Letters to the Editor

• Aycharaych and Chris Dowd:

  [Read the article: The Kucinich court decision and "judicial activism"]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Aych:

  1) I am most definitely not alleging that there is a general principle that one must prove they are not some pejorative before obtaining rights. Those comments are specific to homosexuality, which was understood to be a kind of mental illness up until fairly recently.

  so

  2) With evidence that they are not perverts and mentally deranged in hand, gays had a much easier time showing this was not the case. People do prove negatives - I can prove I was not on the moon yesterday. I can't disprove the existence of unicorns, but nothing so logically abstract was required here.

  Once enough homosexuals were out of the closet and enough studies had been done on their lives and views, the scientific basis for classifying homosexuality in the DSM ran dry.

  Absent that, what you have is a class of people born a certain way being denied their pursuit of happiness by the state of New Jersey, whereas another group born another way have that right.

  Chris Dowd:

  You continue to miss this point. Determination of fact is crucial to many judicial rulings, ergo the lawyerly saying

  "If the facts are on your side, pound the facts, if the law is on your side, pound the law, if neither, pound the table"

  It's simply absurd to allege the commonly understood role of judges precludes factual determination. Just watch Judge Judy. Determinations of fact happen all the time, and for a Judge to decide if gays are a group deserving of equal protection under the law, this legal determination changes based on what the judge thinks the word "gay" means - if he thinks of NAMBLA or some other caricature or pejorative, he's not likely to rule they get equal protection. If he understands that homosexuality is a natural phenomenon, not a product of choice or perversion, and not harmful, then his conclusion naturally flows from that.

  Judicial activism doesn't enter into it. In fact, judicial "restraint" is cowardly and not justified by the law. What form would that ruling take? "I agree you're being discriminated against, but straight people are 90% of the population, and they held a vote, and well, you lost." That judicial attitude would still have whites unable to marry blacks.

  You also try and equate the factual case that homosexuality is normal with the case that it is not. Well, again, Judges have examined this and sided with me. That's what they do. Just like a judge said "intelligent design is not science, get it out of the science classroom." based on a factual determination of what ID actually was.

  Permalink Tuesday, January 15, 2008 07:25 PM