A Couple of News Items

A Couple of News Items

First, an editorial in the Moonie Times about why the Proposition 8 decision was a mistake.

Just to dash any hopes you might have had that it might be well thought out:

First of all, the Plaintiffs have made (deliberately) a glaring legal error which I was at first surprised Judge Walker could overlook with no fallout. The opponents of Proposition 8 argue that homosexuals are a suspect class. But as every student of law and political science knows, homosexuals are not a suspect class. They are not even a quasisuspect class. Homosexuals are a nonsuspect class. This means that the court should only have to apply a minimum rationality standard of review.

I’m no lawyer, but as I understand it, “suspect class” basically means “hey, state! That law looks like it could be bigoted. Show me that it isn’t.” Now, if you’d asked me, I would have thought that since there’s a long history of discrimination against gays, that they’d qualify as a suspect class. Thankfully, Amanda Read managed to prove me wrong, with her “every student … knows”. I guess that settles that.

(Except that she missed the bit on p.117 of the decision where the judge says that the case for Prop 8 can’t even withstand the much less onerous “rational basis review”.)

Speaking of which, I find it amusing that the word “gay” appears three times in her article: twice when she’s quoting someone else, and a third time when she’s mostly paraphrasing someone else. The word “homosexual”, on the other hand, appears nine times, each time when she’s speaking for herself. I’ve seen this a lot. Apparently the far right vastly prefers “homosexual” over “gay”. I can only imagine that this is a compromise since society won’t let them say “faggot” anymore.

The second bit of news is that apparently New York now has no-fault divorce.

Wait, what? They didn’t have it until now? Seriously? New York?

In case you’re not sure why this is a good thing, the article lays out the basic argument for no-fault divorce, which is basically that when a couple falls out of love, they have a choice of either going through a lengthy separation process, or going to court with bogus charges of infidelity or abuse. No-fault divorce allows people to avoid these sorts of expensive and unseemly charades.