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

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.