Gay Marriage to Alfred: Your Thoughts

Passed the Washington state senate, will pass in the House next week and will be signed by the governor.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2012/02/01/state-senate-approves-same-sex-marriage/

Yup. :)

Prop 8 ruled unconstitutional

and now on to the SC

question now is is this going to be THE defining Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage

When Scalia concocts his spurious line of reasoning to reinstate Prop 8, you can be sure he'll be joined by Roberts, Alito and Thomas. That just leaves one vote lacking for some more mind-bogglingly bad reasoning to become precedent and start infecting the well for other rights issues. Let's hope that vote is lacking.

I can't see Kennedy siding with them on this, but anything is possible.

http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/btb/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Prop8Ruling.pdf

lol @ boxturtlebulletin that is awesome

Sully says the court's website was down

I've just always loved the "if we allow gay marriage, next people will be marrying box turtles!" logic

It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right… Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife. - John Cornyn, box turtle enthusiast

Boozhwa 02/07/12 13:10
Which constitution did they use? Is it one Ginsburg would recommend?

you all laugh but i still can't marry my box turtle thanks to this screwed-up society and i feel really oppressed about it

It's a very narrow ruling. They don't even need to overturn the 9th Circuit judgment for the precedent to be messy.

This is just from the headnote, mind you, I haven't had time to read the whole thing. But basically the ruling is made on the grounds that because California had substantive equality in a lot of ways, the ONLY potential purpose of Prop 8 was to deny the term 'marriage' and this is discriminatory and unconstitutional.

The ruling doesn't make any holding on whether there are potentially legitimate reasons for gay marriage bans in contexts where there is less equality generally.

i.e. There is plenty of space for the Supremes to affirm this ruling and phrase its meaning narrowly as 'it is unconstitutional to ban gay marriage when a state has already granted gays substantial rights', while continuing to permit the more discriminatory states to continue as they've been doing.

Which would be pretty typical, no?

any chance SCOTUS won't grant cert?

It's a possibility it won't.

Extreme narrowness of grounds for judicial opinion in the pursuit of freedom is no vice. But it is the sort of virtue that, if it turned sideways, would disappear entirely.

Maggie speaks

that headline is OTM

7 million irrational bigots can't be wrong

No point in beating around the bush.

what kind of phrase is "ill-natured logic" anyway

logic that someone doesn't like

As an instructor with no formal legal training it still amazes me how often people forget that when they read The Great Gatsby or Macbeth in high school nobody agreed on interpretations.

I'm getting tired of waiting to marry Alfred in all these states

I'm claiming him in MS, bud.

Gonna marry him in WA very soon.

has polygamy been OK'd by the Supreme Court

only in OK

i've set up a bevmo gift registry

Toobin doesn't think SC will even take this up, given the ruling's California-specific nature. kinda clever of the judges to rule this way, if their intention was to avoid a SC showdown

Gonna marry him in WA very soon.

I hope so but I bet it won't be too hard to find 120,577 assholes who want put it to a vote and I'm kind of scared how that will turn out.

Eugene Volokh has some thoughts. Worth reading.

i'm gonna quote this one bit at length:

a. First, note that this debate is just about the label “marriage,” and thus about the message that the label sends. The court concluded that Prop. 8 was unconstitutional because this symbolism mattered, and mattered a lot — the message is injurious to same-sex couples’ (and individuals’) dignity, and may lead to more societal discrimination against gays and lesbians. But if this symbolism of “disapproval of … [same-sex] relationships” (Op. 77) is so significant, then it may be plausibly believed to subtly push some people away from same-sex relationships to opposite-sex relationships. To so conclude, you don’t need to believe that gays and lesbians, in the sense of people who are solely attracted to people of the same sex, can be “cured” in the sense of being turned straight. You only need to focus on the substantial number of bisexuals, and assume that their behavior can be affected, in some instances and for some people, by the message of “disapproval of …. [same-sex] relationships.”

This is relevant because it bears on how the Ninth Circuit responded to the arguments that the desire to have a greater fraction of children be raised by opposite-sex biological parent couples forms a rational basis for the law:

We need not decide whether there is any merit to the sociological premise of [the Prop. 8 backers’] first argument — that families headed by two biological parents are the best environments in which to raise children — because even if [the backers] are correct, Proposition 8 had absolutely no effect on the ability of same-sex couples to become parents or the manner in which children are raised in California” (pp. 56-57) is beside the point, when it comes to the rational basis test.

But family formation is not just driven on who has the legal “ability” to become parents. It is also driven by social attitudes. It is not irrational to conclude that, if the refusal to recognize same-sex marriage has powerful symbolic effect — which is what the Ninth Circuit argued in striking down this refusal — it may likewise have a powerful symbolic effect when it comes to people’s choices about whom to parent with. As it happens, I’m quite skeptical that this effect will be substantial enough to make a difference, and I on balance think that recognizing full same-sex marriage is good policy. But under the rational basis test that the Ninth Circuit is purporting to apply, a court must uphold a law so long as it rests on a plausible view of the facts, regardless of whether the judges agree with the lawmakers on those facts.

this is such crap!

It is not irrational to conclude that, if the refusal to recognize same-sex marriage has powerful symbolic effect — which is what the Ninth Circuit argued in striking down this refusal — it may likewise have a powerful symbolic effect when it comes to people’s choices about whom to parent with.

I don't agree. One of the comments called him out on this.

i'm not buying volokh's threading the needle here on bisexuals choices, like at all

a. gay marriage opponents say their effort is really about kids because kids turn out best when coming from a married straight couple

b. the ninth circuit says that's bogus, opposing gay marriage has no effect at all on how kids are raised or cared for, so the effect is just discrimination and animus

c. volokh says well, of (x) number of bisexuals, (x-y) number of them could opt for a straight marriage instead of a gay relationship, so the law could have the effect of making more "straight" couples. so if you buy the two straight married parents = better kids argument, then a gay marriage ban will have some (tiny) good social effect.

gaming out the behavior of bi people, i mean, this is just silly

xp

i love hearing gay people fume about bisexuals fyi, so if anyone wants to do that i'm all ears

I only fume at bi's when they're not fuming in my direction.

i'd love to have a supreme court case rest on an appraisal of LUGs and married craigslist cruisers tho

I read somewhere that this was written expressly for Kennedy

and Kennedy's response?

gaming out the behavior of bi people, i mean, this is just silly

^^^^

there's no scientific evidence for this "two straight parents are better than two gay parents" angle, it should be aggressively contested whenever anyone suggests such nonsense

Conversely, even if it could be shown, it would most likely be because of the ambient bigotry of society.

In a country where every study showing that spanking has a deleterious effect on child development is met by fundamentalist cries that they're 'anti-Christian' (arising from a misunderstanding/mistranslation of Proverbs 13:24), I think this anti-homosexual (as opposed to the total leniency for pork and shellfish eaters, etc...) political hysteria needs to be ridiculed and also shown to be the real negation of Christ.

Dying at this "substantial number of easily swayed to hetero-relationship bisexuals" concept.

Because I didn't go to law school I usually strain to figure out how "compelling interest" and "strict scrutiny" are relevant in cases like this.

pork-eaters make horrible parents fyi

^^^

Why I have avoided procreating, tbh