As I noted on Saturday in a post about Fox News' love/hate relationship with the LGBT community:
To be fair, you may be looking for the “love” part of [Fox News'] “love/hate” relationship in this particular story. It should be noted that Margaret Hoover -- a Fox News contributor and the great-granddaughter of President Herbert Hoover – is on the advisory board of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which spearheaded the legal challenge against Proposition 8 leading to this decision.
Now, Hoover is up with a post on FoxNews.com's Fox Forum in which she pleads with her “fellow conservatives” to “think carefully about [their] opposition to gay marriage.” The piece, excerpted after the break, is well worth a read in its entirety.
Hoover is obviously passionate about marriage equality. It's a brave position to take for an avowed conservative -- especially one employed by Fox News, a network that has been antagonistic not only on marriage equality but on virtually every issue of importance to LGBT people fighting for full legal equality.
Hoover writes:
Now, with a decision handed down that social conservatives despise, a judge whose sterling reputation as a conservative for twenty years on the federal bench is under attack.
On this page the day of the verdict, an article by a law professor from Notre Dame posited through conjecture that Judge Vaughn Walker's rumored homosexuality caused him to decide the trial before hearing it.
Other conservatives howl that one judge is unjustly invalidating the will of seven million Californians and that gay rights should come to the populace through the ballot box, not the courts.
We conservatives have a well-founded narrative about judges and the courts. It is true that the federal bench is populated with liberals who view their role not as interpreting the law as it is written, but as policy makers empowered to sculpt social outcomes with which they agree.The irony of this case is that Judge Walker is not a liberal activist judge but one whose career has proven him to be a tempered judge, true to the Reagan-Bush conservative jurisprudence that he was nominated to represent on the bench.
Conservatives cannot deny that our Founders intended the judiciary as an equal and independent branch of government purposed to ensure the protection of every citizen's rights.The Supreme Court has previously ruled that the right to marry is a fundamental constitutional right.
When an unpopular minority is denied the right to marry, it is indeed the role of the courts to protect the rights of that minority, especially when a majority would deny them. This is why Judge Walker's opinion reads, "That the majority of California voters supported Proposition 8 is irrelevant, as fundamental rights may not be submitted to [a] vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections."
Not to mention that conservatives have a flawed history with civil rights, a trend that began when Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional. While Goldwater was no racist there is clearly a conservative precedent for a breakdown at the intersection of ideology and reality.
Previously: