Prop 8 Redux

For those who think that the Proposition 8 hullabaloo is all over and done with, and the Gays lost, you might want to think again. The issue is anything but dead. Several law suits have been filed, the California Attorney General has changed his position, and the California legislature is likely to weigh in again before the issue is returned to the courts. The possibity of the case going all the way to the Federal Supreme Court is very real, as there are argueably Constitutional issues in play. The subject is still making editorial pages throughout California (and elsewhere) quite lively.

Not all of the discussion is on the Left either.

One surprising side effect of Prop 8, is that many are rediscovering that the issue of Gay Marriage as a viable political goal didn't even originated from the Left. In fact, the first national political party to openly call for complete gay equality was the Libertarian Party, with a plank in their platform, first inserted in 1975. The marriage issue itself first arose to national prominence in a 1998 Slate article by a prominent libertarian who called, not for Gay marriage, but for the privatization of all marriages, as a means of both removing government from the sphere of religion and as way of achieving marriage equity for Gays. Soon thereafter, seeing that the issue had finally become politically viable, the New Left jumped onto the issue and claimed it as their own (sort of as they did with racial equality, which was also originated by libertarians.) The rest is, as they say, history, or at least the history so far...

For some enlightening, and non-New Left, perspective, I recommend visiting the Independent Gay Forum (http://www.independentgayforum.org), which has dozens of articles on Same-Sex Marriage, many of them presenting intelligent post-analysis discussion of the failure of the No on Prop 8 campaign.