Regarding Prop 8, I'm curious as to why state officials would place the fate of a matter of such a nature in the hands of the public. Much of the public is nonsecular and more within that portion appeal to religious authority to justify a decision; hence their reasoning is religious. Homosexuality in any aspect is a prominent point of discussion and thought in any religion, so this is a valid concern.
It would've made more sense if the government is secular, to stick to that value and keep the fate of the matter out of the hands of the public, and instead represent public interests with educated state officials who use objective rationale instead of letting the uneducated nonsecular public decide the fate of the Proposition.
Surely the government was aware that such an action would inevitably cause a huge conflict of interest?
Religious faith is a personal conviction that requires no objectiveness to posit a belief. You simply need to believe that something supernatural exists without evidence to adhere to theism.
My gripe with that premise is that then, people will blindly take unverifiable authority as their reason behind willingly restricting their own and others' rights - this can lead to religious discrimination - discrimination of a religious nature against other religious or non-religious people.
This is precisely why I believe that the government should keep the fate of public political issues out of the hands of the public. You only need to look at Prop 8 to see how this form of discrimination could have potentially have occurred in the form of tyranny of the majority.
There is no doubt that the threat of nonsecular intervention in a secular society is very real and causes a conflict of interest with people voting on public issues for objective reasons (either for or against Prop 8). Not to say that there is a conflict of interest with people voting for Prop 8 behind objective reasoning, but most seemed to vote for Prop 8 for religious reasons.
The problem behind this is that people who voted for Prop 8 and other serious political issues for religious reasons aren't being fair. Religion is a personal conviction that involves an appeal to an unverifiable authority; an appeal to pure emotion, thus any decision is ultimately baseless.
The rationale of two differing parties in a secular process may be different if one is voting for religious reasons and the other for objective reasons. In a secular process, rationale for decisions on serious matters have to be clear across the board if others are to understand exactly what they voted for (if they so choose to diverge such information, ideally). Thus, reasoning on secular issues has to be free of religious ideals and bias.
An informed opinion molded in an open mind is a result of objective reasoning and is easy for others to see a preference for a choice. Religious reasoning appeals largely to emotion, varies depending on the situation, and is very biased to one end of an issue without cause.
People capable of enforcing the contract with the state that allows them to vote can thus also use objective logic to come to decisions borne of informed opinions. It thus makes sense for people to ideally use such logic when voting on public political matters.
It makes no sense for emotional appeal made on a personal conviction to have a hand in deciding the fate of a public matter in a non-secular society. The reasoning is simple. Not all people believe in a supernatural entity for perfectly legitimate reasons.
However, it's rightly presumed that all people of age, regardless of religious conviction, are naturally prone to using objective rationale to their decisions. Voting on a public matter that requires a common trait to be decided on (which is objective rationale) should thus be the foremost preference of reasoning to use when dealing with a public matter in a non-secular society.
You can't make these kinds of people understand the reasoning of a religious person since faith appeals to unverifiable authority and emotion; tacitly instinct, rather than objective conclusions based on unbiased observations and facts. Again, ideally, rationale in non-secular matters should be nonsecular in nature also.
Basically, emotional, baseless reasoning upheld by private convictions held by the nonsensical should not decide the fate of serious public matters for the rest who use objectiveness rather than appeals to an unverifiable authority as a form of reasoning.
I find it safe to say that allowing a matter of such a nature to again be handled by the public with a large non-secular presence can essentially turn a secular government into a potential theocracy, of a sort: a secular state that is inadvertently influenced by non-secular ideals.
Allowing this kind of democracy to run rampant is dangerous because the reigns of democracy can only be held by one prominent group at any one time, each with its own agenda and goals.
I admit that it's impossible to stop people who use religious reasoning from voting on public secular matters. This is why I advocate that such matters be turned over to the hands of the secular state, using representative democracy, and not public referendum, and thus any verdicts will be free of religiously biased reasoning in their decisions to legalize or criminalize a public issue.
