With marriage equality wins in three states this week, supportive activists are increasingly confident that the Supreme Court, less than two weeks away from a decision on whether to review California’s Proposition 8, will rule one way or another on discriminating against same-sex nuptials.
“The court can’t live in a world where the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional in the Northeast and constitutional everywhere else,” ACLU lawyer James Essex told Reuters.
And the momentum toward inclusion across the states creates an even more urgent situation for the Court, says New York Law School professor Arthur Leonard: “It becomes much more urgent to get an answer whether the federal government can continue to refuse to recognize same-sex marriage”
Despite the writing on the wall, Brian Brown from the National Organization for Marriage, an increasingly isolated group of people with nothing better to do than meddle, soap opera villainess style, in other people’s relationships, seems to think all this inclusion will spur one justice in particular, swing voting Anthony Kennedy, to stand for hate.
“Kennedy will look at this and think, why create a new culture war and bypass the democratic process to impose gay marriage on the country when this is being worked out on a state-by-state basis?”
But that probably, actually, most definitely won’t be the case, as reporter Terry Baynes explains:
In 1967 the court ruled that Virginia could no longer ban interracial marriage, reversing a ruling that had stood since 1883, after several states repealed their anti-miscegenation laws. And in 2003 the court found that Texas could not ban sodomy, noting that the number of states with laws banning homosexual conduct had dropped from 25 to 13 since it had made the opposite finding in 1986.
“Every time it becomes clear marriage equality is more accepted and popular, that helps us in the Supreme Court in some hard-to-quantify way,” said Paul Smith, another lawyer who represents people who are challenging the Defense of Marriage Act.
Good grief, Brian Brown.
