Newark Mayor Cory Booker Totally PWNS the Homo-Haters! (Required Viewing)

This guy is AWESOME.  Kudos to him.

Civil rights should never be put to the popular vote. Look at what happened to us in California.

I at first agreed to putting the right to marry up for referendum because it would show the country that the majority doesn’t care whether a gay couple marry. After hearing this, however, I disagree with the referendum. A civil right, which is not legally allowed to be denied by the a state, especially the country (ESPECIALLY due to religious beliefs), should not be up for the people to vote. It should just be common law to have a right that everyone else has. This goes for every civil rights issue there is. Whether you’re black or a woman, gay or transsexual; Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Confucian, or Atheist, you cannot have a group of people who have any right that another group cannot have.

This was absolutely beautiful and awe inspiring. I love it. I love it a lot. This man is amazing, I think his words need to be heard by EVERYBODY and I think everyone else in  offices should take a lesson from him. Amen and bravo to him. Well done. It’s people like him that make me think that maybe one day, my marriage will be recognized even here in Utah. 

That is absolutely incredible!  I’m in tears, I tell ya!

Always been a huge fan of Mayor Booker – if you haven’t seen it, check out Brick City. He’s got some amazing ideas, and he’s made some incredible progress in New Jersey. I think he might even make a potential presidential contender one day. This just takes the cake – well said, Mayor Booker.

[...] Posted by Brent Peterson on Feb 2, 2012 in Politics | 0 comments [...]

Damn right!

No, it should not be put to a popular vote. Minority rights should not be something the majority chooses. That’s not the function of government. It’s function is to ensure that the same rights are grated to all individuals not just the majority. They are supposed to PROTECT the minority from the majority rule. 

Oh I like him.  When is he gonna run for president??  :)  I love his passion and logical level-headedness, his eloquence.

And yes, he is soooo right.  If we left matters of civil rights up to the (let’s face it) bigoted, selfish, “moral” popular vote, we would probably still have slaves!  This right here is the purpose of government: to make the decisions that we as a general populace are quite ill-equipped to make.  When some people are oppressing other people, then those oppressors should not have a say in whether or not they get to continue oppressing others.  

Cory Booker for president!

Good on him!

Even if there was no doubt whatsoever that the bill would pass by a popular vote; I am against the concept for exactly the same reason as Mayor Booker, because it suggests that the rights are anyone’s to give in the first place.  This is a case of an injustice needing to be righted, the same as when it was acknowledged that women should vote, just as men did, and before that, that no human being should be owned by another.  

The New Jersey issue is especially irritating, because the New Jersey Supreme Court had already determined that gay and lesbian couples were entitled to the same status as heterosexual couples.  This decision was made in 2006.  The only issue was what the union would be called.  They made the mistake of caving to pressure to call the unions “civil unions,” rather than marriages, and it has already been acknowledged that the concept of civil unions doesn’t work, because no one knows what a civil union is.  Regardless of the legal status, couples in civil unions are not accorded the same status as couples in traditional marriages.  One case in point concerned a friend of mine, who has two children, legally adopted jointly by himself and his partner, with whom he’d been civilly united on the very first day it became legal in New Jersey.

Despite all these legal realities; his partner and their two children were dropped from his medical insurance, when an outside consultant was hired to go over employee records, and determined that these people did not qualify.  What is amusing is that the man in question is a teacher in a state college, and therefore an employee of the very state assuring him that his union was exactly the same as someone else’s marriage.

Since all the background on the rights of New Jersey couples is already in place, this is a ridiculous temper tantrum on the part of our current governor, over a question of semantics.  He refuses to consider the word ‘marriage,” and because of this, is attempting to have the legislators in the state reinvent the wheel.

I would love to see Mayor Booker become governor.  Not out of the realm of possibility, since Christie’s grandstanding about same sex marriage is almost certainly not about his own religious scruples, but about a need to whore himself to the GOP for a place on a presidential ticket, either now, or four years from now.