I protest.

Civil rights and marriage.

Last week I ranted a bit about the bigotry of those opposed to gay people getting married. In that rant, I pointed out one Bob Parks, a bigot who writes for the conservative site ChronWatch and who wrote a really nasty little screed that denies that marriage is a civil right (among other things; he basically regurgitates every homophobic cliché there is). I mentioned in passing that marriage, er, "fucking well is a civil right!"

That marriage is a civil right was something I knew but couldn't prove without research, which at the time I hadn't done. Well, Atrios did the research for me. It just so happens that Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, in the ruling regarding Loving v. Virginia in 1967, wrote the following:

II.

These statutes also deprive the Lovings of liberty without due process of law in violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.

Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

Emphasis mine.

Marriage is a civil right according to the Supreme Court of the United States. Laws banning gay marriage are simply unconstitutional.

As far as the argument that gay people can marry (they just can't marry persons of the same sex) and therefore their civil rights aren't being violated is simply nonsensical. I wonder how the proponents of that particular argument would feel if they were told that they could marry anyone they neither loved nor to whom they were sexually attracted, while they were not allowed to marry anyone they both loved and were attracted to? I suspect that they would scream bloody murder, and for good reason.

And, of course, the hoary old "slippery slope" arguments are even more absurd, if that's possible.

It is time for both arguments to be put away for good.