SCOTUS has agreed to hear arguments for two same-sex marriage cases in March.
On March 26, it has agreed to hear arguments as to whether the U.S. Constitution bars California from limiting marriage to unions of one man and one woman. They will also consider whether those defending Proposition 8 have the standing necessary to do so.
On March 27, it will hear arguments as to whether or not the federal Defense of Marriage Act passed in 1996 violates the U.S. Constitution. Another question to be argued is whether the Congress—acting through the House of Represenatives’ Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group—can defend DOMA even though the Obama Administration agreed with a federal appeals court that the law is unconstitutional.
This will be interesting indeed.
(Source: Politico)
I’m obviously wrestling with some personal shit here that should probably best be wrestled with in private, so i guess i’ll say laters here…
Ain’t this just hilarious?
The “original intent” gang, the people who think the Constitution was not designed to evolve (a silly notion but widely held) fail to read and understand and accept one of the clearest sentences in the whole document as originally written.
Art. IV, Sec.1:
“Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records and judicial proceedings of every other state. And the Congress may by general laws prescribe the manner in which such acts, records and judicial proceedings shall be proved, and the effect thereof.”
To me, that reads like a positive instruction upon the Congress, that does not allow said Congress to provide any the several states any manner or scheme by which to dodge the implementation of the first sentence. Congress must help to implement “full faith and credit” not restrict it.
And,
“. . . . shall be given in each state . . . . ” seems clear to me, too.
Even better, the 14th Amendment prohibited any state from failing to provide any citizen the equal protection of the law, and in most copies this is cross-referenced to the Full Faith and Credit clause, a matter I assume of judicial precedent.
In other words, if Ellen Degeneris and her wife Portia DiRossi are married under California law, which they are, then they are married persons in any of the 50 states.
Period.
And here we go once again. The solution to the problem o’day entails the Feds relinquishing some authority to the States.
Often approached, I am, with one sporting an abrasion, alligator skin or, even, wrinkles. By rote, I respond, “Vaseline”.
If the ailment’s a bellyache, bad breath or a bladder infection – the frequent suggestion is, “Drink more water”.
Three cure-alls for chapped lips and whatever else ails ya:
petroleum jelly
more H2O
the Tenth Amendment
He may deservedly belong in the pantheon of great presidents, but Lincoln(and Sec of War Stanton) can be blamed for a lot of our present troubles.
number 9…number 9…number 9…
retha,
multicellular life is always going to be more complicated than single cellular life. Blaming Lincoln is a bit like blaming, I dunno, the doctor who prescribed the chemo when rogue cells turncoat and turn cancer. Every generation’s got to strike a new balance. What we need is multicellular solutions for multicellular problems, single cell solutions for single cell problems, and the wisdom to know which is which.
Seems to me what we mostly lack is the wisdom part. That ain’t no fault of no Honest Abe.
9ball,
This ain’t quite your usual “power to the states” argument, though — not in the sense of, say, “let Montana decide how many of what kind of guns it allows, and everybody else butts out — of Montana; but that doesn’t mean you automatically get to take that gun to New York or onto federal property.” As Kev, Bluth, Madame and maybe someone else has said, it’s more, “if Montana says you’re married, then you are fucking married, for the whole damn country. The IRS and the Army and Social Security have to say so, too. And so does Mississippi, when you visit there.”
Abe did give us something of precedent. It’s not all that easy to argue with his reasoning: if there’s no more country, then habeas corpus means means squat, so we suspend it for a while to save it for the long term. But there’s no denying that Brother Cheney seems to have figured out for all future administrations that all you need is something you can call a war and then you can do anything you want, because I say Abe said so. That’s the kind of thing courts were supposed to deal with, not presidents, but we can’t remember everything, I suppose. But laying Article 4 on Abe is a bit of a stretch.
Admittedly, my last comment was something of an oversimplification. When providing a prescription for any problem and two of the three components are vaseline and water, one might have initiated a glide-path towards terra reductio ad absurdum.
Not to get all Jefferson Davis on ya, but a case study on Lincoln would reveal the inherent strengths and weaknesses of character.
Was it his morning readings of Scripture(should that word be capitalized?) which consigned him to his fate? Was he, when he neglected to take heed of warnings about the potential for assassination attempts, exhibiting a similar character trait as my son this a.m. when he was leaving for North Dakota and he gave me a perfunctory “yeah” in response to my dictate that he wear his seatbelt?
Had he survived his tenure as 16th prez, would he be viewed as more Carly Simon than Janis Joplin and would I now be humming ‘you’re so vain’ instead of insisting my daughters learn lyrics a la “my friends all drive Porshees, I must make amends”?
I agree, there’s much for what we can’t blame Lincoln, but there’s anecdotal evidence he had heavy forbodings of an untimely demise – yet his personal choice for VP was, after all, Andrew Johnson.((apologies for another aside, but I believe Robert Todd Lincoln was, if not present, in the very near environs of both Garfield’s and McKinley’s murders))
With devolution becoming ever more topical(Scotland, South Sudan, Kurdistan?) and not much evidence that tribalism is an instinct humans will leave behind, in the long run, do we accept that the end justifies the means?
Digressive, as always, my thoughts. Evidence for why I limit myself to ales and lagers instead of a single malt – best to keep something of a filter between rank contrarianism and my lips/fingertips.
“Conformism, bah” says I, just as I leave so’s I can get to work on time.
Dance like nobody’s watching; love like you’ve never been hurt. Sing like nobody’s listening; live like it’s heaven on earth.”
My posting is really bad these days – I really wanted to add a comment on the ‘places ‘ blog because i am literally commuting between 2 lives at the moment – due to family commitments – provincial small town Denmark and London -baby !! Feeling quite at home at Stansted – thinly spread ??
Aww a reccy – i know that we ‘re all 6’6″ on the internet but my 3.41pm is how I feel about you all – you cool cats ya !
Frances – Feelin’ kinda crappy (not that I ever get sick) and can’t sleep but your 3:41 has cheered me up no end. And don’t those boots go well with the skirt!
Kev:
Looks rather ambiguous to me. “Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records and judicial proceedings of every other state.”
But couldn’t that be read also as meaning if you’re married in state X, but such marriage is ‘not legal’ in state Y, then only the action of Congress, it suggests to me, can make state Y accept a lawful condition of state X:
Which they did with that egregious ‘Defence of Marriage Act’, didn’t they? So unless that’s got rid of somehow, then State V that says ‘marriage is only opposite sexes’ can refuse to recognise any same sex marriage contracted anywhere else?
Looks like a nightmare. Anpther fine mess, as they say . . .
There is, I maintain, a lot to be said for not having a written constitution. Means people can always have a go at trumping some law through the idea of ‘equity’ instead of always looking for a couple of sentences in a written document that can be interpreted two quite contradictory ways according to taste, time, revisionism, political colour, etc, etc.
Squirrel,
There’s another thing about citing the constitution: say I agree with Kevin on this point (and I do) and not with your interpretation (which I don’t). If I say so in public, no more than 97 seconds will pass before some lawyer with a fairly successful real estate practice demands to know when I passed the bar exam and thereby earned the right to even think about such things.
I’m not saying that there aren’t aspects to constitutional law that really do need a little scholarship to understand. Not at all. I am saying that there are several million lawyers in the US who sincerely believe that the rest of us, though minutely governed in every respect by the constitution’s elusive true meaning, can’t possibly even begin to understand that meaning — unless we agree totally with them, and cite them as our source, and ignore those other so-called lawyers who say just the opposite.
I tell you, it’s almost as bad as using a medical term in front of a doctor.
In China in antique times if you happened to know what the law was, and you went around telling ordinary folk what you knew, you could be executed. On the theory that once people get an idea what the law might be they are just going to stir up trouble. Okay, they get into a dispute with a neighbor, they can bring it to a judge and the judge will render a decision (after imprisoning and torturing all the witnesses- forcing them to breath burning pepper while kneeling bare-legged on broken chains was popular- so it wasn’t as if some sort of rule of law didn’t exist. But hell if they were going to let people spread it around.
The trouble with having an unwritten constitution, Red, is that you can’t run a genuine republic that way. Also if you don’t write it down then some guy like, I dunno, Tony Blair, comes along and one afternoon abolishes a couple of little notions that have been around since Magna Carta, like, say, habeas corpus and double jeopardy, just ’cause he happens to have a majority in Parliament that afternoon, and- not one damn thing you can do about it.