njlauren
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DomKen
The great thing is while this ruling only strikes section 3 which means the federal government must recognize all legal marriages it also laid the ground work for a challenge of section 2 which lets states without same sex marriage not recognize those marriages performed elsewhere.
The prop 8 standings stuff was the weaseling I've come to expect from Roberts I'm just disappointed that 3 of the liberal justices joined him. Kennedy wrote the DOMA opinion and I cannot see how he could find DOMA to be a 5th and 14th violation but not find all same sex marriages bans to be the same.
While I suspect Roberts did the prop 8 dodge (invalidating the right to bring the case in front of the court by those supporting prop 8) because if they had ruled on the merits of it i.e that it violated the 14th amendment equal protection clause it woud have been binding on other states with similar bans, there is a good legal reason to reject it on these grounds, the idea being that it will stop everyone with an axe to grind from pursuing cases to Scotus they don't like, even if they have no standing. The house members and the religious right groups that took prop 8 to the Scotus could not show why they had standing, they could show no harm in prop 8 being overturned by the lower court, and thus shouldn't have been allowed to. In a sense, the California AG fouled up, for had they taken it to the Scotus, defending prop 8 (even if they didn't want to), then the court would have been forced to rule, and it is likely it would have been a 5-4 overturning prop 8....Sotomayor dissented specifically because they didn't tackle prop 8 and backed out.....Kennedy would prob have gone along with it, too.
What is sad is reading the dissents of Scalia and Alito, what they basically say is that moral law has held sway for thousands of years, that same sex mariage is new, and therefore, the government has reason to want to stop recognition of same sex marriage, which is asinine.
Of course the creme de la creme is Clarence Thomas going along with this...He is married to a white woman, lives in Virginia, which was the state in the Loving decision that overturned interracial marriage bans.......interracial marriage bans were very old tradition in 1967, 70% of the people in the US thought it was a bad idea, but the court said it was unconstitutional...way to go, Clarence, the old "I am okay as long as I have my rights"....
The other part of DOMA is going to be tough, because the full faith and credit clause of the constitution says congress has the right to decide if states follow other states laws, so it is tangled....the real question will be if congress actions, which is legal, is outweighed by the equal protection clause and due process clauses.
I think what will happen is that a lot more states will open up to same sex marriage and when enough do (with California, 30% of the US population is now covered by legal same sex marriage), the mess with what happens when someone moves from a state where it is legal to where it is not, will get so unwieldy it eventually will have to change. More importantly, it isn't unlikely that states that have same sex marriage will retaliate against states that don't support it, don't reognize same sex marriages, and people from the bible belt might find that other states will invalidate their marriages in retaliation, it has happened before with other issues (some states, for example, would ticket out of state drivers for driving without a license...until their citizens started getting pulled over and ticketed)........the anti same sex marriage forces have lost, it is pretty much a matter of time when it will be in all 50 states, the opponents among other things are dying out.
< Message edited by njlauren -- 6/26/2013 3:58:50 PM >
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RE: 5-4 DOMA is unconstitutional... YEAH FREEDOM! - 
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