NOM BLOG

Defending the voters of CA

 

I expect that Chuck Cooper will defend the voters of California against the truly scurrilous attack made by Olsen and Boies and repeated by Judge Walker.  The plaintiffs complained about the advertising used during the campaign. I was shocked the first time I heard this complaint.  They couldn’t find anything explicitly “homophobic” in the campaign ads. So they drew inferences about the intent of the voters, from subliminal messages that they imagined the voters must have been really responding to. Here is what Cooper said in his motion to appeal about “inferring” voter intent.

The district court thus erred as a matter of law in drawing the “inference” that Proposition 8 was motivated solely by an irrational and bigoted “fear or unarticulated dislike of same-sex couples” or by the “belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite-sex couples.”

At any rate, the inference of anti-gay hostility drawn by the district court is manifestly false. It defames more than seven million California voters as homophobic, a cruelly ironic charge given that California has enacted some of the Nation’s most progressive and sweeping gay-rights protections, including creation of a parallel institution, domestic partnerships, affording same-sex couples all the benefits and obligations of marriage…

The district court’s “inference” regarding the subjective motivations of seven million Californians is based on a tendentious description of no more than a handful of the cacophony of messages, for and against Proposition 8, that were before the electorate during the hard fought and often heated initiative campaign

See what I mean?  He is sticking up for the voters. He had to so so, because the opponents of Prop 8 have impugned the motives of millions of California voters, and the millions of other Americans who agree with them in supporting the principle that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.

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