Hooray!

A federal judge appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan has overturned mob rule in California and re-imposed the rule of law.

Proposition 8, the infamous mob-rule attempt to alienate gay people from the fundamental human right of marriage, is now overturned. The judge spared no words in his ruling: Proposition 8 has no rational basis ("the Bible says" is not a rational, legal argument in these United States, especially when the Bible says nothing of the sort); gay people fall under the strict scrutiny provisions of Constitutional protection, meaning that any restriction imposed only on gay people as opposed to everybody else must pass extra-strict Constitutional provisions requiring the state to account for this restriction with a compelling, rational reason that justifies it; and gay people cannot be deprived of their human rights without due process, something which mob rule masquerading as voting is most certainly not.

The Constitution has now been restored as the law of the land in California. This case, argued let it be noted by one of the most respected conservative lawyers in America, Ted Olsen, is now on a trajectory that will take it to the 9th court of appeals and thence to the Supreme Court. It looks as if, as in Lawrence vs Texas, that Justice Anthony Kennedy will be the one man on which will hang government by law or government by a mob in the street. If Kennedy is still the man who wrote that the purpose of the court is to protect liberty and not to rubber stamp somebody's arbitrary version of "morality," we may be on the verge of a sea change in the status of gay people in America. Cross your fingers and re-read Kennedy's majority opinion in Lawrence.

Read it here