Q Toon: Perry v. Schwarzenegger

The two people in the lower right of this cartoon are Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage and Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association, two anti-marriage activists. This is the second time I've drawn Gallagher in a cartoon, and it's because her troll-like looks are fun to draw.

Once U.S. District court Judge Vaughn Walker issued his strongly worded decision declaring California's Proposition 8 unconstitutional, the strategy of the anti-marriage forces was revealed. Having utterly failed to present any legal defense of Prop 8 in the court, Maggie Gallagher, Tim Wildmon, and the Faux News network immediately began their appeal to the phobias and prejudices of the general public.

The religious right has been able to pass these measures in nearly every state where they've tried because they find it easy to use fear and innuendo to convince a majority to trample the rights of a minority. Then they squawk and scream when judges refer to the law and constitution, not popular opinion and the Pentateuch, to find that the minority deserves protection.

Tim Wildmon has even gone so far as to propose that Judge Walker be impeached -- I guess on the grounds that if Walker is openly gay, he should be disqualified from ruling whether gays have a right to marry. (By the same logic, a judge who is married or engaged to be married ought also to be disqualified. So should a judge who openly professes a faith with a stand either way on the question of marriage equality.)

Unless the right manages to push through a constitutional amendment replacing the judiciary branch with popular referenda (which might actually be easy to accomplish in California), Perry v. Schwarzenegger will be appealed through the court system, and the appeals will have to concern themselves with Judge Walker's ruling itself, not a reintroduction of the allegations that same-sex couples are unfit to be parents, or that reproduction is the sine qua non of marriage, or that gay sex is nasty icky poopy.

An aside: if you wouldn't mind having your sex acts described in exact detail in a court of law, you're probably doing it wrong.