XPost: alt.politics.homosexuality, alt.california 
  
 On Sat, 09 Aug 2003 21:53:47 GMT, David Davis  
 wrote: 
  
 >€ 
 > 
 >Uncle, Bill, Paul wrote: 
 > 
 >> Dating the Anti-Gay Backlash - Oval Office embraces homophobia 
 > 
 >Hardly sparky, even Bork says you are wrong. 
 > 
 >By Robert H. Bork 
 > 
 >"Many court watchers believe that within five to 10 years the U.S. 
 >Supreme Court will hold that there is a constitutional right to 
 >homosexual marriage, ... The chosen instrument will be the Equal 
 >Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. After all, if state law 
 >forbids Fred to marry€Henry, aren't they denied equal protection 
 >when the law permits Tom and Jane to marry"? 
  
  
 The fourteenth has absolutely no bearing on sexual orientation (read 
 it carefully and you will see what it refers to) and cannot be 
 wrenched into having any by even the most creative of homosexuals. 
  
 You might pay particular attention to the narrative that says, 
  
 "The Development of Substantive Due Process 
  
 Although many years after ratification the Court ventured the not very 
 informative observation that the Fourteenth Amendment ''operates to 
 extend . . . the same protection against arbitrary state legislation, 
 affecting life, liberty and property, as is offered by the Fifth 
 Amendment,'' and that ''ordinarily if an act of Congress is valid 
 under the Fifth Amendment it would be hard to say that a state law in 
 like terms was void under the Fourteenth,'' 35 the significance of the 
 due process clause as a restraint on state action appears to have been 
 grossly underestimated by litigants no less than by the Court in the 
 years immediately following its adoption. From the outset of our 
 constitutional history due process of law as it occurs in the Fifth 
 Amendment had been recognized as a restraint upon government, but, 
 with the conspicuous exception of the Dred Scott decision, 36 only in 
 the narrower sense that a legislature must provide ''due process for 
 the enforcement of law.'' 
  
  
  
 >> Fri Aug 8, 5:24 PM ET 
 >> € 
 >> 
 >> By Doug Ireland LA Weekly Writer 
 >> 
 >> George Bush wanted to distract the electorate from the rising U.S. 
 >> body count in Iraq (news - web sites), the sputtering economy and the 
 >> other issues that are eroding his poll numbers. The pope wanted to 
 >> distract the worlds dwindling Mass-goers from the Catholic Churchs 
 >> ongoing pedophile scandals. So, natch, both seized on that old standby 
 >> issue to which political and religious reactionaries have recourse 
 >> when things are going badly for them: gay bashing. 
 >> 
 >> Bushs decision to push the hot-button issue of gay marriage at his 
 >> Rose Garden press conference last week was fueled by the Gallup Poll 
 >> released two days previously showing a dramatic backlash (as poll 
 >> director Frank Newport put it) against gays in the wake of the Supreme 
 >> Courts decision striking down the so-called sodomy laws and legalizing 
 >> sex between consenting adults of the same sex. 
 >> 
 >> Not only did support for same-sex civil unions drop from 49 percent in 
 >> Gallups May poll to 40 percent, those saying homosexuality should be 
 >> considered an acceptable lifestyle careened downward from 54 percent 
 >> to 46 percent. Worse, a comfortable majority of 60 percent favoring 
 >> the legalization of same-gender sex plummeted sharply to 48 percent in 
 >> the wake of the Supremes decision. Among blacks, the drop in support 
 >> for legalizing gay sex was even sharper: a whopping 23 points. (A New 
 >> York Times poll released August 3 tended to confirm the backlash 
 >> Gallup found on the gay-marriage issue among blacks [65-to-28 against] 
 >> and Hispanics [54-to-40 against]). 
 >> 
 >> Bushs categorization of gays as sinners in his biblically framed 
 >> announcement that hes ordered his lawyers to figure out how to block 
 >> gay marriage reflected a stepping-up of the Republicans gay-hostile 
 >> electoral strategy. 
 > 
 >It is sad that a president who is suppose to be the president of 
 >all the people, sees intersexuals and homosexuals as subhuman 
 >second class, sexual objects, to be thrown away like a broken 
 >sex toy. That the constitution means so little to him and his party, 
 >that equal protection and due process of the law clause of the 
 >14th amendment, are just old concepts that get in the way of 
 >their bigotry. That the lie of a sin of homosexuality in the bible, 
 >is more important to this president than are the citizens he is sworn 
 >to protect. He is indeed only the Resident, not the President. 
 > 
 >Resident Bush, who does a hermaphrodite legally marry when 
 >you make it against the law of the constitution for them to 
 >marry? What happens to the 14th amendment when equal 
 >protection and due process of the law no long have any 
 >meaning. Will we then bring back slaves, say all liberals, 
 >Resident Bush? 
 >€ 
 > 
 >> It followed GOP Senate Majority Leader Bill Frists 
 >> declaration on Meet the Press a month ago that he would absolutely 
 >> support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Frists 
 >> surprise declaration was no accident: It was, as Howard Fineman 
 >> reported in Newsweek at the time, made with no-fingerprints support 
 >> from the White House. 
 >> 
 >> Bushs decision to surf on the anti-gay backlash also reflects the 
 >> enormous pressure hes been under from the Christian right and 
 >> conservative ideologues on social issues. Both The Weekly Standard 
 >> (which devoted its cover to the gay-marriage issue last week, and 
 >> which has editorialized in the past that heterosexual sex within 
 >> marriage is the only relationship compatible with the Republic) and 
 >> the National Review have come out in support of the Federal Marriage 
 >> Amendment, as the attempt to write discrimination into the 
 >> Constitution is known. And Pat Robertsons 700 Club prayer campaign 
 >> calling on God to remove three Supreme Court justices in the wake of 
 >> the Supremes legalization of gay sex was only the most off-the-wall 
 >> reflection of how the right-wing Christers have taken to heart Justice 
 >> Antonin Scalias proclamation in his sodomy-law dissent that the court 
 >> has adopted the homosexual agenda. 
 >> 
 >> Karl Roves strategy for Bush and the Republicans not only to win a 
 >> second term for Dubya but to increase their majorities in both houses 
 >> of Congress calls for energizing the Bush Bible Belt base (it was, 
 >> after all, the Christian right that motored Bushs 2000 primary 
 >> victories over John McCain). The 13 states whose anti-sodomy laws were 
 >> nullified by the Supremes were all states that Bush carried last time. 
 >> NASCAR (news - web sites) Dads have replaced soccer moms as the 
 >> constituency to be chased this year, and theyre considered hostile to 
 >> gays in general and gay marriage in particular. The center-right 
 >> Democratic Leadership Councils pollster, Mark Penn, has identified 
 >> white men and married women as the two constituencies among whom the 
 >> Democrats are weak (both happen to have high anti-gay numbers), and 
 >> Howard Deans national identification with Vermonts civil unions for 
  
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