One of the more interesting aspects of the gay marriage debate that the arguments of the last two days have highlighted is how different the discussion of marriage is from the religious to the legal realm. Religion was not mentioned one time over the course of the two days and neither should it have been. The issues of the extension of civil marriage are not issues of theology or spirituality (and they still won’t be if same-sex marriage became legal nationwide tomorrow).

On November 6, 2012 voters in many states had the opportunity to make decisions on a number of state laws through ballot measures. Voters in Maine, Maryland, and Washington voted in favor of measures that would legalize same-sex marriage. Voters in Minnesota rejected a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, and voters in North Carolina voted to define marriage as solely existing between one man and one woman.

Excerpt:  A U.S. District Court judge in Honolulu has rejected arguments from two lesbians who said that Hawaii’s 1998 ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. According to court documents released Wednesday, Judge Alan Kay dismissed the lawsuit, Jackson v. Abercrombie, saying that a decision like this should be left to [...]

In short, Judge Walker ruled based on the evidence presented, as any trial judge should, and regardless of his own personal sexual orientation or biases, Prop 8 supporters simply did not make a viable case for themselves. Sloganeering may have won the election but did not win a trial where real evidence was required. Prop 8 supporters may later look at the ruling and claim it was wrongly decided but as this essay points out, the reality is that they did a poor job presenting their evidence and only put two witnesses on the stand, both of whom had previously written statements that contradicted their testimony in favor of Prop 8. When both of these witnesses were neutralized, Prop 8 advocates had nothing left with which to prove their case and any effort by any judge to add in facts to uphold Prop 8 would have been the very definition of judicial activism.

An epic battle played out on two levels at the California Supreme Court on March 5. On a surface level, attorneys fought over a technical issue of whether the Proposition 8 prohibition on gay marriage represented a revision or an amendment. On the deeper level, the question asked was whether there are any limits on the majority to impact the rights of the minority.

The plan is to mobilize the same religious factions that joined forces in California to deter lawmakers from “taking on this divisive social issue while we are in the middle of a huge financial crisis,” Gallagher said.

The race has tightened over the past six weeks and is expected to be close. A Field Poll released Friday found 49 percent of likely voters oppose the ban and 44 percent favor it. In mid-September, the measure was losing by 17 points.

“In my view, if we are not prepared to protect the rights of those with whom we disagree, we are not serious about religious freedom.”

Former associate general counsel of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, Mitch Tyner, asks questions about the legal process, lawsuits between believers, separation of church and state, and addresses the controversy about gay marriage.

John V. Stevens, Sr., an experienced religious liberty advocate, responds to Professor Crane’s article “A Judeo-Christian Argument for Privatizing Marriage” from his perspective as a Seventh-day Adventist.  He has provided his kind permission to reproduce it here.  I hope that this can be a springboard for discussion on this important [...]

There has been much discussion about the California ballot initiative that would ban same-sex marriages from a moral / social / religious perspective, but not much about the concept of overturning court decisions by majority vote.  Vikram David Amar at Findlaw writes in a post entitled, “The California Supreme Court’s [...]