Today, oral arguments will be heard by the Supreme Court over California’s Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act.
Determining the outcome of these two is like trying to figure out what head football coach Les Miles is going to do when the Tigers are in a pinch. But to be fair to Miles, the Supreme Court takes months to make decisions, not minutes.
Proposition 8 was passed by the majority of California citizens in 2008 to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman. This was met with lawsuits galore, unsurprisingly, and has resulted in a long and arduous process of appeals and claims of unconstitutionality.
The question about Prop 8 is whether the states have the right to declare and define marriage how they want.
Regardless of what the court decides, the case is observably a clash between legal boundaries and social sciences. Both sides offered up oral arguments and briefs for review by the justices.
The issue presented by conservative professors Leon Kass and Harvey Mansfield and the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy is “whether the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment prohibits the state of California from defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman.”
The strongest argument made by Kass and Mansfield is over the dangerous nature of unreliable expert opinions made by social science and their threat to the legal system.
Opposition to Proposition 8 will use ideology masked by science and inconclusive studies as support for repealing the law.
“Because it is seldom, if ever, possible for all relevant data to be accounted for, and thus for all but one of the logically possible alternatives to be falsified, scientific theories are in principle always subject to revision on the basis of new data or better measurements,” the brief states.
We also know social sciences and their statistics are prone to political milking.
For example, while proponents of same-sex marriage claim there is no reason a homosexual couple’s influence on a child would be negative compared with a heterosexual couple, there is no empirical evidence and few statistics” suggesting they would have any benefit to the child. This is mostly because same-sex marriage is a relatively new concept. Traditional marriage, however, has ample evidence to support its stake both economically and
psychologically on the child, making it a viable case for the state to consider. California’s voting citizens recognized this.
Short story: The social sciences are often riddled with biased political agendas.
Instead of using inconclusive studies, the court should base its decision off the jurisdiction of the law and the 14th Amendment’s powers.
For DOMA, there is a challenge to the federal definition of marriage between one man and one woman as well as questions about the jurisdiction of the case. Because the U.S. government agrees that DOMA is unconstitutional, the Obama administration has not defended the act.
Since the act’s passing in 1996, public perception of homosexual marriage has changed drastically.
Fox News Contributor and former George W. Bush Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove said Sunday he could see the next GOP presidential candidate supporting same-sex marriage in 2016 on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos. Rove made that statement based on Ohio Republican Rob Portman declaring his support of same-sex marriage.
You can attribute this to the “GOP” trying to move away from the old platform and adopt a newer progressive platform.
I guess the Libertarians had it right last election. If the conservatives were split between voting for moderate Mitt Romney, they might be in shambles when the GOP picks a nominee supportive of same-sex marriage.
Landon Mills is a 21-year-old international studies senior from Sunshine, La.
