Gay rights are just so NEW we've got to be careful! My commentary on the 6th Circuit's opinion

Oh, I get it now. The 6th Circuit is hesitant to rule in favor of marriage equality because this is a NEW civil liberty. You know, people are always thinking up new ones and we have to be careful to consider the impact of just handing out *new* freedoms to people. Let's not be in a rush. What will the social impacts be? Who should decide? So much to consider! Just like when we let blacks drink from our drinking fountains and go to our schools, we couldn't just RUSH into that without clearly thinking it through. We should let each state take it slowly until they are 100% comfortable with it and have considered the ramifications.

But I'm just paraphrasing! Judge Sutton says it so much better "A State still assessing how this has worked, whether in 2004 or 2014, is not showing irrationality, just a sense of stability and an interest in seeing how the new definition has worked elsewhere. Even today, the only thing anyone knows for sure about the long-term impact of redefining marriage is that they do not know. A Burkean sense of caution does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, least of all when measured by a timeline less than a dozen years long and when assessed by a system of government designed to foster step-by-step, not sudden winner-take-all, innovations to policy problems."

I found most of the particularly ridiculous portions of the majority decision text simply by searching the document for the word "new." Uses of the word "new" abound such "new constitutional right," "new social questions," "new consensus" "new ways of thinking," and of course "new definition."

Two examples so you see the context:

"When the courts do not let the people resolve new social issues like this one, they perpetuate the idea that the heroes in these change events are judges and lawyers."

"The other is whether the Court will begin to undertake a different form of
change—change in the way we as a country optimize the handling of efforts to address requests for new civil liberties."

SEE! Giving the gays rights was just something someone just thought of practically yesterday! About the same as the iPod came out, right? Let's all just take it easy. Some states may not be ready to give out ALL of the rights to ALL of the gays. We just need to all be patient here.

I'll end with this final quote which is just so f***ing awful I can't even...

"The Supreme Court has never held that legislative classifications based on sexual orientation receive heightened review and indeed has not recognized a new suspect class in more than four decades. There are ample reasons for staying the course. Courts consider four rough factors in deciding whether to treat a legislative classification as suspect and presumptively unconstitutional: whether the group has been historically victimized by governmental discrimination; whether it has a defining characteristic that legitimately bears on the classification; whether it exhibits unchanging characteristics that define it as a discrete group; and whether it is politically powerless."

Everything in quotes here I personally copied and pasted directly from the full text of the 6th Circuit majority opinion, 100% IN context in my belief.

You can read it here http://www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/14a0275p-06.pdf