I've been attending a series of lectures about the history of the supreme court and I wanted to point out how the "let the states deal with it" approach to civil rights is what led to such institutions as the Jim Crowe laws in the south. Rulings the famous cases such as Plesby v Fergusson (sp), Dredd Scott and the Slaughterhouse trial, were each used to invest states with the right to determine to what extent citizens of the united states had their rights protected. By denying that the Federal Government had the power to enforce the diversity clause of the 14th amendment (the one that supposed to help confer civil rights upon newly freed blacks), southern blacks were left exposed to all the lingering hatred in the wake of the civil war and the reconstruction era, since it the judiciary had resolved to allow these states to decide for themselves how their civil liberties were protected. It took literally a century to reverse legal discrimination in southern states, and even now, the question of social equality isn't settled anywhere in America. As such, I think we should learn from history and see how both local prejudices and biases of state legislatures do not necessarily indicate the most efficient route to social equality. Imagine if Chief Justice Warren had allowed that view point to persist in Brown vs. Board of Education. For all I know, we could still have segregated schools! Sometimes it's best to allow big government to do its work. It is, after all, why we Federalized 200 plus years ago.
To me, the 13th and 14th amendments already legally guarantee gays the right to marry anyhow, and at law, the constitution is the supreme legal doctrine whereby all laws of America descend. These amendments say the government does not have the right to abridge personal liberty without due process, and personal liberty is accorded to all American citizens, which is defined as being born in the US. I ask what due process has been granted to homosexuals with respect to marriage? On what grounds, besides the moral perspective of a particular subset of our population, does the claim that homosexuals should be legally denied the same privileges shared by the rest of the country stand? I see no legal reason for this, for if the 13th and 14th amendments have been used to argue (successfully) that something as abstract as a company has legal standing as a human being in our legal system (re: corporations and the "corporate veil" of legal protection), it should easily lend itself to the actual, living breathing humans for which it was intended. Therefore, in my opinion, the state governments have a poor record of performance where social equality is concerned.
Just to point out how illegal or legally contradictory all of this is, when civil unions were legalized in 98 by Vermont, President Clinton convened congress to allow them to vote that the full faith and credit clause of the constitution could be ignored where civil unions formed in Vermont were concerned outside of Vermont. What this means is that, for some reason, unlike any other law in America that I know of, other states are not obligated to acknowledge the legality of a law formed in a different state, in this case, Vermont. That would be like murder being legal in NY, but illegal in NJ for some arbitrary reason. It's why the framers installed the full faith clause in the first place. Clearly, however, this move was a political reaction to how states want to deal with this matter, and once again, in my opinion, is an expression of how poorly equipped states can be at handling civil rights issues.
. I guess I won't say anything next time.
if it is how is he able to run for election??? 
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