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East County News Service
August 13, 2010 (San Diego) – U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker lifted a stay on gay marriages yesterday, after overturning Proposition 8 as unconstitutional last week. The judge declined to implement his order immediately, however, giving opponents time to appeal to a higher court. If the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals does not intervene, same-sex marriages may occur starting Wednesday.
San Diego’s Assessor/Recorder/Clerk’s office is accepting reservations for ceremonies to be performing as early as Wednesday, provided the ruling holds.
A Ninth Circuit Court motions panel today set a fast-paced schedule for reviewing a plea to put on hold, for several months, a federal judge’s ruling striking down California’s Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage. The panel ordered briefing completed by Monday morning --two days before the ruling would go into effect if it were not postponed.
Opponents of gay marriage have vowed to take the battle to the U.S. Supreme Court if the 9th Circuit does not overturn Judge Walker’s decision. But the L.A. Times today notes that the State of California was a defendant in that case, but both Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown have stated that they will not appeal. So other may be found to lack standing to take their claim to the high court.
Apart from gay couples, California's economy stands to reap a$370 milllion boom through revenues in the wedding industry if same-sex marriages are legalized, a 2008 UCLA study predicted.
Comments
Judge rules in favor of Homosexuals
Much can be said on this subject, however, let us all remember God is in control. We should be spending our time and energy spreading the Good News as Paul did.
Gay Marriage
Maybe this ruling will stand, maybe it won't. In either case, nothing said or done by any judge or legislator can change the true identity or reality of marriage. Marriage is essentially a pre-political relgio-moral institution; one based on--to use language that was once meaningful to Americans—“the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God” (The Declaration of Independence). It is what it is regardless of what we think of it and, as such, is no more subject to redefinition than would be rocks or trees. That doesn't mean, of course, that such ideologically motivated redefinitions won't be attempted and, given modern America's deep moral confusion, it would surprising if they weren't. Some might even formally succeed. But these victories can only be hollow, legal formalities. For “facts”--as John Adams once noted--“are stubborn things,” and do not yield to human fashions or flights of fancy, even when these are codified into illegitimate national laws.
Would that the human race had learned something lasting from the Orwellian century we just squeaked through. It was characterized to a significant degree by the fanatically desperate and brutal attempts of progressive totalitarians world-wide to rewrite the permanent rules of moral and political reality. We must remain wary of today's ubiquitous, and only slightly less overtly ideological, variants.
Those of us who still acknowledge and heed the “laws of nature and of nature's God” stand with every great American from Jefferson and Lincoln, to Martin Luther King, who paid it memorable tribute in his Letter From His Birmingham Jail: “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that, 'an unjust law is no law at all.' . . . To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law."
Few laws could be more plainly uprooted from the eternal and natural law, than would be a merely human (conventional) law which sanctions same sex marriage. Therefore, same sex marriage is, in the purest sense of the word, unjust, and must be opposed.
Craig S. Maxwell
Maxwell's House of Books
8285 La Mesa Blvd.
La Mesa, Ca 91941
619-462-3387
maxwellshouseofbooks@gmail.com