So awesome!

[go_team]

YAY!

(I tried to make my formatting exultant, but not so happy that it would screw up anybody's friends page; let me know if anything needs fixing.)

P.S. Suck it, Prop 22!

Comments

[nuclear-eggset.livejournal.com]

woot! woot! woot!

(it makes me a touch sad in a way, because I would LOVE to put this article up on the wall of my cube, but some coworkers would find it offensive... :-( )

[boojum.livejournal.com]

And they've been together for fifty years. Wow. Good for them, and for that mayor.

[qousqous.livejournal.com]

wow! fantastic!

[iainuki.livejournal.com]

But how will the California courts react to this? Protest is all well and good, but will it result in substantive change?

[goteam.livejournal.com]

All I know is, this is a significant legal and political challenge to fuckin' Proposition 22 and its ilk. Same-sex marriage is going to the Supreme Court one of these days, and the more challenges to hateful --- erm, I mean, discriminatory --- marriage laws, the better.

Re:

[iainuki.livejournal.com]

I'm not trying to be snarky here, just trying to point out the ramifications. While I applaud the guts of the individuals involved and even to a certain extent those of the politicians (same-sex marriage plays well in SF, but would torpedo many higher-level ambitions), issuing the challenge is the easy part.

For a social/legal issue that has caused the amount of debate same-sex marriage has, the Supreme Court of the US has little say. Marriage law is a state affair and thus will be decided in the state Supreme Courts. The only issues the Supreme Court will have to rule on, if one state grants same-sex marriage rights, as far as I know, are whether all states will be forced to honor same-sex marriages in one state, and whether the federal government can deny the benefits afforded to opposite-sex married couples to same-sex married couples.

I suppose that if you lost a case in a state Supreme Court, you could take it to SCOTUS as a violation of the 14th amendment. I'm not sure how likely a positive outcome is, though; my suspicion is that they would refuse to take the case, leaving the state court's decision standing.

[goteam.livejournal.com]

I guess when I say "same-sex marriage is going to the Supreme Court" I really mean shit like the Defense of Marriage Act is due for a judicial challenge. It's total bullshit that states recognize each other's opposite-sex marriages, regardless of their differences in marriage laws, but not same-sex marriages. So then we get a whole host of second-tier "I can't believe it's not marriage" contracts that are even harder to enforce across state lines because the rights and privileges they grant are even more nonstandardized, and to make matters even worse, the ICBINM arrangements are almost invariably exclusively same-sex, as if to rub in the fact that these are second-class unions created to sidestep the same-sex marriage issue. Snarkity snark snark snark, preaching to the choir, blah de blah.

Re:

[antonvowel.livejournal.com]

Hey,

It will go to the Supreme Court because it turns out that marriage is *not* a states' rights issue, as Conservatives* (and now some Liberals**) would have us believe.

There's this thing called the "Full Faith and Credit Clause" that requires states to uphold the legal arrangements of other states. While there are some limited exceptions to this rule, marriage is not one of them.

Or so says Deva, and she's a law student, so maybe she knows.

* Because initially it seemed like a good way to keep the Supreme Court out of it
**but now it turns out that individual states might swing towards supporting equal rights

Re:

[iainuki.livejournal.com]

That's what I meant when I said that the one of the two issues the Supreme Court will have to rule on is whether a same-sex marriage conducted in one state must be honored by the others . . . that's the "full faith and credit" clause, which is intended to force the states to honor each others' contracts. However, that still requires that one state permit same-sex marriages first. That's what I meant when I said it was a state issue.

I'm not sure how "full faith and credit" interacts with ICBINM contracts: it might be that states have to honor the parts of the contract that are between the two members (who gets to decide on medical care if one partner is incapacitated, distribution of property after the death of a partner) while not granting state marriage benefits (taxes, say) to them. However, that's speculation on my part.

The SCOTUS could decide to take on a case someone lost at the state level with regards to the national Constitution, the most likely reason being that opposite-sex-only marriage laws are a violation of the 14th amendment. This would not be the first time that the US Constitution invalidates a state law: the most recent example I can think of was the Court's decision (later reversed) that execution was "cruel and unusual" punishment, which struck down parts of a bunch of state penal codes. However, I don't see the Supreme Court sticking its neck into this issue until it can't avoid it.