The rulings protecting gay marriage in California are precisely on Constitutional grounds.

The courts are the ultimate umpire of whether a law or an act is protected or prohibited by the Constitution, the judiciary's role in chain after the specifier of government action (legislative) and its executor (executive) have played their role.

You are a fool, a bigot and an America hater. Shut up already, Osama.

The Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution says "[...] nor deny to any person within [any state's] jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.". Those are the words in the Constitution to the effect that all people are equal. Sadly, it took an Amendment, a bloody Civil War, and nearly a century of constituted "liberty" before we got it in there. But we did, nearly a century and a half ago.

Sadly, we're still far from practicing it. But we're closer than ever before, and I think our approach is accelerating. I just hope it's not asymptotic.

No, the only logic you cited was the procreative limits of human sexuality. They argued against that.

The Constitution also creates many powers of government, not just limits them.

Except there are people with XXX or with XXY chromosomes.

And even if there weren't, just because there's a binary pair of genetic conditions doesn't force us to treat people in a binary way, just to suit your anxiety at ambiguity.

Because marriage offers many protections, some legal and others social, as well as conventions guiding the behavior of parties within the marriage according to mutually recognized expectations.

Your ignorance of the many benefits of marriage, despite the penalties for violating it, obligates you to look into it more before talking like an authority on it.

You're arguing semantics. These people aren't "gender changers", they're "gender identity changers", going to more or less extreme effort to change gender identity cues.

They certainly can pick their gender identity. Many of them do on the basis of an involuntary compulsion that defines their every moment just as much as a person without the compulsion is defined by their own identity - and its voluntary cues. That is who they are, which is different from others.

As long as they're not doing anything to you, why should you care? Why should you even care if someone has surgery to look like a different species, if that's how they feel?

That's right: involuntarily identifying completely as the opposite gender is just like thinking you're a different species. And people who cross-gender identify are exactly like people of the opposite gender. That's not a salami, that's a sack of fallacies.

And gender has been redefined the more we've learned about it.

We don't have "a universal checkbox" that says "male" or "female", except in your mind. People don't have to pick anything just to avoid reminding you that you're gay.

All Americans are free to marry only members of their own race. Freedom!

You're a bigot. Probably homosexual, hiding behind incomplete logic, afraid to have compassion. Get over it.

The Constitution nipped that kind of "democracy" in the bud by giving us representatives and a Constitution each more powerful than the democracy that creates them. I don't know whether we agree, but I know that "the end of democracy in America" that Card mourns was executed by 1789.

He's talking about "the end of majority tyranny in Utah". Good riddance.

Nonsense. The phrase "taken away" doesn't mean "removing what once was given" here, but rather "depriving of an option for some that's available to others".

Before women's right to vote was protected a century ago, they had the right, just as men had the right. Exactly as Black people's right to vote prior to 1865. But the government wasn't instructed to protect that right. Their right to vote was taken away by the refusal of the state to register them. If you say that's not "taken away", your disagreement is purely semantic, and irrelevant.

The issue for Conservatives is that you're bigots. Period.

The Constitution instructs the creation of government as representatives who have the power, elected by people who have only the power to vote and to petition for redress of grievances, and implicitly to exercise rights the government is instructed to protect. The government of representatives has all the other power.

That is the definition of a republic.

Though of course I'm a fan of the 13th and 15th Amendments, the democratic process for passing them required the killing of hundreds of thousands of people, the forced abdication of their elected leaders, and the military occupation of their lands after destroying much of their infrastructure. I am grateful for the outcome of the Civil War, but the ends contain the means, and more than just democracy produced those Amendments.

The rest of those Amendments and laws weren't purely democratic in their process, either, but rather republican and otherwise political outside of simply voting, whether by citizens or by their representatives. Indeed, even the Civil Rights Act was enforced by threat (and sometimes exercise) of violence. As, sorry to say, are most laws that prevent some people from taking without permission from others.

It forces the government to deny equal protection (of marriage) to some people but not to others, based on a difference that does not conflict with the public interest in applying the protection to anyone. That is why this is a marriage equality issue, just as it was when the difference was racial, not gender.