Assault on California's Constitution

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jeffg

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I've lived in California for 43 years now, and looking through initiatives that have qualified for this November's ballot I've never seen such an all-out assault on our state's constitution. Everything from outlawing abortions to outlawing gay marriage to eliminating domestic partner benefits to forced redistricting: not just proposed laws, but constitutional amendments in every case (see link).

Is this the last dying gasp of far-right desperation, before our state's demographics drive the Republican Party to extinction? Or is it the beginning of a fascist state? I honestly can't tell which is true, or if neither is true. But I do know we need to organize campaigns against these attacks on our liberties and established rights.

 
When Americans lost the right to

Habeas Corpus many true patriots warned that when you lost that, the rest were even easier to take away.
Very few people listened.
The whack-jobs and wing-nuts have been trying since March 4, 1789 to take away Americans' rights.
Using the smoke screen of "patriotism" "country at war" "enemies from without and within", "God's will", "Defense of Marriage" etc., they have picked away at civil rights bit by bit.
Sadly, they are enormously successful. All you have to do is to chose a group of people of whom many are jealous or distrust or dislike.
Next, you blame the decline of the Republic on them.
We know how the story ends.

The folks in our virtual world who indulge in threatening others to make them shut up - whether by threatening one's family or by not-so-veiled references to "if the Nazis could do it, we can, too..."are a good example of just how many have fallen for these anti-American tactics. Hook, line and sinker.

The only hope is to fight back and to fight back hard. Read the US Constitution. Learn about the Bill of Rights.
Accept that you are never going to get 100% of the non-fascist community to agree with you on 100% of your views. (Example: Do you folks who so attack people who believe the 2nd Amendment means exactly what it says really want another four years of this mess just for the joy of telling us to go fcuk ourselves, the fact that we agree with you on civil rights, women's rights, gay rights and all the rest doesn't matter? Is it really worth the price?)

The whack-job-wing-nut republicans always vote. The christianists* always vote. If the literate republicans, Christians, independents, democrats and, may the gods help us, the Libertarians don't wake up and realise just how close we are to losing freedom because we can't achieve perfection, the barbarians will win.
*christianist: Not a Christian, rather a hate-filled person who cherry-picks the bible to justify torture, murder and denial of human rights to women, gays and people who don't see the world through their eyes.
 
I hope that's true, Rich. If I'm not mistaken this same type of constitutional amendment has passed in every state in which it's been proposed, so I'll be shocked if it doesn't pass in California. If it does pass, it's going to raise some very novel questions, e.g. can the people of a state outlaw something that their own supreme court has already decided is a right?
 
Jeff,

I hope you will forgive my interjection. No, Arizona rejected it. Yes, they can declare us sub-human and take away our constitutionally guaranteed right to equal treatment.
It's that simple.
Once they have done that - the blacks and the Hispanics are next.
Ultimately, they want a fascist theocracy and have chosen their steps well.
Hatred works.
Unfortunately - just look at the Nazis. These people are no different.
 
Not really,

The christianists overplayed their hand and people in their sixties and older realized that if it passed, they would lose their pensions and insurance rights.
Never, ever underestimate these people.
Germany at the beginning of the 1930's had the most advanced, liberal constitution of any democracy.
And the Nazis needed very little time to succeed.

We really, really have to have our guard up.
Our best bet is to explain to the Hispanics and the Blacks why it is in their best interests to stand with us on this one.
I am not hopeful, the comments from many blacks that "civil rights" has nothing to do with gays are not helpful.
 
We had a constitutional ammendment on the ballot in NE a few years back, which of course passed overwhelmingly but was struck down in litigation by the U.S. Supremes for being too vague.

It was a crappy deal - a GOP funded operative from KY or TN was moved into the state and set up shop to get the bible-bangers riled up about the issue. Got the required signatures on petitions and it easily got on the ballot. All part of the GOP's successful scheme to get out the voters on these types of issues - abortion and gay marriage - so they would invariable finish drinking the rest of the Kool-Aid in the glass and cast their vote for the Bush Crime Family and equally putrid GOP candidates for every other Federal, State and Local seat.

As soon as the amendment passed, the evil woman brought in to start the process accepted a new position and now resides in D.C.
 
It's the same everywhere -

they search for divisive topics (gun control, abortion, gay rights, patriotism, Mexican "take over" of American jobs, etc.) then they put something with a really patriotic sounding title on it to dress it up for the public.
And they get the votes.

My feeling is, if we beat the republicans this Fall, hold the congress, take the presidency and succeed in appointing at least one, if not two justices to the Supreme Court, there is still a chance to save the constitution.
If we don't, well it is just a matter of time until the republicans strip us of the rest of our rights and set up the concentration camps.

What saddens me most is that there are people on this site who actually threaten others with the Feds to make them toe the line and shut their mouths. They ought to sit down and take a look at what the Nazis did with them as "thanks" for their denounciations... The more things change, the more they stay the same.

It is trite, it is so old it has whiskers, but this time it really, really is true: This election is all or nothing. Time to put aside the pettiness, time to forgive Obama for winning and put down the nuclear button threat to vote for McCain just to spite us. The cost of that spite is too high.
 
John McCain weighs in on the initiative....

"I welcome the news that the people of California will have the opportunity to decide on the question of the definition of marriage, rather than having that decision made by judicial fiat as the California Supreme Court asserted in their recent ruling."

And part of his "issues" platform reads...

"The family represents the foundation of Western Civilization and civil society and John McCain believes the institution of marriage is a union between one man and one woman."

Typical GOP, of course. IMO, they have a history of nominating "inadequate white males", if I may paraphrase Harriet Christian ;-) But interestingly enough, Arnold Schwarzenegger opposes the CA ballot initiative.
 
Schwarzenegger knows

which side his, er, buns are buttered on.
He grew up in a country, in an era, in which he knew people who had actually been tortured by the Nazis, people who had lost their jobs, seen their families torn apart - and so he is more inclined to think twice before sanctioning their evil.
I know that not all republicans are "bad guys" just as many Christians are wonderful, caring people. But if we aren't very very careful, this idea of declaring human beings as not-quite-human (the logical extension of denying us civil rights per constitutional decree) is a replay of the Nazi era.
In the end, it is the everyday evil which ultimately poses the most threat.
The ones who start with the groups which "all upstanding citizens" despise...they are the ones who pose the greatest threat, not the loudest demagogues. You give them an inch in the name of freedom (Defense of Marriage Act is a perfect example) and they take a mile. Goodness, who is the libertarian candidate this year? Hmm, I seem to recall his name from something or other back in September 1996. Nah, can't be, can it?
We, quite literally, are in danger of being classed as menschenunwürdiges Leben here if we don't buckle down and fight back.
 
Blacks and hispanics will never stand with us...they are a part of the bible thumping hypocrites that want to banish us to another land.
 
I'm not quite as cynical as Keven about this issue. Or perhaps I'm even more cynical, but in a different way....

It seems to me that these social wedge issues are just shiny objects to distract us from the real work of the neo-con agenda, which is the dismantling of the middle class, and the lowering of the standard of living to the favor of the ultra-wealthy. They seemingly want to return us to a period not unlike Czarist Russia or France before the revolution. Which seems self-destructive to the ultra-wealthy (look how they turned out in both instances) but they don't look that far ahead.

Take abortion: The Republicans have harped on this issue for 40 years, winning many sincere Christians over to their side. But what has been done about it? There has been a GOP dominated congress pretty much since 92 or thereabouts. With the exception of Clinton and Carter - who were not all that liberal - there have been GOP presidents since 1968. GOP judges are a large part of the judiciary, including the Supreme Court, but yet there has been no real "progress" on one of their key issues. (Not that there ever would be "progress": Abortion will be with us until the last woman gives birth to the last baby. Outlawing it would just sweep it under the rug and clean up the statistics. Affluent women will go to Canada or Europe, poor and middle-class women will try home remedies - like the girl at my high school who kept doing wind sprints hoping for a miscarriage.)

Why is nothing done? Because it's a vote getter. People who are sincerely against abortion vote for these candidates faithfully, because the candidates know how to pound their message out, and these voters believe them. Then these candidates go to Washington and pass legislation that hurts those same people economically, while ignoring why they were presumably sent there in the first place.

Gay marriage is the same sort of thing - since there aren't all that many gay people, gay issues are an easy target, and a way to make a big drama out of whole cloth. Anyone who *really thinks* about the issue knows that there's no threat to traditional marriage - you can't convert a person to gay (I know, I've tried.... ;-) . But in a time where our way of life seems to be slowly deteriorating, voting against such "radical change" helps people feel like they still have some control over their life and their government.

This initiative in California is nothing more than a cynical ploy to get out the wingnut, whackjob and uniformed vote, presumably for McCain. But with Bob Barr running as the Libertarian candidate, and Ron Paul still out there (and still taking sizable chunks of votes in primaries) it may not work as well as expected. But if it passes, people who are interested in equal justice under the law will be the collateral damage.
 
It's been said that SF Mayor Gavin Newsom's 2004 decision to allow gay marriages in that city played a role in John Kerry's defeat at the polls that November. Certainly it brought the religious right to arms and perhaps it did have an effect. But now he is somewhat vindicated with the California Supreme Court deciding he was right all along.

This time around I'm not getting the sense that the public in this state is all that engaged about this proposed ban. Perhaps they see it for what it is, a wedge issue, or perhaps they are just tired of seeing one group pilloried as a scapegoat. With less than 50% of traditional marriage lasting more than a few years, perhaps they also realize that it's not quite the sacred institution in practice that the wingnuts claim it is in theory. What this is really about is granting a sizeable minority equal rights and respect under the law. Who knows, maybe defeating the ban and letting the California court decision stand will even strengthen the insitution of marriage.
 
What's different about this year's ballot, and what I find so alarming is the number of proposals for constitutional amendments. It seems the Neocons have finally figured out they don't stand a chance of ramming their Medieval social agenda down the majority's throat via laws or our courts, they don't have a legal leg to stand on on many issues, so they've resorted to trying to circumvent the will of the majority and our courts by amending our state constitution.

As Keven has pointed out, parallels between Neocons and Nazis are undeniable and startling: years of a floundering economy, fabricated internal threats to national security, illegal and amoral invasions of other countries, relentless executive decrees intended to usurp power from other branches of government, the indoctrination of youth etc. It's the exact same evil script, but this time in a country which, not even 70 years ago, sacrificed 400,000+ lives to defeat and destroy. How did we get here so quickly from there? Just astonishing.
 
Dan,

It's not cynicism, it's cold, hard reasoning and an awareness of history which we both share.
Sadly, too many people are just plain ignorant of the consequences of their actions.
Here's a sad little poem which sums things up quite well:
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
—Pastor Martin Niemöller, 1955
 
Dan,

It's not cynicism, it's cold, hard reasoning and an awareness of history which we both share.
Sadly, too many people are just plain ignorant of the consequences of their actions.
Here's a sad little poem which sums things up quite well:
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
—Pastor Martin Niemöller, 1955
 
It's not often we get to peek under the "Christian" Neocon mask, but this brief glimpse is probably the clearest I've seen.

I'm not sure what's more frightening, Huckabee's claim or the reaction of his airhead supporters.

 
There seems to be a brightening of awareness on the part of the California electorate.

In the recent election, they defeated a trojan horse initiative that purported to be against eminent domain, but included provisions that in effect would have invalidated rent control all across the state. It was defeated, and another initiative that merely banned use of eminent domain seizure of owner-occupied residences for private development passed handily. I was surprised and pleased - the electorate wasn't fooled by the trojan initiative.

All this gives me an idea. If this constitutional amendment to try to ban gay marriage fails, no doubt there will be another attempt. Pehaps what is needed is a counter-amendment. This one would require any two people getting married that they really love each other and promise to stay married for at least five years, or be subject to a $500 fine, not allowed to hire divorce lawyers, and be subject to an even 50/50 split of all property regardless of pre-nups or prior ownership. It could be called the Strength of Marriage Act.
 

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