"Didn't we have a vote about 8 or 9 years ago?"
Gee, don't we have laws prohibiting interracial marriage? Because after all, lots of people don’t think interracial marriage is OK and you can even use the Bible to show that God disagrees with it… Oh wait, that’s right, anti-miscegeny laws were found to be unconstitutional. Hawaii’s and every other one of those state level anti-gay laws will eventually be struck down, just as slavery was finally ended, and miscegeny, Jim Crow laws and other racist policies were eventually rescinded. Just because the majority votes to oppress the minority doesn’t mean it’ll stand the test of time. This is America, and in the end the U.S. Constitution and the Fourteen Amendment will win out. All these measures do is cost the taxpayers money as those oppressive laws have to be tested in the courts. Gays will eventually have equal rights, and all that the bigots are doing in the meantime is delaying equality and temporarily causing same sex families additional pain and hardship.
The civil rights of a minority group should never be put to a public vote. Same sex couples are citizens like you and me. They pay taxes, they raise kids, they deserve equal rights. Those who seek to oppress gay and *** citizens erroneously claim they are simply trying to “protect traditional marriage.” What a hoax! Traditional marriage is quite different from what marriage is today. Traditional biblical marriage was a way for rich men to buy young girls by paying off their family with a dowry (legalized prostitution). Mormon marriage included polygamy. Catholic marriage was and still is marriage without divorce. Other religions allowed men to divorce their wives but not vice versa. In fact, traditional marriage legally meant the transfer of a woman's property inheritance from her father or deceased husband to her new owner, I mean husband. Until recently, traditional marriage in America meant blacks couldn't marry whites. Until the 1970’s, a man could rape his wife and he wouldn’t be charged with a crime. So which “traditional marriage” are they seeking to protect? For six thousand years those “traditional marriages” meant women were enslaved by their husbands, with no rights to their own labor, to property, and even without the right to divorce their abusive husbands. One man, one woman is a meaningless standard to hold up when multiple woman were “owned” by men in traditional marriage. The scant fifty years of America's current version of marriage (the one where divorce is allowed, children can't be sold to adult men, and people of different races can actually marry) is hardly long enough to call traditional.
Using the bible and “traditions” to justify oppressing a group of people is nothing new. American women and blacks faced the same kinds of oppression that gay and *** citizens experience today. Laws were written to restrict their rights, and judges, lawmakers, religious leaders and the public used the Bible to justify oppressive policies. Ten thousand years of slavery didn’t make it right, just as the majority of voters being against equality never made racism OK. The Bible was used to “prove” women and Negroes were inferior and didn’t deserve equal rights. Sure, in 30 out of 30 states where gay rights were put to a public vote, the people have voted to oppress same sex families. But that doesn’t make it right. Each and every one of those state laws will eventually be struck down, because in the end the U.S. Constitution and the Fourteen Amendment will win out.
Marriage equality is about equal rights for same sex couples and the rights of their (mostly) heterosexual children. There are thousands of rights associated with marriage, and they help compensate for the responsibilities that same sex couples have already assumed.