Stick with me. When an individual state votes on the issue and a [strike]majority[/strike] prevailing plurality of actual voters in that state decides why would the courts involve themselves?
U.S. and state electoral contests are not majoritarian, but plurality votes. An electoral candidate or ballot initiative need not obtain explicit majority support, and no effort is made to assess whether or not majority support has been obtained or not.
The people have a right to determine the laws and the mores of their state.
Governments deal in laws, not mores. Obviously, popular mores can and do influence policy, but they are not policy. As for determining the laws of their state, as things currently stand the voters of a state do NOT actually have a legal right to set any law they wish; there are still substantial constraints on which legislation they may propose, and how they may go about supporting it.
I know the homosexuals and their supporters want to equate the right to marry with a right to life, liberty, and property.
Many do, but there's no need to go into abstractions and ideals. The plain fact of the matter is that heterosexuals have their marriages recognized by law, and homosexuals do not. UNLIKE discrimination in early childhood education (for example, you're not allowed to work with young children if convicted of certain offenses), there is NO RATIONAL BASIS for legally recognizing the marriages of hetero couples while denying such recognition to homosexual couples. There is no grounds for LEGAL policy justification for recognizing hetero marriages which doesn't apply just as well to homosexual marriages.
Perhaps one day it will be viewed that way. When your side loses at the ballot you ought to have the decency to spend more time changing hearts and minds.
That's incredibly arrogant, entitled, and easy to say when you can take for granted what others must struggle for. Segregationist "whites" said the same thing of equal legal rights for people of color, i.e. Oh Just Wait and Make Your Case...
HELL NO. Justice deferred is justice denied. More to the point, the notion that politically vulnerable groups (whether numerically minor or not) must wait around for equality to come from the eventual enlightenment and change in attitudes among a privileged population completely ignores the fact that the privileged group has no substantive stake in the matter. It costs hetero couples nothing to have homosexual marriages legally recognized, while it costs homosexual couples denied recognition quite a lot: socially, financially, and legally.
You diminish the legitimacy of the state when unelected, unaccountable people overthrow the will of the people as evidenced by a vote.
So if a plurality of voters wants something -- no matter how LITTLE or even nonexistent a stake they have in the matter -- you're OK with making that the prevailing policy?
For example, let's say the state you live in proposes a ballot initiative which bans you, specifically, from all auto travel. The only car ride you're allowed to have is in a squad car if you get arrested. Let's say it turns out many people (or at least enough to soundly achieve victory in the initiative process) are dead set in favor of the law. Are you truly OK with that?!? You don't see anything wrong with it?