{"id":13216,"date":"2010-08-10T21:58:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-11T04:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2010\/08\/10\/13216.html"},"modified":"2010-08-10T21:58:00","modified_gmt":"2010-08-11T04:58:00","slug":"seven-million-californians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2010\/08\/10\/seven-million-californians\/","title":{"rendered":"Seven million Californians"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the wake of the Prop 8 decision, lots of people opposed to same-sex marriage keep saying that Judge Walker has gone against the expressed will of seven million Californians<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That sure sounds like a big scary number. SEVEN MILLION people can't be wrong! Walker must be pure evil for contradicting that many people!<\/p>\n

But if Walker had ruled the other way, he would have gone against the expressed will of six point four million Californians<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Prop 8 people talk like the whole state voted in favor of Prop 8. In reality, it was 52% of those who voted.<\/p>\n

So any decision that any judge makes in this case will likely be displeasing to millions of Californians.<\/p>\n

Besides, the people who are making the Seven Million Californians argument don't really believe it. If three hundred thousand of those Californians had switched their votes to No, then Prop 8 would've been defeated at the ballot box, but the proponents of Prop 8 wouldn't have said, “Well, gosh, nearly seven million Californians said no to this, so I guess we were wrong and same-sex marriage is okay after all.” They would have continued to insist that they were right, no matter how many or how few people voted for their proposition.<\/p>\n

Anyway, all of this is of course beside the point; the real point is that we don't generally take away the rights of a group of people by majority vote.<\/p>\n

To riff on something Ted Olson said in his Fox News interview<\/a>, if California were to pass a law banning Fox News from broadcasting, that would be unconstitutional, no matter how many Californians voted for it.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the wake of the Prop 8 decision, lots of people opposed to same-sex marriage keep saying that Judge Walker…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-samesex-marriage"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13216\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}