Olbermann was wrong.

"Wha? John, say it ain't so." 

Ok, calm down and (re)watch his special comment from Monday and think about it.

Well, I'm not saying I disagree with him on any point he made, but for all his eloquence and vehemence, he missed the issue in favor of warm fuzzies.

Sure, he made me feel all those warm fuzzies, and he made the religious right look hypocritical and anything but Christlike, but this issue, marriage, is not about love.

There is no need for love to be legitimized by any institution -church or state- only by those involved.

Marriage, the marriage the homosexual community is fighting for, is marriage as a legal right. The "Gay agenda" is not about getting their unions recognized by any religious institution, this is not about love or God, or dissolving the sanctity of a sacrament. This issue is about property, it's about kinship, it's about custody, insurance, taxes.  Marriage in this instance is something created (appropriated) and recognized by the state, and is excluding a group people from sharing these rights based on a specific yet arbitrary characteristic. 

This issue is about our government's failure in enforcing separation of church and state, and now it's gone further - a proposition passed with a simple majority with the intent to modify the state constitution to exclude a certain class of people from equal recognition under the law on very real issues (property, kinship, custody... etc.).

When James Madison introduced the amendments to the constitution that would become the bill of rights, he made specific mention of this problem.

"But I confess that I do conceive, that in a government modified like this of the United States, the great danger lies rather in the abuse of the community than in the legislative body. The prescriptions in favor of liberty, ought to be levelled against that quarter where the greatest danger lies, namely, that which possesses the highest prerogative of power: But this [is] not found in either the executive or legislative departments of government, but in the body of the people, operating by the majority against the minority."

I hear all the time about how the State Supreme Court overturned the "Will of the People" but the court's job is to use the constitution to serve as a watchdog against abuses of any and all in power, be they by the executive or legislative branches of government, or by the majority of the people. This is one such instance where we have witnessed the "tyranny of the majority" and when their initiative was overturned by the courts, they moved to change the state constitution to make their discrimination legal. It takes a supermajority of the legislature to make any changes to the constitution, but only a simple majority to use the constitution to deny the legal rights that only come with marriage to a class of citizens. That's 50% plus 1 vote.

The ACLU in northern California has since filed suit with the State Supreme Court, basing their claims that Proposition 8: 

"...makes far reaching changes to the nature of our governmental plan by compromising the core constitutional principle of equal protection laws, depriving a vulnerable minority of fundamental rights, inscribing discrimination based on a suspect classification into the Constitution and destroying the courts' quintessential power and role of protection minorities and enforcing the guarantee of equal protection under the law."

Olbermann was wrong. This is not about permanence, or happiness, or legitimacy of love, it's about the legitimacy of a certain group of people as citizens of our government, legitimizing the homosexual community as a minority worthy of the same protections under our constitution as any other.