Thoughts on Prop 8
Even though I’ve done volunteer work against it, today’s ruling has made me realize I don’t know much about the legality of it all.
A Numbers Game
Results of the popular vote on Proposition 8 (Nov 5, 2008)
| Yes 52.5% | No 47.5% |
| 5,387,939 votes | 4,883,460 votes |
That’s a margin of 504,479. For the sake of scale, the population of San Francisco is 808,976.
The population of California is 36,961,664. About 14.6% of the population voted for prop 8, and 13.2% voted against it. The margin between is about 1.4% of the population.
For comparison’s sake, 69,438,983 people voted for Barack Obama (52.87%), and 59,930,551 voted for John McCain (45.63%). That’s a margin of 9,508,432. The population of Oregon is 3,825,657.
The population of the United States if 307,006,550. Approximately 22.6% of the population voted for Obama. Approximately 19.5% of the population voted for McCain. The deciding margin was about 3.1% of the population.
And those are the numbers. Overall, there was a smaller turnout for the statewide election, as there should have been. I’ve seen a lot of different statistics, such as how today’s ruling overlooked the opinions of 7 million Californians, and now I see that number isn’t quite right.
LOVING ET UX. v. VIRGINIA SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 388 U.S. 1 June 12, 1967, Decided, landmark case that declared the ban of interracial marriage in Virginia illegal: “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.”
Amendment XIV
Section 1.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
