Open Mic Night for Republicans
Steve Blow, metro columnist for The Dallas Morning News, is usually congenial, but he has the capacity to occasionally surprise. Today, he tells us of a scheduled "Open Mic Night" at the Dallas County Republican Party headquarters. Blow starts things off with his suggestion: "Ditch the ditz from Alaska."
Sexist? Sure. Unfair? Maybe. Wrong? Hardly.
eHarmony Agrees to Service Gays
Jeffrey Weiss, in The Dallas Morning News Religion blog, stirs up a hornet's nest by reporting on an out-of-court settlement by eHarmony Inc. to provide support for a same-sex dating service. Weiss isn't sure eHarmony should be forced to do this, given that there are plenty of gay dating services available on the Internet. He does concede that, much like the days of racially segregated lunch counters, "separate but equal isn't."
Since this was a settlement and not a court decision, it offers little guidance as to what the law requires. But we can assume eHarmony thought the law was against them. I'm assuming we're talking New Jersey law, not Texas law or US law, as the settlement involved the New Jersey Attorney General.
If New Jersey law forbids businesses from discrimination on account of sexual orientation and eHarmony cannot show that complying with the law imposes an undue burden, then eHarmony ought to be obliged to accept gays as customers, the same as legal requirements not to discriminate on the basis of sex, religion, or ethnicity. In other words, the debate ought be about whether sexual orientation ought to be a protected class. As long as it is, at least in New Jersey, eHarmony ought to comply with the law.
P.S. Yes, the double entendre in the headline was deliberate.
Now, the Court's Turn to Decide Prop. 8
Another head scratcher lawsuit comes out of California, where opponents of Proposition 8, which overturned gay marriage rights in the state, have filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the ballot initiative. Readers of The Dallas Morning News Religion blog ask how a constitutional amendment can possibly be declared unconstitional.
Well, IANAL, but here goes. The California constitution talks about revising the constitution and about amending it, with (maybe) different ways to accomplish each. The ballot initiative is to be used for amending the constitution, not revising it (maybe). The plaintiffs argue that Prop. 8 amounts to a revision of the constitution, not an amendment, so was done through the wrong procedure. The court is being asked to interpret the constitution's (perhaps) ambiguous instructions for how to ... well, change it (amend? revise?). We'll see how it goes, but I think the odds are strongly against the plaintiffs.
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