SCOTUS CONSIDERS SAME-SEX MARRIAGE, PART I: HOLLINGSWORTH V. PERRY

[Geee]

Breitbart:

This would be an easy case with clear adherence to two constitutional principles. Prop 8 and DOMA would both be upheld. Now we’ll find out how those two principles fare before the nine justices currently on the Supreme Court. Part I is about Hollingsworth, and Part II is about Windsor.

This is Part I, the Hollingsworth case:

California voters passed Proposition 22 in 2000, defining marriage in that state as one man and one woman. When the California Supreme Court ruled that this violated the California Constitution, the voters of California promptly amended their constitution with Proposition 8, reaffirming marriage is between one man and one woman.

Then a legal team headed by libertarian Republican Ted Olson and liberal Democrat David Boies filed suit, alleging that Prop 8 in the California Constitution violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and must be struck down. Doing so would also invalidate all traditional marriage laws in all 50 states; same-sex marriage would be mandated nationwide.

The two statewide elected officials responsible for defending California’s laws and Constitution abdicated their responsibilities, refusing even to show up in court. So Charles Cooper—a national heavyweight Supreme Court lawyer and former Supreme Court clerk who headed the Reagan-Meese Justice Department’s elite Office of Legal Counsel—teamed up with the Alliance Defending Freedom, whose marriage team is lead by Austin Nimocks. They represent the official sponsors of Prop 8 to defend the amendment in court.

[Valin]

Joe Klein: ‘It’s Just Mystifying that Anybody Would be Opposed’ to Same-Sex Marriage

By Andrew Johnson

March 26, 2013 9:31 A.M

 

[Geee]

My worry about making a 'marriage' legal vs. a legal contract is that if it is a law that churchs will then be legally required to perform same sex marriages. Another encroachment on religious beliefs.

[Draggingtree]

The Argument For “Marriage Equality” Is Not A Conservative One

 

By: Dana Loesch (Diary) | March 26th, 2013 at 08:56 AM

This week the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on same California’s Prop 8 and a section of the Defense of Marriage Act which deals with benefits for same sex couples. Same sex marriage is front and center once again and I’ve heard some interesting arguments on how supporting government involvement in defining marriage is a “conservative” ideal. During the Sunday morning talk show circuit, former Bush communications adviser took the moderate position emerging within the GOP against American Values’ Gary Bauer. Nicole Wallace tried to argue that supporting “marriage equality” is a conservative position. No, it is not.

 

I’ve never understood how anyone who spent the past four-plus years lamenting the size of government could then argue for its increase by inviting it into the discussion of marriage. We complain about government in health care, we complain about government in education, we complain about government regulating soft drink size, but suddenly some of us have no problem with more government in people’s relationships with one another. Marriage is a covenant between a man, woman, and God before God on His terms. It is a religious civil liberty, not a right granted by government. It should never have been regulated by government in the first place, and government shouldn’t have an expanded reach in further regulating it now. There is no allowance constitutionally that invites our government to define the religious covenant of marriage.

In suing over marriage one is demanding that others modify their beliefs to accomodate another. Do not people of faith retain their First Amendment liberty of freedom of religion?

http://www.redstate.com/dloesch/2013/03/26/the-argument-for-marriage-equality-is-not-a-conservative-one/

[Draggingtree]

Will gay rights infringe on religious liberty?

By Marc D. Stern, Special to CNN

updated 5:33 AM EDT, Mon March 25, 2013

Editor's note: Marc D. Stern is the general counsel of the American Jewish Committee and a contributor to the book, "Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty."

 

(CNN) -- It was inevitable that the debate over same-sex marriage would have a strong religious component. This is partly because it involves such questions as the interpretation of biblical passages that, on their face, condemn homosexuality as a sin. But it also involves squaring the authority of ancient texts with modern theological understanding and developments in biology. And of course, the importance of love and human autonomy as religious values should be considered.

 

Those issues surfaced in the various briefs filed in the Supreme Court, some of which are written as if the court must inevitably choose one religious point of view as the winner and the other as the loser. This is a false choice. The Court can make all winners, or at least avoid allowing one side to suppress the other's deepest beliefs.http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/24/opinion/stern-gay-marriage/index.html?hpt=op_t1

 

I am lost as to where the word "gay rights" come from.

[Geee]

Thanks for those posts @Draggingtree.

[Casino67]

SSM couples have a designated 'wife' and 'husband' thereby admitting there is a marriage of two different entities. By definition one is female and one is male. Ergo, can two of the same entity really get 'married'?

 

Huh? What did he say??

[Valin]

SSM couples have a designated 'wife' and 'husband' thereby admitting there is a marriage of two different entities. By definition one is female and one is male. Ergo, can two of the same entity really get 'married'?

 

Huh? What did he say??

 

I believe the technical term is Top and Bottom.

[Valin]

The transcript of the oral argument in the Prop 8 case is now available. So is the audio

 

H/T Power Line

 

 

Marriage in the Court

By Hadley Arkes

March 26, 2013

 

From the back and forth this morning, it appears that the issue of the Supreme Court’s “standing” is not likely to be decisive. Even Justice Kennedy seemed to be concerned to answer that question — and put it out of the way. One had the sense that Justice Sotomayor saw that this argument was not going to succeed, so she began shifting to argument on the substance of the case. The “substance” was debate over the meaning of marriage itself, and whether it has become irrational and bigoted to think that marriage claims its coherence only as a legal union of a man and woman.

 

Coming out of the courtroom today, the defenders of marriage were decorously upbeat: One savvy observer thought that the odds on Kennedy tilted to the conservative side were about 70 percent. The main point of concern for traditional-marriage advocates was Kennedy’s musing about 37,000 children living in households headed by gay or lesbian couples: Were their parents to be denied the standing of marriage, and they in turn branded as offspring of some sub-legal ménage? But of course the question is no different here from the plight of children in polygamous unions. And what of the children today living with parents who have never married? Surely they would have to be recognized as “harmed” in the same way; would the remedy be to compel the parents to marry?

 

It was regrettable and surprising as to how much weight seemed to be placed on the findings of social science — on whether children have fared as well with same-sex parents as with their natural parents. There have been only several years of experience with children raised with same-sex unions that are legal, and so the conservative justices treated this as an open question, and appealed for restraint: We should not be so quick to take this recent novelty in the law and impose it on the whole country. In point of fact, even the evidence accumulated thus far raises serious doubts that children fare quite as well in households led by gay or lesbian couples. But the question may be essentially beside the point in principle: Surely we will find children of some gays and lesbians doing better than children in some dysfunctional heterosexual families. The question is whether one form of marriage is in principle preferable to any other. Marriage finds its coherence as a framework of legal commitment to envelop the begetting and nurturing of children. It is built on the natural complementarity of men and women; that purpose marks the reason that there will always be . . . men and women, because of reproduction, or begetting. If marriage is detached from that central function, and those anchoring facts, what ground of principle would confine it to a relation between two people? What of those people who say that their loves are not confined to a coupling, but woven into an ensemble of three or four, or more?

 

(Snip)

[Draggingtree]

Thanks for those posts @Draggingtree.

thanks not needed, K

[Draggingtree]

If the Justices don’t rule then doesn’t that fall back to the 9^th Court of appeals then that means in a de facto way the voters lose / the 9^th hasn’t it all ready ruled banding same sex marriage as un-constitutional. (just asking)