A Quick Tutorial on the Gay/Lesbian Equality Decisions of the Supreme Court

graphic from gaylife.org


or Frank Rich can be the Best Man at my Marriage

by James Nimmo

(OKLAHOMA CITY) As the time draws near for the final arguments of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, aka the Prop 8 trial, we'll come to the close of chapter four in the ongoing saga of America's love-hate relationship with diversity, be it based on skin color, gender, or sexual orientation.

I've numbered this as chapter four because there've been three previous chapters in our gay/lesbian history that have been decided by the United States Supreme Court, the first one going against us, with the subsequent two keeping us in the game.

Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) ruled 5-4 against us, claiming " ... a right to engage in such conduct is 'deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition' or 'implicit in the concept of ordered liberty' is, at best, facetious."
(http://tinyurl.com/jus3e)

Romer v. Evans (1996) reared its ugly face in an attempt to further keep gay citizens away from full inclusion in the political and social fabric of the country. In a 6-3 ruling for us, Justice Kennedy wrote that the passage of Colorado's Amendment 2 disallowing any recognition of gay people under the laws of Colorado was unconstitutional.

He wrote in the majority opinion that "laws of the kind now before us raise the inevitable inference that the disadvantage imposed is born of animosity toward the class of persons affected." The Court implied that the passage of Amendment 2 was born of a "bare...desire to harm a politically unpopular group".
( http://tinyurl.com/49m9er )

Turning the page we get to the decision striking down sodomy laws with the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) that helped immensely in removing the uncharged felon status every gay man and woman carried with them as these laws were selectively enforced to intimidate us in our public and private lives.
(http://tinyurl.com/br2tj )

The Prop 8 ruling, regardless of which gay or homo-hating party it favors, will eventually make its way to the Supreme Court where for many years the decisions have been 5-4 with the 5 going mostly to the regressive sides of the arguments, be they social justice or economic equality questions.

I was tickled pink when Olson and Boies took up the clarion call from the Equal Rights Foundation ( www.equalrightsfoundation.org ) to make a full court argument on our behalf for civil rights in marriage. Even as the purpose of the trial has been to reverse the unconscionable passage of California's Prop 8 that disallows same gender marriage after a favorable California Supreme Court ruling, there's no doubt in my mind that the extensive media coverage and social conversation of the nearly four-year history of this latest action to remove gay/lesbian discrimination has been effective in diluting the homo-hating potions and superstitious invectives thrown at us. The echos of previous court decisions across the country that have been heard will prove too powerful for the cobwebs of prejudice and animosity to resist.

Frank Rich, op/ed columnist for the New York Times, has written an optimistic essay I recommend for anyone down in the dumps over our on-again/off-again progress for civil equality. Mr. Rich writes that approval of same-gender marriage is higher now than the approval for inter-racial marriage a year after it was supported by a Supreme Court ruling in 1967, I think thanks to the vastly easier modes of communication now available with social networking and the Internet.

If Limbaugh can have Elton John sing at his fourth marriage can my first marriage be far behind?


From The New York Times' Frank Rich....
Op-Ed Columnist
Two Weddings, a Divorce and 'Glee'
By FRANK RICH
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13rich.html
or http://tinyurl.com/38gornv


My selected excerpts:

Their [the enemies of same-gender marriage] stated reason for opposing a television record was fear that their witnesses might be harassed. But in the end the Prop 8 defenders mustered only two witnesses, just one of them a controversial culture warrior. That “expert” was David Blankenhorn, president of the so-called Institute for American Values. Blankenhorn holds no degree in such seemingly relevant fields as psychology, psychiatry or sociology. But his pretrial research did include reading a specious treatise by George Rekers, the antigay evangelist now notorious for his recent 10-day European trip with a young male companion procured from Rentboy.com. And Blankenhorn’s testimony relies on the same sweeping generalization as Rekers — that children raised by two biological parents are so advantaged that all alternatives should be shunned.



What was the unqualified Blankenhorn doing at the Prop 8 trial? Like Rekers, who had a lucrative history of testifying for pay in legal cases attacking gay civil rights, he also profits from his propaganda. Public documents, including tax returns, reveal that Blankenhorn’s institute, financed by such right-wing stalwarts as the Bradley and Scaife foundations, paid him $247,500 in base salary in 2008, the most recent year for which data is available, and another $70,000 to his wife. Not a bad payday for a self-professed arbiter of American marital values who under oath described his sole peer-reviewed academic paper (from the University of Warwick) as “a study of two cabinetmakers’ unions in 19th-century Britain.” That the Prop 8 proponents employed him as their star witness suggests that no actual experts could be found (or rented) to match his disparagement of gay parents.