Op-ed: On Day of Supreme Court Decision, How Will You React?
When the Supreme Court issues its ruling this month, how we react will send a message to the country.
Supreme Court might dismiss Prop. 8 case on a technicality
SAN FRANCISCO — Lawyers leading the fight for gay marriage in California have been quietly preparing state officials for the possibility the U.S. Supreme Court might dismiss the case on a technicality next month without deciding the fate of Proposition 8 .
Former Justice John Paul Stevens, Professor Laurence Tribe give their Prop 8 and DOMA predictions
This is similar to most predictions we’ve seen lately: narrow results but still the end of these anti-gay laws. Either way, based at least on the oral arguments, it appears the votes could be closer than expected.
How The Silence Of The Mormons Is Making Marriage Equality Possible
Why the about-face? Mencimer cites a number of reasons. For one thing, Mormon leaders were apparently caught off guard by the backlash to their involvement in Prop. 8, including from their own members.
Mormon Church Abandons Its Crusade Against Gay Marriage
“It seems like the [Mormon] hierarchy has pulled the plug and is no longer taking the lead in the fight to stop same-sex marriage,” says Fred Karger, the LGBT activist who first exposed the church’s major role in the passage of Prop. 8. “The Mormon Church has lost so many members and suffered such a black eye because of all its anti-gay activities that they really had no choice. I am hopeful that the Catholic Church cannot be far behind.”
Gay Political Power—Or Good Survival Skills?
Following Wednesday’s Supreme Court arguments on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, there has been a lot of discussion of whether gays and lesbians individually, and the gay-rights movement in general, have become so politically powerful as to hardly warrant the safeguards of the equal-protection clause of the Constitution.
Substantial attention focussed on an exchange during the argument between Chief Justice John Roberts and the attorney for Edith Windsor, who is challenging the law. Justice Roberts asked Roberta Kaplan, “You don’t doubt that the lobby supporting the enactment of same-sex-marriage laws in different states is politically powerful, do you?” When she disagreed with him, the Chief Justice somewhat snarkily responded, “As far as I can tell, political figures are falling over themselves to endorse your side of the case.”
The issue is legally important—so important that it merited its own front-page story in the Times today—because in order for the court to apply what’s known as “heightened scrutiny” in an equal-protection context, it has required, in the past, a finding that the group seeking redress has historically lacked political power. Heightened scrutiny would mean, for example, that a court would look especially skeptically at a law that treated people of different races dissimilarly—the law would be suspect from the start. (One of the reasons that gay-rights groups may have been initially reluctant to take Windsor’s case for a large tax refund was that it looked like a claim for more money by an already affluent person.)
What is often lost in this discussion is that the legal test requires a finding of lack of political power historically. It has much less to do with political power, or lack thereof, in the present moment. In the DOMA context, what the court would need to look at, if it wanted to remain true to its precedents, would be the political power of gays and lesbians in 1996, when the law was enacted. Perhaps the best evidence of the lack of political power at that time is that the law—one of the most discriminatory anti-gay measure in American history—was passed by veto-proof margins in both houses of Congress and signed by a President who, even though he personally opposed the goals of the legislation, was unwilling to stand up against it in an election year out of fear that doing so would require that he defend himself against the charge that he supported the group stigmatized by the bill’s sponsors.
Mixed reaction over Verrilli’s Prop 8 arguments
The U.S. solicitor general’s performance before the Supreme Court on marriage is receiving mixed reviews amid disappointment that he didn’t overtly say same-sex marriage should be institutionalized nationwide as a result of the cases.
Obama Evolves Even Further, Denies That State Marriage Bans Are Constitutional
Stephanopoulos then asked whether Obama could imagine a circumstance wherein a state’s gay marriage ban could pass constitutional muster.
“Well, I can’t, personally. I cannot,” Obama responded.
“That’s part of the reason I said, ultimately, I think that, same-sex couples should be able to marry. That’s my personal position. And, frankly, that’s the position that’s reflected — in the briefs that we filed — in the Supreme Court.”
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How the Court Could Rule on Same-Sex Marriage
Great infographic breakdown of how they could rule
