EndGender

Big news here in California today as the Supreme Court struck down the ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional.  Last month I dedicated a Quotable Quotes to the topic of gay marriage. In honor of today’s ruling, here are some more quotes on the legality of gayness.

“A law branding one class of persons as criminal solely based on the State’s moral disapproval of that class and the conduct associated with that class runs contrary to the values of the Constitution and the Equal Protection Clause, under any standard of review. I therefore concur in the Court’s judgment that Texas’ sodomy law banning ‘deviate sexual intercourse’ between consenting adults of the same sex, but not between consenting adults of different sexes, is unconstitutional.”

- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. O’Connor voted to legalize gay sex in all 50 states, but for a different reason than five other justices, who cited “private conduct in the exercise of their liberty under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.”

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“Separate is never equal. Civil unions are a step in the right direction. But they almost always offer less than the full roster of rights that marriage entails — and they still stigmatize same-sex relationships as deserving only second-class recognition.”

- Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth

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“The majority of social conservatives oppose gay marriage; they oppose gay citizens serving their country in the military; they oppose gay citizens raising children; they oppose protecting gay citizens from workplace discrimination; they oppose including gays in hate-crime legislation, while including every other victimized group; they oppose civil unions; they oppose domestic partnerships; they oppose … well, they oppose, for the most part, every single practical measure that brings gay citizens into the mainstream of American life. This is simply bizarre. Can you think of any other legal, noncriminal minority in society toward which social conservatives have nothing but a negative social policy?”

– Gay journalist Andrew Sullivan writing in The Wall Street Journal

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“I think it’s entirely who you are from birth, personally. Some people might choose, but I think that it’s who you are. I think people need to be able to be who they are. I have a friend who was married for many years and then the marriage dissolved and he came out … and he lived this life of tension and of great difficulty. … It’s in your system. It’s in your genes. … I think that people have a right in America to be who they are, who they are born as, and we are all God’s children.”

- Presidential candidate John Kerry in an MTV interview

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“Love is the most cherished feeling we have; it’s unique to human beings, and if anyone thinks they can dismiss love through politics, they’re nuts.”

– Liza Minnelli receiving an award from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation in Los Angeles.