Delaware on Tuesday became the eleventh state to embrace marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples. The state Senate passed the freedom to marry legislation by a 12-9 vote Tuesday morning. Democratic Gov. Jack Markell later signed the bill into law, tweeting “marriage equality is a…
Rhode Island senate votes to legalize same-sex marriage
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Rhode Island senators put the state on the path Wednesday to becoming the 10th state to allow same-sex couples to marry.The gay marriage legislation easily passed the Rhode Island House in January, and the Senate vote was seen as the true test. The bill passed 26-12, and now returns to the House for a largely procedural vote, likely next week, before going to Gov. Lincoln Chafee, who supports the legislation.”This is a historic piece of legislation, one that literally has been in the works for more than 20 years,” said Sen. Donna Nesselbush, D-Pawtucket, the bill’s main sponsor in the Senate. “This is something that undoes centuries of discrimination against gay and lesbian couples.”While the other five New England states already allow gay marriage, heavily Catholic Rhode Island has been a hold-out. Supporters this year mounted an aggressive and coordinated campaign that included organized labor, religious leaders, business owners and leaders including Chafee and Providence Mayor Angel Taveras.The bill’s chances improved when Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed said she would allow the bill to move forward, despite her opposition to gay marriage. Earlier this week, the Senate’s five Republicans announced they would all support the measure.Continue Reading… … Read More
Gay Marriage Advocates Embrace Federalism, Reject New York Times
Last week
I criticized a column by New York Times legal pundit
Linda Greenhouse which argued that “the campaign for marriage
equality would be worse off” if the Supreme Court voided the
Defense of Marriage Act on federalism grounds. “A ruling that left
the states to their own devices when it comes to marriage would
take the equal protection guarantee out of the picture,” Greenhouse
asserted, dubbing the federalist case against DOMA a conservative
“Trojan Horse” designed to outlaw gay marriage at the state
level.
I’m happy to report I am not alone in finding fault with
Greenhouse’s work. At the blog of the liberal American Constitution
Society, two prominent lawyers involved in “the campaign for
marriage equality” have rejected Greenhouse’s dubious assertions
and endorsed a federalist argument against DOMA. As Mary Bonauto,
the Civil Rights Project Director for the group Gay & Lesbian
Advocates & Defenders, and Paul Smith, the Washington lawyer
who argued and won the 2003 Supreme Court case Lawrence v.
Texas, observe:
The primary concern [Greenhouse] expressed was that a decision
invalidating DOMA on federalism grounds would, by emphasizing the
primacy of states in setting marriage policy, somehow immunize from
constitutional challenge those states that have chosen not to
extend marriage rights to same-sex couples. But this concern
reflects a mixing of constitutional apples and oranges.
The federalism concerns raised by DOMA have to do with the power
of Congress. It is Congress that chose in 1996 to exclude
only same-sex couples married under state law from the otherwise
capacious category of state law “marriages” recognized under
federal law. It expressly did so in part to undercut potential
state choices in favor of marriage equality. When that law is
challenged as discriminating against gay couples, the fact that
Congress has no general power to marry people is properly weighed
in the balance when lawyers try to come up with substantial
justifications for what Congress did….
Whatever one’s political inclinations, it is not possible to
find another example of federal legislation that comes anywhere
close to DOMA. And that understanding leads to the last and perhaps
most important lesson that federalism teaches in this case. When
the federal government acts in a way that not only is
unprecedented, but also violates some of the basic principles of
federalism, courts enforcing the equal protection guarantee have
good reason to search more carefully for the government’s real
motives.
Read more about the federalist case against DOMA
here. … Read More
Jon Stewart: It takes a brain injury for Republicans to support marriage equality
On his show Monday night, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart lampooned the nation’s current debate over allowing gay and lesbian couples to wed. After taking some time to poke fun at some of the Obamas recent gaffes, Stewart turned his attention to same sex marriage. He noted Democrats…
Cindy McCain to star in Proposition 8 play
Cindy McCain is ready for her close-up.The wife of Sen. John McCain — and a memorable and sometimes icy figure from the 2008 presidential campaign — is to appear in a Phoenix production of “8,” the play by Dustin Lance Black dramatizing arguments against California’s anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8.McCain is to join Phoenix first lady Nicole Stanton in the production; the two will play Kris Perry and Sandra Stier, a lesbian couple who served as plaintiffs in the case against Proposition 8.In the 2008 presidential election, candidate John McCain voiced his support for Proposition 8, which was on the ballot in California:As I did in my home state of Arizona, I support the effort in California to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. However, the people of California will ultimately decide this issue, and I’ll of course respect the decision of the voters.Continue Reading… … Read More
Did TV change America’s mind on gay marriage?
Did gay and lesbian characters on TV (and to a lesser extent in the movies) help pave the way toward acceptance of gay marriage and this spring’s potential Supreme Court landmark? So Vice President Joe Biden said last year in his possibly strategic endorsement of same-sex marriage on “Meet the Press”: “When things really began to change is when the social culture changes. I think ‘Will & Grace’ probably did more to educate the American public than almost anybody’s ever done so far. People fear that which is different. Now they’re beginning to understand.”I’m a fan of Biden’s, more or less. (Here’s my unsolicited advice on 2016, Joe: Don’t do it!) But that may have been the only time anyone ever described “Will & Grace” as educational, and Biden is engaging in a classic Democratic Party, pro-Hollywood fence-straddle here on the effects of culture. A popular and vaguely liberal sitcom gets credit for driving social change in a positive direction, but violent media bears no responsibility for real-life violent crime. (Conservatives are at least more consistent, if also more consistently wrongheaded: Pop culture has pernicious effects all the way around, and is turning us all into slutty divorced gay mass murderers.) No, the two things are not parallel, and the general point the veep was struggling to make is valid. But “Will & Grace” marks only one minor milestone in TV’s 30-odd-year struggle with representations of sexual identity, during which the box has served both as an agent and a mirror of social change.Continue Reading… … Read More
Why Gay Marriage Will Win Regardless of SCOTUS Rulings
Today is the first of two
consecutive days of oral arguments about marriage equality cases at
the Supreme Court. Come back to Reason.com later today for an
interview with our own Damon Root, who is covering the arguments
for us.
Here’s a snippet from a
Wall Street Journal op-ed by lawyers David Boies and Ted Olson,
liberal and conservative legal eagles, on why California’s
Proposition 8, which killed same-sex marriage in the Golden State,
should be overturned:
…laws like Proposition 8 cause devastating harm to gay and
lesbian couples and their children. Exclusion from the institution
of marriage marks those couples and their children with a badge of
inferiority. The damage this does to their hearts and minds is
immeasurable—and the damage it does to all of us and our belief in
the nation’s ideal of equality is incalculable.
For one to say that the Supreme Court should leave the question
of marriage equality to the political processes of the states is to
say that states should remain free to discriminate—to impose this
pain and humiliation on gay men and lesbians and their children—for
as long as they wish, without justification. The Constitution
forbids such an indecent result. It did not tolerate it in separate
schools and drinking fountains, it did not tolerate it with respect
to bans on interracial marriage, and it does not tolerate it
here.
Whole thing here.
(Hat tip: Instapundit)
Boies and Olson specifically argue that the 14th Amendment,
which
essentially applies the Bill of Rights to the states, means
that state and local jurisdictions can’t deny basic rights to
individuals regardless of majority will or local preference. The
14th Amendment is a check on the states’ power to be “laboratories
of democracy” to allude to Justice Louis Brandeis’ evocative
phrase. And it’s a good thing that power is checked, since as Root
and many other have pointed out, the states are probably as often
“laboratories
of repression” as they are of anything else. Progressives such
as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and conservatives such as Robert Bork
agree that, as Holmes’ once put it, very little should get in the
way of “the right of the majority to embody their opinions in law.”
As
Holmes put it back in the day, the 14th Amendment is
“perverted…when it is held to prevent the natural outcome of a
dominant opinion.” Yeesh.
There is real and ultimately irresolvable tension between the
idea that individuals have certain rights that cannot be legislated
away and the idea that the federal government’s power should be
limited. That’s one point of disagreement among libertarians about
marriage equality and a host of other issues, ranging from drug
prohibition to college entrance policies and more. What counts as a
fundamental right that should always and everywhere be respected -
and what counts as something that can modified or even proscribed
by a given unit of government (and under what circumstances)?
But in the end, the legal arguments being made at the Supreme
Court today and tomorrow aren’t why marriage equality will prevail
(nor
will contested social scientific findings matter in the long
run). It’s because public opinion is swinging definitively in favor
of treating gays and lesbians as citizens with full rights in every
possible situation. That in itself happened first and foremost by
gays and lesbians who refused to be denigrated in all sorts of
social, cultural, economic, and political situations, ranging from
the anit-police riot at Stonewall through books, plays, movies, and
even sitcoms that defended sexual preference as an individual right
that the state or society writ large could dismiss either as
pathological or criminal. Joe Biden, it turns out, was absolutely
right
when he said the Will & Grace had “probably did more to
educate the American public [about tolerance for gays and lesbians]
than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far.”
As can be seen from the growing
number of national legislators – Republicans and Democrats alike -
who are coming out in favor of same-sex marriage, law is often a
trailing indicator of where public opinion is either headed
or where it’s already arrived. As law professor Mark Tushnet
once
told me, “The Court can have some influence on the margins,
pushing things a little further in the direction that they’re
already moving or sometimes retarding the direction. But 10 years
down the line, the society’s going to be pretty much where it
would’ve been even if the courts hadn’t said a word about it.”
The end of de jure racial segregation in post-War America is
testament not just to how long and overdue the process of change
can be; it also shows how messy it is, often bouncing back and
forth between legal decisions, ;public opinion, and politics.
But once large numbers people fall on one side of an issue -
especially to a point where public denunciation and vilification of
the minority group is no longer tolerated in polite society – the
law will fall into line one way or another. And sooner rather than
later.
Watch last year’s Why Gay Marriage is Winning:
