Gay Marriage Vote in NJ Senate on Thursday

[Vepres]

Civil rights are inherent and should not be decided by "the people".. instead they should be protected by the government*, "the people" be damned.

*As long as it doesn't slow down their agenda

[Vepres]

How about they let the people of NJ vote on this?

Yeah, civil rights should always go to referenda. That's how we made such great progress with african american rights!

I love how you pretend to support democracy.

Referenda have never been a great thing, in my opinion. People are notoriously uninformed, subject more to personal bigotry than your average legislator, and often just generally don't see the big picture.

Several examples off the top of my head. Gay marriage is of course one of the first that comes to mind. Passing the legislature of Maine, and supported by the legislature of California, yet, narrowly fails in both states because of a silly referendum. Individual rights should never be left up for a vote. If we followed the referendum approach, rights for women, blacks, gays, and a whole host of other sections of society would be set back decades, at least. Can you imagine slavery being put up for a referendum in the 1800s?

California also has serious budget issues, caused mainly by silly rules in amending the constitution and an unwilling public to go along with a damn thing being done. California is essentially bankrupt, and almost nothing good is getting done about that.

Colorado voters also made an extremely stupid move in approving the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or TABOR, because it sounded like a cute and good idea to the Average Joe that can't, apparently, do any sort of research on his own or see the forest instead of the trees. Instead TABOR passed, and ravaged Colorado, causing an uncountable number of difficulties and funding shortfalls. It was so bad, voters in Colorado changed their minds and suspended most of TABOR for the time being.

Switzerland also had the infamous referendum last year banning minarets. The Swiss government was vocally against the ban, being more, you know, intelligent, but the voters approved it anyway and the Swiss now have a lovely xenophobic image I'm sure they're proud of.

The list goes on and on. Voters simply cannot be trusted to make direct decisions most of the time, because they're too subject to their own bigotry or personal feelings and are grossly uninformed. Because voters are too dumb to make all the decisions, we have a system where voters elect more intelligent and dedicated people to make decisions for them, and evaluate their progress every 2/4/6 years. There are countless, countless, examples of referenda going wrong, and that's why I'm opposed to them.

For the most part, the referendum work very well in Colorado. The TABOR reform passed, and it's not like it wouldn't have passed the state legislature at the time anyway. There's a reason that we're the second "freest" state.

However, I agree that civil rights shouldn't be put to referendum to protect against tyranny of the majority.