Mystech said:
Unfortunately for southerners in favor of slave ownership, one's individual rights do not extend so far as to be able to deny the human rights of other individuals. That sort of situation would create a bit of a legal paradox, I'm afraid, or hadn't you noticed?
Well, it wasn't a legal paradox at the time. Most people of those times didn't consider blacks as human, remember? So they also didn't consider that they were denying them "human" rights. It was only the Civil War, a very bloody and deadly war, that it was then announced that blacks were, in fact, humans with the same "rights" as other men.
See how laws work in a society? Our society was perfectly happy for a hundred years or so denying the "rights" to slaves. Then, one day, someone said, "Gee, are those black slaves human?" ...and then the shit hit the fan! And after a major war, the north won, and forced the south to accept the liberal laws!
See? If the south had won, we'd still have blacks as slaves!
A society makes/create/writes laws as they see fit for the time in which they're society is operating. It's not a major contest in "right or wrong", but in how the society sees or determines things to be. And who writes the laws? Well, golly, the members of that society, of course!
And since we now have that same right, we're writting laws against homo marriage in the same way as we wrote laws before ....it's what society wants and needs at the time.
Baron Max