elsewhere: grim amusements - "washington state says yea ... for now"

grim amusements / 13 february 2012 / washington state says yea ... for now

.....I would be astonished if the anti-gay-marriage crowd fails to get enough signatures to put this onto the ballot. That said, if they do succeed, I hope the pro-gay-marriage crowd takes it into court prior to the vote on the grounds that a known hostile majority should not be allowed to vote to recognise the rights of a known-to-be-discriminated-against minority. (Though, to be fair, I'm not sure that argument is precisely a constitutional argument, either under the Washington state or federal constitutions. I would think that you'd be able to get the courts to invoke heightened scrutiny, though.)

What I found interesting, though, was a side comment somewhere: approximately 42% of people in this country now live in a state where gay marriage is legal. Of course, that's primarily due to California and New York, and it's not precisely legal in California at the moment. It's also due to the fact that our population is heavily concentrated in only a few areas; there are only seven states plus DC where gay marriage is legal; another 41 where, one way or another, the state has said, "NO! NO MARRIAGE FOR YOU, ICKY GAY PEOPLES!", either through constitutional amendment or some other law. Weirdly, several of those states grant something vaguely like civil union status. [...] There are also two (yes, TWO), where the state constitutions and any specifically exclusionary laws are, for the moment, utterly silent: New Jersey and New Mexico....