The fact is that if one citizen is above the law while others are not, it erodes popular confidence in democratic equality and political accountability.
Rationing was popular, and equality mattered: hence Kingsley Wood's 1941 budget with its 100% Excess Profits Tax and price fixing.
My evolving dialogue with the Phelps family is even more curious in light of my role with the NOH8 Campaign, a popular pro-equality, anti-bullying effort Westboro has assailed with a pushback they call their GODH8s Campaign.
Without the Supreme Court's saying a word, the popular understanding of equality has evolved with near lightning speed and invested the constitutional guarantee of equal protection with new meaning.
The strongest normative grounds for direct democracy are the democratic principles of popular sovereignty, political equality, and all the arguments for participative democracy that support the idea that all citizens should have the right not only to elect representatives but also to vote on policy issues in referendums.
Such values may include inclusiveness, equality, popular control, transparency, accountability, deliberation, or something else.
In this respect it is important to keep in mind, as Kymlicka also argues, that the national community is conceived in egalitarian terms: the two fundamental principles of the nation – popular sovereignty and equality of all members of the national community – are at the same time the two core principles of democracy (Greenfeld, 1992: 10).
Contrary to popular opinion, recognizing equality for the LGBT community is not "philosophically" a liberal issue.
But the Senate had rejected that plan, which had not been popular with marriage-equality advocates like Thorpe, either — they find it insulting and frustrating to have the question posed to the general public when Parliament already has the power to legalize same-sex marriage without a constitutional amendment, such as the one needed in Ireland.
