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Comment by anonunivgrad | Hacker News Reader

You're only really a liberal democracy if the ruling elite can coerce private actors to take the repressive actions instead of doing it officially. You must also allow your civil service to be an unaccountable branch of government controlled by the professional managerial class and unresponsive to the commands of elected leadership (unless they're from the correct side). Furthermore, you must allow lawyers to use the judiciary to rewrite laws to suit their political preferences (e.g. your Constitution must be found to guarantee the right to gay marriage, an idea laughable to people who wrote it and to everyone until 15 years ago). Finally, you must protect all classes of people from unjust termination and unwarranted denial of service except for everyone whose political views align with the wrong half of the country. Thank God we live in a real liberal democracy.

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Gay marriage has a popular majority in the UK and Ireland in both polls and referenda. Is it that different in the US? Interpreting old documents is hard, and where there is silence or substantial ambiguity it seems right to err on the side of popular opinion.

7 of 27 EU states have a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. The EU Human Rights Court has not stepped in to overturn those bans: https://eclj.org/marriage/the-echr-unanimously-confirms-the-.... In 2016, it held unanimously that the European Convention on Human Rights doesn’t protect same-sex marriage. In the EU countries where it has been legalized, that was done by statue.

In the US, those issues are handled through court cases, regardless of where public opinion stands. For example, elective abortions (without health risks or something else) in the second trimester or later is very unpopular in the US and the EU. Only about a quarter of people think it should be generally legal after the first trimester: https://news.gallup.com/poll/235469/trimesters-key-abortion-.... That matches up with the law in most of the EU, where the limit for elective abortions is 10-14 weeks. (As I recall, the UK is the exception at 24 weeks.)

The US constitution doesn’t say anything about abortion, or anything that could really be construed to be about abortion, but the Supreme Court has interpreted it to protect abortion up to viability, usually 22-24 weeks. So the Supreme Court has interpreted the constitution, which says nothing about abortion, to create an abortion right so broad France or Germany’s or Denmark’s abortion laws would be invalid in the US.

The topping on that cake is that the US is that the US is the most religious developed country in the world, more so than countries like Poland.

Which is why Supreme Court appointments get so heated here.

Gay marriage had a popular majority in favour before it became legal (though obviously a popular majority doesn’t necessarily mean much in the US system.) Compare this to interracial marriage which was not approved of by the majority of the population for many years after it was made fully legal across the country .

This lays out the timeline of the shift in popular opinion for gay marriage:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/117328/marriage.aspx

Here's polling on interracial marriage:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-...

Interracial marriage became legal nationwide in 1967 with Loving v Virginia, but wasn't approved of by the majority of Americans until 1997.

Edit: I only add this to support the the comment replied to.

Thanks for the stats. I guess I was a bit wrong in what I wrote above.

I think you got it right, just wanted to provide some supporting data, even if polling is a little fuzzy.

Can we really trust polling data from the 60s?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8

> Is it that different in the US?

It's certainly different from state to state.

Most cases that reach the US Supreme Court aren't about whether X is good or bad (let's say X is abortion or gay marriage) but whether X is so good that the Federal government should compel states to allow it, or so bad that it should compel states to forbid it.

> Most cases that reach the US Supreme Court aren’t about whether X is good or bad (let’s say X is abortion or gay marriage) but whether X is so good that the Federal government should compel states to allow it, or so bad that it should compel states to forbid it.

No, most of them aren’t about good or bad, which is a policy judgement generally reserved for the political branches, at all.

Its about whether X or Y is consistent with the law (including, as the paramount law, the Constitution of the United States.)

> where there is silence or substantial ambiguity it seems right to err on the side of popular opinion

If “it seems right” is a good way to run a country, why do we even have laws?

I don’t think abusing silence and substantial ambiguity is a coherent approach to legislation. If something important in the law is ambiguous, the correct approach in my view is to make it unambiguous by the usual legislative process.

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