Saturday, September 25, 2010

Ken Cuccinelli Files Amicus Brief Saying Gay Marriage Not A Fundamental Right

Virginia Attorney General Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli has joined in an amicus brief filed in Perry v. Schwarzenegger yesterday, September 24, 2010, arguing that gay marriage is not a fundamental right under the U. S. Constitution. From his past actions, it's pretty clear that Cuccinelli would most prefer to apply his own version of a "Final Solution" to LGBT Virginians and simply drive gays from Virginia and exterminate those who fail to leave. The man is a religious extremist of the highest degree who ought to be working for a professional Christian organization such as FCR or holding office in Opus Dei as opposed to serving as the top legal official for a state with over 7 million residents. So far I haven't seen any Virginia newspaper report on the filing - not a surprise given the low quality of most of said newspapers - and learned of it via the Wyoming StarTribune which is reporting in part as follows:
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Wyoming and nine other states will file a legal brief today saying a federal court "exceeded its judicial authority" when it ruled that the U.S. Constitution requires legal marriage to include same-sex couples.
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In the amicus brief, which will be filed late this afternoon in the case of Perry vs. Schwarzenegger, the states disagree with the court's ruling that same-sex marriage is a fundamental right. The brief also asserts that individual states, not the federal court system, have final say in decisions about whether to allow same-sex marriages.
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The other states joining the brief are Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia. The brief doesn't mean the states will join the lawsuit. Amicus briefs are often submitted in court cases by outside parties to volunteer their opinions on cases.
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The brief can be viewed here. Not surprisingly, the brief tries to basically ignore Loving v. Virginia where the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in to end illegal discrimination under the U. S. Constitution. Kookinelli and his fellow Christo-fascist attorneys general would limit Loving to ending laws that continued "an incident of slavery" and "measures designed to maintain White Supremacy." Mob majority rule is clearly the mantra of these individuals - a mantra that ought to terrify every minority group in their respective states. The brief states in part as follows:
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Federal intervention was justified in cases such as Loving to uphold the core guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment. See, e.g., Loving, 388 U.S. at 6, 11 (describing anti-miscegenation laws as “an incident to slavery” and as “measures designed to maintain White Supremacy”); id. at 11 (observing that “[o]ver the years, this Court has consistently repudiated ‘[d]istinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry’ as being ‘odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality’”).
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But the Supreme Court has never countenanced the use of federal judicial power to recast the basic parameters of marriage. The notion is at war with the federalist structure of our republic. That structure is designed to allow individual states to experiment with novel social or economic arrangements, without the attendant disruption of forcing the entire nation to do so.
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[V]oters and legislatures in forty-one states have affirmatively rejected the notion of same-sex marriage, either by constitutional amendment or legislation, and voters or legislatures in four other states have left in place statutes that plainly assume the opposite-sex definition of marriage. See supra n.1. Thus, as in Glucksburg, “[t]he history of the law’s treatment of [same-sex marriage] in this country has been and continues to be one of the rejection of nearly all efforts to permit it.” 521 U.S. at 728. “That being the case . . . the asserted ‘right’ . . . is not a fundamental liberty interest protected by the Due Process Clause.”
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The United States Supreme Court has never held that homosexuality constitutes a suspect class, and the law in this circuit is that homosexual persons do not constitute a suspect class. . . . Because Proposition 8 does not involve a fundamental right or a suspect class, it benefits from a “strong presumption of validity.” Heller v. Doe, 509 U.S. 312, 319 (1993). Proposition 8 must be upheld “‘if there is any reasonably conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis for the classification.’”

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Of course, given his religious fanaticism, Cuccinelli's personal religious beliefs are the only basis needed to uphold the religious based discrimination embodied in Proposition 8. Never mind that the proponents of Prop 8 failed to produce any facts to support it other than by default religious belief.

1 comment:

Michael Ejercito said...

From Davis v. Beason

"Certainly no legislation can be supposed more wholesome and necessary in the founding of a free, self-governing commonwealth, fit to take rank as one of the coordinate states of the union, than that which seeks to establish it on the basis of the idea of the family, as consisting in and springing from the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony; the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization; the best guaranty of that reverent morality which is the source of all beneficent progress in social and political improvement. And to this end, no means are more directly and immediately suitable than those provided by this act, which endeavors to withdraw all political influence from those who are practically hostile to its attainment."