Posted by
Zentrist on Wednesday, May 27, 2009 11:36:42 PM
In two separate interviews today/tonight, on CNN, the surprising team of Ted Olson and David Boies (remember Florida, 2000?) argued passionately for the legalization of gay marriage. "State by state is fine," said Mr. Boies. However, he went on to argue that an incremental approach to the issue is not fair to those who should be enjoying, now, the same rights as "everyone else."
Olson, so far from falling back on the technical and the merely legal, argued with great simplicity--and therefore with amazing power--that equality, justice, human rights and human decency are all at stake here. Under the Constitution, both legal giants amazingly said, gay people already have the same right as everyone else to "marry the person they love." In short, federal law, Constitutional law (equal protection under Law), guarantees the right to homosexual marriage. And again, this should not be merely a matter of the legal. Nor should it be a left versus right or Dem versus Republican deal. We are talking about a fundamental human right, in fact, one could infer, a universal human right--to the extent that the Constitution sort of depends on the language of the Declaration (universal human rights, universal human freedom and universal human equality).
All of this was amazing to me.
I have to say, I've gotten off the fence on this issue. I dare say, if you had seen these two and had listened carefully to what they had to say, you might have been as convinced as I am now--that they are right!
When a person likes me changes his mind or gets "off the fence" on an issue as important as this one, well, it's a "shaking of the foundations."
Folks, get used to it.