Marriage law is not bigoted. It is intended to regulate people who share community property and who produce biological offspring. Over the years, married people have been given quite a few special privileges in the name of parenthood. These special privileges have created an Equal Protection crisis for all unmarried individuals. Gay marriage is a small part of a much bigger issue. Our modern regulatory problems have not transformed marriage into an inherently bigoted, anti-gay institution.
The passage of Prop 8 was an affirmative action taken to strip a group of people of their right to marriage. Thus,
that law was indeed bigoted.
Legally-speaking, it was a good argument. Unfortunately for the bigots, it was not a correct argument. Genetic diversity is an imperative for producing biological offspring. Also, Virginia could not have created an effective legal method for defining "white" and "black". The anti-interracial laws were appearance-based, unenforceable, and designed to prevent people of different races from being together and producing biological children.
All of that is true, and the Court did point out all of those problems with the law, but none of those issues represented the core reason for striking down the law on equal protection grounds.
The implication of your post was that I'm using a bigoted legal defense; therefore, I must have a bigot's agenda. A legal defense is not inherently bigoted, and the rest of your implied point was a non-sequitur since the subject matter is different.
The point of my post was to show that in your attempt to argue that opposition to SSM is not analogous to the racial discrimination of the past, you inadvertently showed exactly why they are analogous by using literally the same arguments that were used to justify miscegenation laws. You're intentionally dancing around the obvious parallels in order to avoid the real question.
Furthermore, the US is not particularly hostile to gays so the lack of gay marriage does not exclude the possibility of Equal Protection.
What? Lack of gay marriage absolutely excludes equal protection of the law in the realm of marriage law because gays are singled out by the state and treated differently than other citizens, and the government has not legitimate interest in doing so. Saying, "well, gays could have it worse off than they do" doesn't justify the discrimination that does exist in the U.S.
Anyway, the real bigots are the people in DC, who don't want to lose revenue by giving married tax benefits to all single people. Follow the money.
I take your position to be that the government should either (1) stop granting marriage benefits altogether, or (2) grant similar benefits to all people regardless of their relationship status. This is of course the classic libertarian cop-out. Not that position itself, but the fact that you're using that view to sidestep the question of gay marriage. You could hold such a view regardless of your stance on gay marriage because two completely different questions are involved. The one you want to ask is should the state grant government benefits to couples, and if so what kind? The question involved in the gay marriage debate is, IF the government is going to grant benefits to married couples, THEN should they have to grant those benefits regardless of sexual orientation.
