On June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Inn, a gay restaurant and nightclub in Greenwich Village in New York City, was raided by police, leading to a large scale riot. It was the beginning of the gay rights movement, the struggle against oppression.
46 years have passed, and on June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court upheld the right of gays and lesbians to marry everywhere in the United States, a path breaking advancement in human rights, reaching a new pinnacle of social justice. It makes America a more perfect democracy, promoting equality and liberty for another class of citizens who have faced oppression. It is a tremendous expansion of human rights and social justice!
America is a better nation for this fantastic development, and much credit is due to several people, including:
Then San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who was the first chief executive to promote gay marriage in California, and officiate at many gay weddings n 2003. He is now Lieutenant Governor of California, and likely successor to Governor Jerry Brown in the next gubernatorial election in 2018.
Ted Olson and David Boies, opposing attorneys in the Bush-Gore Presidential battle in 2000, who pursued the constitutional case promoting gay marriage, helping to lead it to Supreme Court decision yesterday.
Associate Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion in four crucial Supreme Court cases, in 2003 (Lawrence V Texas), two in 2013 (Hollingsworth V Perry) and (US V Windsor), and yesterday (Obergefell V Hodges) Without him, none of this advancement of gay rights and gay marriage could ever have occurred. Interestingly, all four of these cases were decided on June 26, of those years, 2003, 2013, and 2015!
The history of the gay rights movement is yet to be written, but it will be seen as part of the great movement forward as evidenced by the abolitionist crusade against slavery; the woman suffrage movement; the civil rights movement; the labor union movement; the environmental movement; the disability reform movement; the promotion of a safety net as represented by Social Security, Medicare, and now ObamaCare; and the immigration reform movement!
With this ruling the SCOTUS has put the last nail on the coffin of federalism and representative government. Justice Kennedy wrote: “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family. In forming a marital union, TWO PEOPLE become something greater than once they were.†Here he imposed his and only his definition of marriage on 320 million people by changing the words A WOMAN AND A MAN to TWO PEOPLE and thus gutting the concept of two complementary sexes from the definition of marriage.
While the goal , changing the definition of marriage and expanding it to gays, is laudable, and I personally would have surely voted, if given a chance and now I as well as millions of Americans won’t, in favor of the change. But apparently here the ends justifies the means. Oh an by the way, the censorship, silencing on dissent and thought police has begun. http://www.mediaite.com/print/pennsylvania-paper-bans-editorials-opposing-same-sex-marriage/
I am sure the professor agrees with this. From Politico “It’s Time to Legalize Polygamy” Correct? I certainly do LOL! http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/gay-marriage-decision-polygamy-119469.html#.VY6SbfmrTcc
Scalia: Priceless! LOL!
“If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,†I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”
Commenting on the majority opinion (in quotation marks):
“The nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality.†(Really? Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie. Expression, sure enough, is a freedom, but anyone in a long-lasting marriage will attest that that happy state constricts, rather than expands, what one can prudently say.)”
And here we have a marvelous use of “Huh?†then “never mind†as a literary flourish:
“Rights, we are told, can “rise . . . from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era.†(Huh? How can a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives [whatever that means] define [whatever that means] an urgent liberty [never mind], give birth to a right?)”
BRILLIANT!!
Since Progressives strive to continually progress, the question is: what’s next on their marriage agenda?
See: http://www.beyondmarriage.org/full_statement.html
“We need look no farther than the document entitled “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage, A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families & Relationships, July 26, 2006,” initially signed by over 300 LGBT activists, including Chai Rachel Feldblum who was appointed by Obama to serve on the EEOC, states:
“To have our government define as ‘legitimate families’ only those households with couples in conjugal relationships does a tremendous disservice to the many other ways in which people actually construct their families, kinship networks, households, and relationships. For example, who among us seriously will argue that the following kinds of households are less socially, economically, and spiritually worthy?
[The ten “kinds of households” listed include “blended families” and “single parent households,” plus:]
Committed, loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner.
So, the same basic LGBT arguments in favor of same-sex marriage also seem to apply to multiple-partner relationships. Therefore, should “our government” also legitimize polygamous nuptials?
If Bill & Tom, or Jane & Judy, represent a relationship “morally equivalent” to a traditional, one-man-one-woman heterosexual marriage, then what can Progressives find fundamentally objectionable about a Bill, Tom, and Jane marriage? Or, one where Jane, Judy, Jim & Dan engage in a government-sanctioned marriage arrangement where an ‘interdependent framework helps sustain an individual’s sense of self and stability’? ”
So now we know what is next in the progressive’s never ending pursuit to impose its agenda on the American people whether they agree to it or not. For what is there to stop them if the American people can’t? After all they have five Justices in their pockets who spew out “political” instead of legally reasoned rulings: four locked step leftist political hacks and one “confused” Justice Kennedy at their disposal.
P.S. I have no issue with letting as many people marry each other as they want. I just don’t agree with the method. Again, the ends does not justify the means. And sacrificing federalism and representative government is never worth it, no matter how commendable the ends.
Did you notice that there was not an iota of speculation about how the four Progressive justices would vote? There was never a shadow of a doubt. In the plethora of opinions generated by these three cases, there is not a single one authored by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, or Sonia Sotomayor. There was no need. They are the Left’s voting bloc. There was a better chance that the sun would not rise this morning than that any of them would wander off the reservation. How can that be? Jurisprudence is complex. Supple minds, however likeminded, will often diverge, sometimes dramatically, on principles of constitutional adjudication, canons of statutory construction, murky separation-of-powers boundaries, the etymology of language, and much else. Witness, for example, the spirited debate between the Court’s two originalists, Scalia and Clarence Thomas, over a statute that, in defiance of Obama policy, treats Jerusalem as sovereign Israeli territory. But not the Court’s lefties, not on the major cases. And it is not so much that they move in lockstep. It is that no one expects them to do anything but move in lockstep — not their fellow justices, not the political branches, and certainly not the commentariat, right or left. It is simply accepted that these justices are not there to judge. They are there to vote. They get to the desired outcome the same way disparate-impact voodoo always manages to get to discrimination: Start at the end and work backwards. Guiding precedents are for the quaint business of administering justice. In the social justice business, the road never before traveled will do if one less traveled is unavailable. But there’s a problem. Once it has become a given that a critical mass of the Supreme Court is no longer expected, much less obliged, to do law, then the Court is no longer a legal institution. It is a political institution. That is where we are. We should thus drop the pretense that the Court is a tribunal worthy of the protections our system designed for a non-political entity — life-tenure, insulation from elections, and the veil of secrecy that shrouds judicial deliberations. If the justices are going to do politics, they should be in electoral politics. If John Roberts is going to write laws on the days when he isn’t posing as powerless to write laws, if Anthony Kennedy truly believes the country craves his eccentric notion of liberty (one that condemns government restraints on marriage 24 hours after it tightens government’s noose around one-sixth of the U.S. economy), then their seats should not be in an insulated third branch of government. They should be in an accountable third chamber of Congress. If, for old times’ sake, we want to maintain some harmless vestige of the charade, then let them keep wearing their robes to work — for at least as long as they can persuade voters to keep them in these jobs. Let’s dispense, though, with the fiction that their judgments are the product of legal acumen rather than sheer will.
Max, according to your right wing viewpoint, the entire Warren Court should be repealed, and that is the only way real social justice developed, as it prodded Congress eventually to change what should never have been allowed to happen–the denial of equality and justice to many groups of citizens, simply because they were not white, male and Christian.
The republic has survived the Warren Court, and it will survive the Supreme Court and its good and until now, often bad, decisions under Chief Justice Roberts.
Thank goodness for the Reagan surprise appointment of Anthony Kennedy in 1988 after two failed Supreme Court nominees, who would have taken us back to the Gilded Age mentality of the late 19th century!
Actually we had segregation for a century thanks to an activist SCOTUS that imposed its political view against the clear language of the 14th Amendment in Pleasy v Ferguson. The Warren Court in Brown only corrected the previous SCOTUS disaster in Plessy. Then eventually civil rights for African americans was established by the legislature with Civil Rights Acts not by the SCOTUS. Thus contradicting the claim that rights are never voted on. If that were the case why on earth did we have a 19th amendment?
Max, when it comes to basic human rights, it should NOT be voted on, but rather automatic, including the right to vote, right to marry, and to equal treatment under the law.
It took 72 years to get women suffrage, and your conservative “friends”, including Ann Coulter and other whackos, want to take away the 19th Amendment because the majority of women vote Democratic and want the government out of their private lives!
LOL! Max is boo hoo-ing just like his fellow Fox News sheeple! Love it!
I find it contradictory that you want government out of our lives when it comes to abortion yet support government intervention in our lives when it comes to Obamacare and all other health issues? Amazing.
Yes, it took 72 years to get women suffrage, but it was done by the people voting for it and approving the 19th amendment, not by unelected unaccountable Justices. Are you proposing that every Justice, every legal scholar, every lawyer and every single one of the suffragettes had it all wrong and didn’t see the 14th amendment clearly establishing women’s right to vote for all those years? WOW thank God we now have clear minded and bright Justices who can read what is clearly written in invisible ink and discover new rights from the 14th amendment! LOL!
Goodbye, Max!
Have a good weekend Ronald
Max’s trolling here is a waste of his time.
The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution bridges the gap between actual conservatives and actual liberals on this issue of same-sex couples being able to legally become married in every state in this nation.
Those who oppose are, in reality, saying they don’t approve.
T-H-E-Y D-O-N-‘-T A-P-P-R-O-V-E.
That’s the real reason. It has nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with children, nothing to do with family. (Those serve as attempts to justify their feelings.) It all has to do with their … personal … disapproval.
Back in 2009, Steve Schmidt and Meghan McCain both stated that the Republican Party should move ahead of the Democrats in making marriage equality a new part of the Republican Party’s platform. They were, not surprisingly, dismissed by their party and, of course, by the Republican Talking Points of Professional Pundits and Right-Wing Hacks (like Laura Ingraham who, in reality, are not concerned with the general welfare of the Republican Party). But Schmidt and McCain were both forward-thinking on this issue…and they did connect the dots between noting that new 18-to-29 voters, their social positions, are well ahead with being supportive and that a an upcoming wave would eventually deliver. They also took into consideration that 2008 was a realigning presidential election, for the Democrats, and they both wanted the Republican Party to counter the Democratic Party by making such a major move that could be persuadable to the changing attitudes of the voting electorate. (After all: Just because a realigning presidential period puts your party at a disadvantage doesn’t mean the party should automatically let it happen by doing nothing to counter.)
Three years later, 44th president Barack Obama and the Democratic Party beat the Republicans in getting their party’s platform to embrace same-sex couples for legally recognized marriage nationwide.
The Republicans had their chance. And this speaks even further, to yet another example, about what a presidential realigning period is like when the two parties have any issues that are in direct opposition to each other … and one of the parties is in tune with the profound changes going on with the people of the United States. Pew Research showed the trajectory of how support for same-sex marriage had shifted. (Link appears below.) The Democratic Party beat the Republican Party on this issue. And now the Republican Party has another strike against their prospects of thwarting the Democratic Party’s advantage in winning the overwhelming majority of presidential election cycles … because, and this must be noted, they [Republicans] are out of touch.
Matt Dowd, on ABC’s Election Night coverage of 2012, said it well: “The Republican Party is a ‘Mad Men’ party in a ‘Modern Family’ world.”
@ http://www.pewforum.org/2015/06/08/graphics-slideshow-changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/
I want to add the following: the United States is now the 21st country to have legal, same-sex marriage throughout its nation.
@ http://www.cnn.com/interactive/us/map-same-sex-marriage/
This is yet another example of the Republican Party being inexcusably out of touch.
Thanks so much for your posting, D. Perceptive as usual!