Wisconsin's top right-wing blogger announces

[Flourish]

I disagree with this ruling. [snip MSNBC (!!!) reporting] It is not a right for your marriage to be recognized by the state.

What is Wisconsin's top right-wing blogger's point, I have no idea, because the court never said there was any such right. But seeing as the invalidated California proposition reads, "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California," then our top right-wing blogger should find it unconstitutional as well, no?

After all, according to his claims, not even the opposite marriage people have any right to expect their nuptial consummations to be recognized by the State.

Indeed, you'd think that would be the politically conservative position, where the State (and in parallel, the state, but the Defense of Marriage Act is another question) interferes at only the bare administrative minimum in the private and consensual domestic arrangements of individual Americans.

Nobody, to my knowledge, has empowered any State (and certainly not the federal government) to draw an arbitrary line somewhere along the continuum of sexual orientation or gender (or "race" or ethnicity or religion, the latter of which is chosen) for those administrative purposes.

And when I say arbitrary, I mean that as the most charitable compliment that might be mustered as to the quality of the Proposition 8 proponents' evidence. Some of their testimony relied on that rentboy guy, other of it on "the internet." (The latter proponent also jabbered about Satan, which, let's face it, was to be expected. That's the sort of hocus-pocus that drives their arguments.* Wisconsin's leading marriage expert Julaine Appling, anyone?)

The top blogging continues:

There is a right to marry, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

Yes, that's precisely what we're talking about here and the judge's opinion could not have made clearer its distinguishing between the creation of novel rights and the simple recognition of existing ones.

The top blogger has it exactly backwards. This case is not about the State of California's recognizing a right to marry. This case is about the State of California's refusal to recognize that right. Even more to the point, the State of California's affirmative denial of that right.

And it cannot so refuse and at the same time be in compliance with the 14th Amendment, which maybe the top blogger should read.

Along with the opinion, and not some MSNBC-generated** syllabus.

h/t WisOpinion, which aggregates the views of "opinion leaders."

* And those of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, if I'm not mistaken.

** Bonus irony.