When asked who was responsible for the passage of California’s Proposition 8, 59-year-old Cybil Shepherd said “The Mormons and Catholics.” But when asked to identify Cybil’s image from a group of photos, respondents replied, “Cybil who?”
I guess she’s not aware that Mormons only made for about 3% of the vote in California. The majority of people who voted in favor of Prop8 were Blacks and Hispanics. But, because Shepherd “was stricken with guilt and shame” for not doing enough to help the civil rights movement, she now needs to find a cure for her latent bigotry.
So, she feels better attacking people of faith.
The real kicker is this statement, “I felt as though I hadn’t done enough to help the civil rights cause and as I gradually began to understand, what is the most recent excuse to deny people rights under the law? To treat them as less than human and once you get that kind of right thinking you realize how important it is to stand up for the gay and lesbian kids who are at greater risk because they don’t have community support and sometimes their parents kick them out. Particularly in L.A we have more runaways then anywhere in the world.”
Ms. Shepherd is unable to distinguish between civil rights and natural Rights. Marriage, if it can be called a right at all (a claim I dispute, by the way), existed prior to Government, which puts it squarely in the category of natural rights. Government has no authority to define Marriage, because government didn’t create Marriage.
Nobody is advocating treating Gays and Lesbians as less than human, and denying them Marriage does not make them less than human. Another example of the high-quality intellectual product being released by Hollywood.
Finally, does Ms. Shepherd really think she can try to equate runaways in Hollywood with parents kicking their gay children out? The claim is utterly preposterous and without foundation, and is entirely disingenuous.
She should stick to the things she knows, like acting. How IS that acting career working out, Cybil? Oh, wait…
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You make the statement “Government has no authority to define Marriage, because government didn’t create Marriage.” This statement is absurd.
Governments have regulated marriage for a long time. Take a look at any general history of marriage and you will see that the flavors of marriage regulated by governments run far and wide. (I posted the wikipedia article titled Marriage for a start, also take a look at Marriage Law)
Seems to me you are also ignorant of the U.S. government’s use of law in order to define Mormon polygamy as illegal. Take a look at the Morrill act, the Edmunds Act, and the Edmunds-Tucker act, not to mention the “The Racial Integrity Act” of 1924 that needed to be overturned by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in Loving vs. Virginia. Perhaps the US Government didn’t get your memo.
Regardless of some ephemeral “authority” that you mention, governments have somehow gained the authority, and have successfully regulated and defined marriage for centuries and even millennium.
So maybe you feel fine attacking actors as stupid and/or ignorant, a point with which I don’t necessarily disagree, but it doesn’t bode well for you when you make outrageously ignorant statements that can’t be sustained with even a very cursory look at history.
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