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Bong Lover on 17 July 2012
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Kasz216 said:
Bong Lover said:

A) You don't know what you are talking about.

B) This has nothing to do with what we're discussing. I said your claim of letting the injunction on DADT stand would have created a stronger legal precedence for gay rights, I said that is speculative argument. You have still not given a single hint to what kind of precedence would be set that would go beyond Lawerence vs Texas that was setteled in 2003.

To the Prop 8 stuff, how in the world is that relevant?


A) Except I do... look it up?  DADT was ruled unconstituional, and the Injunction was put in place, demanding enforcement of it stop immediatly so the law didn't keep being enforced through the appeals process.  Unless of course, your talking about the injunction of the injunction which is even stronger in my point.

http://www.metroweekly.com/poliglot/2010/10/breaking-ninth-circuit-stays-d.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_Cabin_Republicans_v._United_States

 

B) Your joking right?   Lawerence vs Texas' only precedent was that sex acts could not be illegal.  This set no actual precedent in regards to treatment of people who comit those acts.   Which is why it's perfectly legal in most states and in the federal government to just outright fire someone specifically because they are gay.

Like Lofton vs Family Services.

 

Check wikipedia which notes.

On September 9, 2010, Judge Phillips ruled in favor of plaintiffs, finding that DADT violates the First and Fifth Amendments to the United States Constitution.[11][12][13] Noting the deference that courts are required to show the military in reviewing First Amendment claims, Phillips found that the "sweeping reach" of the restrictions placed on the speech of LGBT military personnel by DADT is "far broader than is reasonably necessary to protect the substantial government interest at stake". Phillips also found that DADT violates LGBT personnel's right of association, as it prohibits them from openly joining organizations like LCR for fear of reprisal, thereby depriving them of their ability to petition the government for redress of grievances. Phillips further ruled that DADT violates LGBT personnel's substantive due process rights, as articulated in Lawrence v. Texas, associated with the "'autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct.'"[14]

 

In otherwords, new precedence would be everything bolded.  It goes from "Being illegal to prosecute people on what intimiate acts they do in the bedroom" to "It becomes illegal to be biased against people for the acts they do in the bedroom."

In the interest of keeping it real, let me retort.

You've pointed out three or four times now that the Log Cabin Republicans won some law suit in a lower California court that ruled DADT unconstitutional and that the Obama administration appealed the ruling and requested a stay on the injunction that was passed with the ruling. For the record, I know these facts, what you fail to realize is that that has no relevance to what we are talking about.

You claim that if the Log Cabin court case had been allowed to stand, it would have provided stronger legal precedence for gay people, I say that is speculative. As you point out in your own quote, the ruling is heavily dependent on the ruling in Lawrence vs Texas. So yes, the Lawrence vs. Texas ruling absolutely sets precedence here, the Log Cabin ruling would (probably) not have been possible without this ruling. (keep in mind that the Lawrence vs Texas case directly contradicts a previous SC ruling, without that ruling overturned there is no way the Log cabin wins their case). The principle upheld in that ruling is basically that homosexuals conduct is protected by the 'due process clause' by the 14th amendment (and 5th). This opens the door for all the other findings and is the real legal precedence in this case.

Your conclusion above shows that you have not understood what the rulings in either case you are talking about are about.

So, the real precedence that the Log Cabin case would have set was that it gives certain civil rights much more weight in relation to the military than before. It's already established law that the military must be considered as a society unto itself and that civil law not necessarily can be applied to the armed forces. The ruling basically lifts certain rights beyond this devision. That is the real precedence and probably the real reason why the ruling was appealed so vigorously, apart from the fact that constitutional law is rarely settled in a District Court. So the hypothetical precedence that this ruling could have set would be a relative strengthening of the civil rights of service members, and would not have been a gay rights issue.

A much cleaner process is of course to just repeal DADT all together, which happened, and would have happened before the Log Cabin ruling was even made if it wasn't for ....?

So yes, based on this it's highly speculative to try to project what gay rights would have been strengthened in the hypothetical case of DADT being overturned in a District Court in California rather than it being repealed by Congress.