It doesn't matter if your point wasn't about gay marriage specifically. What I'm saying doesn't rely on your point being about gay marriage. That you invoked it just made it easy to continue using it to illustrate the deficiencies in your argument. You might recall that in my last two responses I've also invoked murder, interracial marriage, Civil Rights, and even - much as you had - D&D to illustrate the issue and show how the situations you laid out were not analogous.
So why you think "it wasn't just about gay marriage" somehow defends your position - when the point of contention was that you were clearly arguing from preconception rather than knowledge, your reasoning was deficient, and that the comparisons you were making were were severely flawed at best - is bizarre to say the least.
Once again, that's not how it works. To appeal a case to the Supreme Court is to challenge the laws involved with the case as constitutionally invalid. It is not to simply argue that the lower court's ruling was wrong, it is to challenge that the applicable laws were unjust and need to be overturned. And that is well within the Court's power. And let me dissuade you of a misconception: The Supreme Court taking a case is not a simple matter of "it was appealed up to them". The Supreme Court chooses which cases it takes (and chooses very few of them, to the tune of roughly 2% of the cases appealed to them), and does so specifically because they anticipate that their ruling for the case would have national significance through their authority to lay down the law. This is not a secret. The SC is, to quote its own site "the final arbiter of the law", and its role is rooted in its "authority to invalidate legislation or executive actions which, in the Court’s considered judgment, conflict with the Constitution". And it has done so many times.
For instance, in 2011, the Supreme Court's ruling in Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc. overturned Vermont's Prescription Confidentiality Law (State Law). In 2009, their ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission struck provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (Federal legislation). In 2009's Boumendiene v. Bush, they overturned Section 7 of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (Act of Congress). In 1966's Loving v. Virginia, their ruling not only struck Va. Code Ann. §20-58, 20-59 (State Law), but declared that every anti-miscegenation law in the United States was an illegal law, ensuring that the Federal anti-miscegenation laws that were being proposed died then and there by establishing that they wouldn't be legally valid, rendering them dead on arrival even if they did pass. Lawrence v. Texas was appealed to the Supreme Court specifically to challenge sodomy laws, resulting - much as in Loving - in said laws being overturned and rendered unenforceable across the US.
And in the Dred Scott case - shitstain that it was - their ruling was that that any efforts to limit the spread of slavery were necessarily unconstitutional, explicitly overturning the Missouri Compromise and its successor the Kansas-Nebraska Act (Organic Acts/Acts of Congress), used it to declare that the Federal Government had no power to free slaves, and moreover used the case to strip citizenship from every African American (by using "originalism" to claim that the Constitution's writers would not have considered black people to be citizens) and declare that as far as the law was concerned black people had no rights at all. (These decisions, of course, were ultimately rendered moot by the Civil War and 14th Amendment). Hell, the Taney majority made no secret of the fact that they were using the case as a vehicle to try and settle the slavery debate by using their ruling to codify slavery into law (much to the adulation of the slaveholding states, which were quick to decry the northern states objecting to it as lawless rebels who refused to accept the Supreme Court's ruling as the law of the land and final word on the subject), making it one of the most brazen cases of what we call "legislating from the bench" in US history.
Point being that the impact of Supreme Court cases is far more expansive than you pretend, and carry the weight of law with them, including overturning, amending, or otherwise editing that law. And as we've seen in multiple cases (most infamously the aforementioned Dred Scott case) whether or not the court declares something to conflict with the Constitution can very well be down to spin. For goodness sake, that's why I gave you a rundown of the cases leading up to Loving and the court's 180 on whether or not anti-miscegenation laws conflicted with the same aspect of the Constitution (the Equal Protection Clause). If the Supreme Court decides to take a case, related legislation existing means diddly-squat, as their decision to take a case means - as a matter of course - that the laws related to it are in their crosshairs as something to codify, modify, or strike.
That I have read the arguments is the reason that I know that you are simply parroting a strawman and haven't actually familiarized yourself with the case. The actual argument was that the laws banning abortion as a matter of course without regard for circumstance violated the Due Process Clause. It concluded that while the State cannot override that right entirely, it has its own interest in protecting both the pregnant woman's health and the potentiality of human life represented by the fetus, with that interest overriding the woman's right to Due Process later in the pregnancy when abortion procedures (at least at the time of ruling) posed a much greater risk to her own health (ie, the increasing risk hit a point where it outweighed the benefit).
While privacy was an element of this, the case gets bastardized by ideologues as claiming that the case was wholly "based on a right to privacy" which they - and you - pretend was conjured out of the aether (when in fact Griswold v. Connecticut that first explicitly claimed that it was a constitutional right a few years earlier, the case law officially establishing it as precedent dates back to the 1920s for Federal Law and 1900s at the State level, and had been explicitly opined on in the Harvard Law Review in the 1890s), and further bastardize it by pretending that the case declared it to be some unalienable right, which the plain text of the case shows - in no uncertain terms - was not actually the case. Roe v. Wade was explicitly a compromise position.
And don't get me started on how absurd it is that you're actually trying to argue "how problematic [privacy laws] would be when applied to things other than abortion". You claim to have worked in a hospital, and yet you're acting like HIPAA is a foreign concept to you. Not only is medical privacy very much applied to things other than abortion, it's something that they take very seriously, up to violations potentially being felony offenses.
Once again, you failing to understand the case because you have gotten its basic facts wrong is not the same thing as it not making sense.
Once again, you're presenting a strawman of the case. The argument is not that families don't have a good foundation or dignity if they don't marry, but that the right to marry is fundamental for reasons in line with the rulings of previous cases like Loving v. Virginia and Turner v. Safley. It does not argue that unmarried couples are lesser, but that denying couples the right to marry for no justifiable reason violated the Equal Protections Clause. Moreover, the arguments against allowing homosexual couples to marry are frequently predicated on declaring their relationships to be lesser and seeking to codify that value judgment into law (to the point of arguing that permitting homosexuals to marry is to disrespect the idea of marriage). What you're referring to is contextually a repudiation of the arguments against gay marriage.
Again, you not understanding the case - and make no mistake, you've made it abundantly clear that you haven't so much as to even tried to understand it, instead simply looking for a pretext to declare that it's wrong - is not the same thing as the case not making sense.
Setting aside that they've been even proposing legislation to ban the practice for years now: That is again, not how it works. The law does not do that kind of uncertainty. There is no "the law might protect something". It either does or does not protect something, and until such time that it declares that something is protected, it is not. The definition of protection is that something is officially (and therefore, necessarily, explicitly) safeguarded.
It does not mean that 'you rolls the dice and takes your chances', so to speak. If there is no clear indication that something is protected, then it is simply not protected. Once again, this is a foundational element of our legal system. If the law is not clear on an issue, then it is invalid in that context. This is a legal principle known as "Void for Vagueness", which - fittingly - leaves very little wiggle room. And it's why legislation takes such pains to be exactingly clear on its provisions, assumptions, definitions, penalties, and qualifiers.
To be blunt, you clearly have no idea just how telling it is about the gaps in your knowledge that you're even trying to argue this point.
So close and yet so far. Once again, it's closer to the opposite. Until you ask if declawing is considered animal abuse - or more accurately, until it is affirmatively declared to be so - it is not considered animal abuse. It's the basic principle of a null hypothesis: two phenomena are not considered to be linked until such time that an alternate hypothesis causes you to reject the null hypothesis. It is not that it is "essentially up in the air". It is that it is still legal because it has not yet been legally recognized as animal abuse. This is once again, a foundational principle of our legal system, arguably most directly represented in the maxim of "innocent until proven guilty". A defendant is presumed to have no connection whatsoever to the events they are accused of (the null hypothesis) until such time that the evidence demonstrates the opposite (the alternate hypothesis).
Law works the same way, as seen in many cases and - once again - in protected classes. In order for something to be considered protected by the law, the null hypothesis must be rejected by affirmatively establishing that it is protected. Legal protection is a binary proposition. It's an explicit guarantee that violations of that protection will be de facto considered a violation of the law. That is something that either "is" or "is not" the case, with "is not" being the null hypothesis. Until such time that the null hypothesis is explicitly rejected, it remains the default. There is no limbo when it is "essentially up in the air", because that would be - once again - be Void for Vagueness, and thus default to "is not protected". There is no "we do not know" or "have not decided". If the answer to "is this protected by law" is not an unambiguous "yes", then it is "no".
Again, this is not a negotiable point nor is it difficult to understand. Bluntly, your failure to understand as much is exactly that: your failure to understand. These are extremely basic and uncontested principles. In fact, they're premises that our legal system is built around. You're simply refusing to even try to understand them, and then confusing your willful lack of personal knowledge on the subject (and apparent lack of interest in learning about it) for its content being ambiguous. It's not ambiguous or "up in the air," you're just being obtuse.
