At the Risk of Being Called Whine-y...; Family News...

...by Anonymous persons who can't be bothered to actually take responsibility for their words...

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So here's the low-down on New Jersey...

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The court ruled unanimously (7-0) that homosexual couples must be afforded the same rights as homophobic and straight couples when it comes to the benefits and responsibilities of marriage; the vote was split (4-3) on whether marriage should be the term used for these homosexual unions (3 said that yes, they should be given marriage; 4 voted to send it to the NJ legislature to come up with either a civil union arrangement or use marriage already in place). From an article:

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Several Democratic lawmakers said they will push for full marriage rights. But some Republicans, the minority party in both houses of the legislature, said they will seek a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Assemblyman Richard Merkt, R-Morris, vowed to have the justices impeached.

"Neither the framers of New Jersey's 1947 constitution, nor the voters who ratified it, ever remotely contemplated the possibility of same-sex marriage," Merkt said.

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The framers of the federal constitution never imagined home owners having semiautomatic machine guns, either. Or for that matter, an internet, mobile-to-mobile text messaging (I'm now imagining what our Constitution would have read in text-alese...), or that religious folks would ever want a state-sponsored church in power--goes to show how much times have changed, hasn't it?

The issue, though, and why NJ is such a bigger deal than Massachusetts having gay marriage, is that NJ does not have a law on the books that prevents out-of-state couples from marrying there (Massachusetts has a law from 1913 that was used to prevent interracial couples from marrying if that marriage wouldn't be recognized in their home state; the law fell out of use after the civil rights movement of the 60s, but since Mass. never took it off the books, they now use their bigot law to prevent same-sex couples form marrying there as opposed to interracial couples. What's the saying, "Scratch a homophobe, find a racist"? Something like that...) And while Mass. did say Rhode Island couples could marry there as Rhode Island didn't have a law against same-sex marriage, the majority of same-sex couples in the country simply cannot go there to get married--they actually card you to see if you are a resident of Mass or not, and thus deny you...

But since NJ does not have such a law, couples such as Rich and myself would be able to get married in NJ, then come home and sue to have our state recognize our marriage (in which case they would have to, as the fourteenth amendment of the federal constitution demands that states recognize and respect all certificates and documents from all other states in the union), and then, the federal government would have to drop DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act, which actually doesn't protect marriage against anything remotely anti-marriage, such as divorce or spousal abuse...) as, since FCSuper pointed out very recently (and Darkmind also makes a very good point about court precedence in the comments below), the federal government has no domain over marriage to begin with, it is a state's rights issue, and hence, Rich and I would have marriage equality in our country, which I served proudly in the Army in the 1990s...

See how the cookie crumbles? Life is getting better in this country for all.

In a superbly ironic twist, in the Ivory Coast, two prisoners who courted each other through a peephole between the male and female cell blocks were allowed to get married, even though they never actually saw each other until the wedding day. Why are there no laws preventing child molesters, murders, thieves, rapists, and other not-good-for-society type persons from getting married? Is it truly the issue that marriage needs protected from same-sex couples? Or that people are just hypocritical asses?

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In other news, my younger brother, while on a business trip in Florida, got into a bar fight with a co-worker (this is not big news; both he and the co-worker are apparently surly individuals when drinking...) The weird thing is, since Mike punched the dude in the mouth, it cut his hand open, and he received a very nasty infection. And since Mike has the pain tolerance of a drunk elephant on methanphetamines, he didn't get the hand looked at even as it swelled up to three times its normal size. Finally, his (not girlfriend) girlfriend convinced him to get it looked at. They had to keep in the hospital for three days. They say if he had waited much longer, his hand would have died, or he himself could have died.... He is now home and recovering, but he's still a dipshit sometimes... There's no medicine for that...

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Nathaniel, my youngest sisters newest edition to our family, smiled for the first time!

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Olivia, my other sisters daughter, does not have the degenerative eye disease that they feared she had, so, even though she still will live with Grave's Disease, she will not go blind because of it!! Whew!

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All other sibling and nieces and nephews are well. All parents are fine, I'm assuming, since I got no panicky phone calls (although it is odd that mom hasn't been by lately... she must be cleaning all the dirt dad made when adding on their new front porch...)