Oklahoma Judge Strikes Down Gay Adoption Law

The Constitution of The United States would disagree with you.

Because those pieces of legislation are assanine.

This one is rough....

1. I don't think that adoption is going at such a heady pace in this country that we need to be shutting out potentially loving parents simply because of their sexual orientation.

2. On the other hand, I believe in democracy and state's rights...so if they want to ban homosexual adoption in Oklahoma...welll......I have a hard time....but I think they should be allowed.

3. They should not, however, be able to dissolve a parental bond like that. It differs from states not recognizing gay marriages from other states because states aren't required to recognize marriages of any sort from out of state.

-Kiamat Dusk

Oklahoma Judge Strikes Down Gay Adoption Law

Saturday , May 20, 2006

OKLAHOMA CITY — A federal judge struck down a 2-year-old law that prohibits Oklahoma from recognizing adoptions by same-sex couples from other countries and U.S. states.

U.S. District Judge Robin Cauthron ruled Friday the measure violated due process rights under the U.S. Constitution because it attempted to break up families without considering the parents' fitness or the children's best interests.

Gay-rights organization Lambda Legal had challenged the law on behalf of three same-sex couples.

"Gay and lesbian parents in Oklahoma can now breathe a collective sigh of relief because their relationships with their children are no longer threatened by the state of Oklahoma," said Ken Upton, an attorney in Lambda Legal's Dallas office.

One of the plaintiffs, Heather Finstuen, said the ruling will allow her and partner Anne Magro to focus on being parents to their 7-year-old twin girls rather than worrying about the adoption law.

"This is really good news for our family," she said. "It's a huge relief."

The couple said the law endangered the legal relationship established by a New Jersey court between Finstuen and her adopted daughters. The girls were born to Magro.

The ruling was attacked by supporters of the law, which was passed by the Legislature with bipartisan support in 2004.

"It's another case of an activist court trying to legislate from the bench," said Republican Rep. Thad Balkman. "It's unfortunate that a single judge is trying to rewrite the law."
http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,196316,00.html


This one is rough....

1. I don't think that adoption is going at such a heady pace in this country that we need to be shutting out potentially loving parents simply because of their sexual orientation.

2. On the other hand, I believe in democracy and state's rights...so if they want to ban homosexual adoption in Oklahoma...welll......I have a hard time....but I think they should be allowed.

3. They should not, however, be able to dissolve a parental bond like that. It differs from states not recognizing gay marriages from other states because states aren't required to recognize marriages of any sort from out of state.

-Kiamat Dusk

Are you retarded? Seperate bathrooms for men and women isn't discriminatory, but I'd be all for combining them. As for affirmative action, I think it should be done away with.

Well you make my point for me there don't you? BTW it is spelt 'asinine'.

And even though my examples of solutions to tackle the problems were lame, are you telling me that reducing the damage we are doing to the environment and doing something about rising obesity levels isn't more important than stopping gay people adopting children?

My point was our politicians would rather tackle non-issues because they pander to wide-held prejudices and won't hurt their support base, whereas tackling real issues often will. It is good that there are checks in the system that prevent even popular, but dangerous legislation getting through. It's just a shame that it doesn't always work.

There are other ways to stop this sort of legislation being considered, like the media ridiculing it, but we all know that in the case of video game laws they won't because people playing games watch less TV and being shown to be too pro gay would get certain religious pressure groups to put pressure on advertisers.

What's scary to me here is that I largely agree with Kiamat on this one.

Can someone take my temperature, please? I haven't had too much to drink today, so that's not it.....and nope, no drugs.....

The problem is that you seem to think that civil rights and equality under the law are issues that are subject to popular vote. Even if the citizens of Oklahoma voted to ban voting by people of German descent, it wouldn't be legal, nor would it be democratic.

The US Constitution in the 14th Amendment guarantees all Americans "equal protection under the law." That means that even if the majority of voters in Oklahoma don't like gay people adopting, those very same gay people are to be treated just like everyone else under the law. Civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution are not subject to popular referenda. Just because the majority in his town might vote for it, doesn't mean that it would be legal to expropriate Bill Gates of his fortune and redistribute it among his neighbors. Democracy requires certain fundamental rules that are not subject to the vote.

This is the reason there is such a push to amend state constitutions and the US Constitution to invalidate the Equal Protection clause in order to ban gay marriage. In Alaska our constitution was amended a few years ago to limit marriage to one man and one woman. But last year the state Supreme Court ruled that if a public employer gives benefits to the spouses of its employees, it has to give the same benefits to the partners of its gay employees. The court decided that the ban on gay marriage was narrow and that it didn't amend the state constitution's guarantee of equality under the law.

Now we have conservative Republicans calling for yet another amendment to the state's constitution to do just that, to exempt gay people from the protections afforded under the "equality under the law" clause. Nice huh?

That is the danger of bigotry when it is drug to the ballot box.

You can't catch anything from a public toilet anyway.

..... because states aren't required to recognize marriages of any sort from out of state.

-Kiamat Dusk

Actually they are. Look up Loving vs. The State of Virginia. I believe that was the landmark case wherein a black woman and a white man got married in DC and moved to Virginia. Virginia had a law, at the time, of banning interracial marriages (because interracial marriages were unholy, everyone knew interracial marriages could not produce children and by golly it was unAmerican). I believe the way it went (and my memory is kind of fuzzy here) is that the State told the married couple to move or dissolve the marriage. When they refused, they were jailed. Or threatened with jail. Or something like that. Anyway I think it went all the way up to the Supreme Court and, in a landmark ruling, the Court ruled that if a couple gets married in one state it has to be recognized in another.

This is why Bush et al want a constitutional amendment stating that marriage is that which binds one man and one woman and no other combination.

Crabs.

Briana Dawson

A common misbelief is that crabs can be spread by sitting on a toilet seat. This isn't likely, according to the CDC, since lice can't live long if they're away from a warm human body. Also, lice do not have feet designed to walk or hold onto smooth surfaces such as toilet seats.

That measure was shot down soley because of the race issue and the inbalanced way Virginia enforced their laws.

"There is patently no legitimate overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which justifies this classification. The fact that Virginia prohibits only interracial marriages involving white persons demonstrates that the racial classifications must stand on their own justification, as measures designed to maintain White Supremacy. 11 We have consistently denied [388 U.S. 1, 12] the constitutionality of measures which restrict the rights of citizens on account of race. There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.
II.
These statutes also deprive the Lovings of liberty without due process of law in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.

Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival. Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 541 (1942). See also Maynard v. Hill, 125 U.S. 190 (188. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State. "
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=388&invol=1


Meanwhile Massachussets law prohibts the marriage of same sex couples who live in states where same sex marriage is prohibited. And Connecticut, which allows for civil unions between same sex couples, but not marriage, does not recognize same sex marriages from Massachussets but will recognize civil unions from Vermont.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/connecticut/articles/2006/03/30/mass_ruling_wont_affect_bill_to_recognize_out_of_state_marriages/

-Kiamat Dusk

You know I say why discuss the issue when you can divert the thread to personal attacks? It makes sense when you are as dumb as a bag of hammers.