Outrage Over Gay Marriages

Re “Outrage Where It’s Due,” editorial, Feb. 18:

By comparing the evil of violent crime to same-sex marriage, you’re implying we should be outraged about the one and not the other. But our courts and elected officials are not, by and large, thumbing their noses at California citizens when it comes to violent crime. They know it’s illegal; they uphold the law accordingly. Not so with same-sex marriage. San Francisco’s mayor and judicial activists have told the rest of us we clearly don’t count, and they’ll do as they please regardless of California’s law and Constitution. Don’t even try to tell me that’s not cause for outrage.

Joe Dallas

Orange

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In “S.F. Judge Won’t Halt Marriages” (Feb. 18), Randy Thomasson of the Campaign for California Families states, “If we don’t respect the rule of law, then we are not a democracy. We’re a dictatorship.” Heady talk.

Perhaps we should remind Thomasson that in this democracy, laws may be passed by the majority, but it is the role of the judiciary to protect the citizens from the tyranny of the majority. If the notion of majority rule had been used to decide every issue in this democracy, then blacks and women would still not have the right to vote.

Pam Watson

Manhattan Beach

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Re “Lawyer Was Ready for the Marriage Debate,” Feb. 15: Matt Daniels’ personal history, leading to his drafting of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution defining marriage, contradicts his own anti-gay-marriage stance.

Here’s a man who comes from a broken home with a father who abandoned his family. As a result, Daniels says the presence of a father and mother is critical to a child’s upbringing. Fair enough. But it doesn’t make a case against gay marriage -- it makes a case against bad marriage.

Tell me Daniels wouldn’t have been better served as a child by having two loving same-sex parents, male or female, than by one absentee parent and one struggling parent who “slipped into a lifelong depression.” It seems as if he is trying to fix his own shattered past on the backs of people who are just striving for the same things he admittedly lacked -- love, support, happiness and wholeness.

Gary Goldstein

Los Angeles

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The proposed amendment is puzzling. How, I ask myself, is the preservation of a heterosexual family with children to be accomplished by a law prohibiting the ritual of marriage between homosexuals? It is not gay marriage that challenges the institution of the traditional family. It is the errant, irresponsible and dissolute parent who abandons the family and leaves behind an unhappy child in a fatherless or motherless household, and no amount of anti-gay furor will stop that.

Howard Calder

Hemet

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Am I the only Democrat around here who is worried sick that proponents of gay marriage like San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom are taking President Bush’s bait and swallowing it whole? Isn’t this issue the perfect one to divide the Democratic Party and help ensure that Republicans frame all Democrats as gay-marriage-rights activists?

I am for gay marriage rights, but I am certain of this: If this issue continues to inflate in this presidential election year, and Republicans keep the White House, every citizen in the United States, gay or straight, will suffer diminished civil rights.

Molly Bosted

Glendale