude same-sex marriage along the lines of the traditional definition, interracial marriage bans were more like outright bans that imposed penalties. Whether any version of a law barring recognition to interracial marriage would have constitutional issues depends. Given the difficulties in defining and identifying race, one could argue that it would be an equal protection issue on those grounds. Basically, since certain cases would leave the validity of a marriage subject to individual opinions, it would not really offer people equal protection as a marriage could be considered interracial in one jurisdiction and intraracial in another.