@raphjd said in Oklahoma Governor Signs Law Banning Abortion From Moment of Conception:
You only want to focus on a tiny part of the marriage equality push.
No, I just focus on the dominant, mainline push for marriage equality without tarring the whole group with something that, at best, may have been propounded by a small minority of marriage equality advocates.
Marriage equality advocates weren't seeking to empower the states to act because they had been losing in the states ever since the 1970's. You might not know, but in the late 1960's and early 1970's, gay men applied for marriage licenses from the states and it was ultimately determined that they could not be denied said marriage licenses because it wasn't illegal to issue them the licenses. Well, the homophobes corrected that mistake right away and between 1973 to 2000 every state in America (other than New Mexico) had enacted a statutory ban on same-sex marriage.
Then in 1993, the Hawaii Supreme Court, relying on Hawaii's state constitution decided Hawaii's ban on same-sex marriage violated the state's equal protection clause. Hawaii quickly fixed this problem by enacting a constitutional amendment which empowered Hawaii's legislature to pass a gay marriage ban, which it did quickly.
To prevent what happened in Hawaii from happening elsewhere, states started adopting Constitutional amendments banning gay marriage (30 states, a majority of states by my math).
So, the RIGHTS being exercised by the states....the power being used by the states....was being used to prevent gay marriage. Why the fuck would marriage equality advocates try to give even more power of the states by increasing the states' rights? That's absurd. You're wrong.
The gay marriage advocates only avenue for advancement was in the federal judiciary and the SCOTUS, i.e., a federal solution for marriage equality.
Your argument is like saying abolitionists were advocating for states' rights when they were pushing Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.