Prop 8 reviewed tomorrow

[Guest EXPAT]

HRC are asking people to change their Facebook profile pic to this for Tuesday when the Supreme Court starts Prop 8 arguments.

[JKane]

Yeah, when did they ask, midnight? Besides, my profile is chroma key green to support another cause...

[AdamSmith]

SCOTUSblog's recap:

Lyle Denniston Reporter

Posted Wed, March 27th, 2013 1:28 pm

Argument recap: DOMA is in trouble

Analysis

If the Supreme Court can find its way through a dense procedural thicket, and confront the constitutionality of the federal law that defined marriage as limited to a man and a woman, that law may be gone, after a seventeen-year existence. That was the overriding impression after just under two hours of argument Wednesday on the fate of the Defense of Marriage Act.

That would happen, it appeared, primarily because Justice Anthony M. Kennedy seemed persuaded that the federal law intruded too deeply into the power of the states to regulate marriage, and that the federal definition cannot prevail. The only barrier to such a ruling, it appeared, was the chance – an outside one, though — that the Court majority might conclude that there is no live case before it at this point.

After a sometimes bewilderingly complex first hour, discussing the Court’s power to decide the case of United States v. Windsor (12-307), the Court moved on to explore DOMA’s constitutionality. And one of the most talented lawyers appearing these days before the Court — Washington attorney Paul D. Clement — faced fervent opposition to his defense of DOMA from enough members of the Court to make the difference. He was there on behalf of the Republican leaders of the House (as majority members of the House’s Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group), defending the law because the Obama administration has stopped doing so.

Justice Kennedy told Clement that there was “a real risk” that DOMA would interfere with the traditional authority of states to regulate marriage. Kennedy also seemed troubled about the sweeping breadth of DOMA’s Section 3, noting that its ban on benefits to already married same-sex couples under 1,100 laws and programs would mean that the federal government was “intertwined with citizens’ daily lives.” He questioned Congress’s very authority to pass such a broad law.

Moreover, Kennedy questioned Clement’s most basic argument — that Congress was only reaching for uniformity, so that federal agencies would not have to sort out who was or was not married legally in deciding who could qualify for federal marital benefits, because some states were on the verge of recognizing same-sex marriage.

Along with sharply negative comments about DOMA by the Court’s four more liberal members, Kennedy’s stance could put the law on the edge of constitutional extinction. But, if the Court were to do that based on states’ rights premises, the final ruling might not say much at all about whether same-sex couples were any closer to gaining an equal right to marry under the Constitution.

There did not appear to be a majority of Justices willing to strike down the 1996 law based on the argument that the Obama administration and gay rights advocates have been pressing: that is, the law violates the Fifth Amendment guarantee of legal equality in general.

If the House GOP leaders’ lawyer had trouble on Wednesday, so did the federal government’s lawyer, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., who was pushing for a wide-ranging ruling that might have the potential to outlaw any ban on same-sex marriage. It was not apparent that Verrilli was making much headway with his argument that any law that treats gays and lesbians less favorably, because of their sexual identity, should have to satisfy a stricter constitutional test.

The Court, although it has been dealing with gay rights cases for years, has never spelled out a specific constitutional standard for judging laws that allegedly discriminate based on homosexuality. The indications on Wednesday were that the DOMA case might be decided without supplying such a standard, since a decision based on interference with states’ prerogatives would not require the creation of a test based on equality principles.

There was a third lawyer in the case to discuss the constitutional issue, New York City attorney Roberta A. Kaplan, representing the New York City woman who had successfully challenged DOMA in this case — Edith Schlain Windsor, an eighty-three-year-old widow of a same-sex marriage, who sat in the second row of the audience to watch the Court deal with her case. Kaplan seemingly missed several opportunities, in answering the Justices’ questions, to the apparent consternation of gay rights lawyers in the attorney section.

http://www.scotusblog.com/2013/03/argument-recap-doma-is-in-trouble/#more-161880

[Guest EXPAT]

[Guest EXPAT]

Not to be out-done by others, HBO's True Blood decided to use this as their Facebook page photo:

hahahahahaha

[Guest hitoallusa]

Very creative... It shows the very strength of Americans... I think DOMA will be struck down...

[AdamSmith]

[Guest EXPAT]

[Guest EXPAT]

Rush Limbaugh appears to have given up, calling marriage equality inevitable. “We lost the issue when we started allowing the word ‘marriage’ to be bastardized and redefined. Once you decide to modify the word marriage then the other side has won. The best thing that marriage had going for it was basically what they teach you the first day in law school: If you hang on a horse the sign that says ‘Cow,’ it does not make it a cow." Moooo!

[Guest EXPAT]

Meanwhile, the creative marriage equality signs continue. . .

[Guest EXPAT]

This map, released by Facebook, the social network, shows the rate of people who changed their profile picture this week to the red-and-pink equal sign in support of same-sex marriage (deeper red equals more changes). It kind of shows that the south is not really that supportive doesn't it? More: http://nbcnews.to/166bdPJ

[Guest NCBored]

Actually, it shows rate of profile picture changes during the HRC campaign...period. There is no data on what profiles changed to or from.

"As some commenting on the Facebook blog post have pointed out, there's no way to know whether all these profile picture updates were in support of gay marriage, since users could just as easily be changing their picture to indicate opposition to gay marriage (or just a new look). But the correlation with college towns and the deliberate and visible campaign by the Human Rights Campaign suggest that it was mostly supportive."

But I suspect the South is less supportive, overall, than much of the rest of the country.

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

[Guest hitoallusa]

Aww they look so cute holding the cute baby... I want to have a family like that too. Unfortunately, a lot of guys I meet don't want to raise a child together. I don't know why some guys (straight or gay) hate kids.. One guy I dated hated kids and didn't want to have a monogamous relationship ..Second guy I dated was cheating on his bf and did horrible things to people. I don't think he would make a good father..

I know a good Christian couple... Even though they could make more money by doing something else they provide medical care to those who can't afford to pay... It shows clear contrast to a gay doctor I know who look down on poor people as losers and so unhappy with his life. My point is that not all Christians are against gay marriage and we need to communicate with them and not shun them. I think our community to be more caring and compassionate to one another so we can grow and prosper.

[AdamSmith]

[RA1]

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. We vote on everything now (polls and more) from who, what, when and where to did the sun come up yesterday or not?

If unalienable rights were truly unalienable, our founders had no need to reduce the thought to writing, did they?

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

To be sure, the out-of-control ballot-initiative process in California vividly illustrates why the Framers put in everything they could think of to protect representative democracy from being trampled by direct democracy.

[RA1]

But we are trampling merrily away regardless and have been doing so for a very long time and not only locally but nationally as well.

Not picking on you, AS, but various cannot just pick and choose which parts of the Constitution they don't like and attack such as Scalia for trying to uphold it all. Of course, it has provisions whereby it can be amended and the processes are delineated therein. None of them mention disagreement in various media as binding.

Best regards,

RA1