Supreme Court rules gay couples nationwide have a right to marry

Proud of Chief Justice John Roberts.

…and States power was just weakened. The Constitution does not discuss marriage. I don’t hold a stance on gay marriage otherwise.

This dude is a Bush appointee too. I think this is more about expanding the influence of the Supreme Court. They make a contemporarily appropriate political decision because it helps them become more relevant. Just like pope Palpatine is starting to acknowledge evolution and climate change.

I am not.

But - what if I was one?

This is over the line Finance Consultant

Thanks, seeing that am a pain most of the times.

Not trying to change the subject or get on my religious high horse, but since when is the Pope an expert on climate change? I’ve never heard Billy Graham try to lobby the government for climate change.

On the one hand I think that sometimes when states are standing in the way of rights it is the morally right move for the SC to stand in and do what happened today. On the other hand, an erosion of state’s rights is concerning, so I do see your point.

At the end of the day though, there are still a lot of people that claim the Civil War was about state’s rights and as such clearly does represent an erosion of state’s rights. One that I’m ok with.

I don’t think the Pope really views what Billy Graham did or didn’t do as relevant to his own actions.

Very pleased by this. Two consenting adults should be allowed to marry each other, wherever they live in the US. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness should not be limited to the majority.

The Pope’s job (since at least 1600), includes clarifying the relationship betwen religious doctrine and scientific knowledge. You could argue that almost no political leader is an expert on climate change, since they’ve been doing politics instead of climate science or anti-science, yet they still need to have opinions on the matter.

There’s definitely a strain of Christianity dating back to at least St. Francis of Assisi that looks to humans as caretakers of God’s creation and thus potentially damnable for its destruction. That’s distinct from the brands of Christianity that see man’s job as to subdue the earth and confident that God will presumably intervene to provide more if anything actually damaging happens. So the Pope has decided to steer the Church in one direction rather than the other.

Does OP realize that Roberts voted against? Kennedy was the swing vote. Roberts maintained this was a legislative issue.

If you were in my position (as a tax preparer and personal finance expert), you would see how much of a problem gay couples had. It was truly a quagmire when gay couples moved from a “gay” state to a “nonrecognition” state. So for that reason, I think it’s important that this law applied uniformly to all US citizens.

I’m more concerned with the fact that some people with genunie religious objections, or certain religious institutions, will have to bend to the will of the gay lobby. EG - in some Christian schools, they provide apartments for straight couples who are students. Now they will have to provide apartments to gay couples, even though it’s contrary to the school’s mission and its religious ethos.

In political science, there’s always a debate about the usefulness of centralized authority vs local authorities. Some of it is economic, suggesting that central authorities can do things with economies of scale. Some of it is about information and local knowlege, suggesting that local authorities understand the local situation better and can be nimble and that central authority tends view things in terms of cookie-cutter type solutions that don’t fit a lot of situations. Some of it is about which level of government protects people’s liberties better.

When it comes down to civil liberties and rights-based stuff, the truth is sometimes one is better than the other, but it is not consistently central or local authority, but dependant on the situation.

When the southern states fought for their rights to deny the Bill of Rights to people they felt free to whip, sell, or even kill and dispose of like cattle simply because their ancestors had been captured in a fight on some other contient, it took a centralized authority beyond the local to say “The Bill of Rights must apply to all human beings.” A similar federal intervention was required 100 years later when Southern apartheid had to be dismantled.

On the other hand, there’s nothing intrinsic about centralized authority that makes it immune to corruption or guarantees that it the optimal enforcer of rights. In authoritarian regimes, it’s often local government that is able to provide little pockets of freedom (though typically this is in response graft) that central authorities would like closed. A large number of local governments with relatively wide local powers can also provide a larger number of experimental policy laboratories, and so one can often sample a larger number of policy approaches and learn what works best. So there is an information processing and learning aspect that favors protecting degrees of local autonomy.

Figuring out which is the level of government to back is often a judgement about costs/risks and benefits.

So this is a case where States Rights is often presented as clothing for what your preferred policy perscription is. If you think States Rights are protecting corrupt and/or evil local officials, you often want to empower central authorities to chuck them out. If you think central authorities’ policies don’t help you, States’ Rights is many people’s chosen way to try to diffuse it.

But the truth is that there’s nothing unique about States that guarantees that local corrupt officials are any better than national corrupt officials, except perhaps that if you are well-connected in local circles, you might have better access to bribing them, which is why States’ Rights is usually brought up by those who are locally powerful.

why cant i read finance consultant

I assume his posts were deleted by mods.

But it does discuss personal liberties i.e. we have them.

Can that troll be banned already? He/She brings some pretty awful dialogue to this forum.

Countries where gay marriage is legal nationwide:

The Netherlands (2000)

Belgium (2003)

Canada (2005)

Spain (2005)

South Africa (2006)

Norway (2009)

Sweden (2009)

Argentina (2010)

Iceland (2010)

Portugal (2010)

Denmark (2012)

Brazil (2013)

England and Wales (2013)

France (2013)

New Zealand (2013)

Uruguay (2013)

Luxembourg (2014)

Scotland (2014)

Finland: (signed 2015, effective 2017)

USA (2015)

Notable countries not on the list: Australia, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, Switzerland, China, all of Eastern Europe.

Roberts told same-sex couples they could “celebrate today’s decision,” even though he disagreed with it so strongly.

“Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits,” he wrote. “But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.”