dumping ann coulter

It's really kind of fascinating watching how political groups eat their own young, so to speak.

Leaving aside the fact that I rather detest Ms. Coulter and probably all that she stands for ... I really kind of love her response to WND:

So apparently, being open minded (if that's quite the right term) enough to speak to gays -- not to, you know, advocate same-sex marriage or their right to exist or something radical like that, but just to accept their money to talk at them about political issues of the day -- that is enough to get the ultra-right wing to decide that you're not ultra ultra enough and dump you.

My.

Well, now she knows how the president feels, some days.

...What? What? The shellacking he takes from the left wing doesn't remind you of this at all?

(Mind, I do think some of the left's ire is unjustified. After all, he positioned himself as a centrist from the start, so being disappointed because he hasn't fulfilled all of the liberal dreams isn't terribly realistic. That said, I wish he wasn't so prone to compromise and/or utter and abject surrender sometimes. And for a person who is as deliberative and contemplative as he seems to be, he manages to say things without thinking them through -- the recent Muslim mosque statements controversy is entirely of his own making. But then again, I never really expected much from him; after all, he came into office explicitly stating that he thought his religious principles were more important than my civil rights. And even with a start like that, the Administration's positions on LGBT issues have been, to put it politely, wildly uneven and incoherent. But I digress.)

Posted by Iain Jackson at 01:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

prop. 8 ruling still on temporary hold

Well, they're going to have to take it all the way, I should think. Or, if not them, then the plaintiffs will appeal the extension of the stay itself. Either way, the appeal of the stay itself will probably go all the way up to the Supreme Court. Depending on what's been done, the Court will then either decline to remove the stay or put it back in place -- I cannot see this Court allowing marriages to proceed while the case itself is still in the appeals process. Shouldt this Court will overturn Walker's decision -- which it might not -- then all the marriages conducted in the interim would likely be ruled invalid, as they should never have been conducted in the first place. Of course, unless the Court says as much in any resulting decision, that would take another court case, and that would be exceptionally nasty.

I have to admit, I am really fascinated to see what the Ninth does in the next week. It really would be astonishing -- and, as a commenter has said, a strong signal of where they were headed with a final decision -- if the Ninth does not continue the hold indefinitely. After all, it's likely to be six months to a year before the appeals court hears the case itself. Just imagine how many marriages could be contracted in the meantime. But there won't be any marriages conducted on or about August 18 anyway; even if the appeals court itself declines to issue an indefinite hold, I should think they would issue another temporary hold in order to allow the Supreme Court to decide whether or not to issue its own hold.

It's also going to be interesting to see what the appeal itself says. I wonder if it's going to be possible for the defendants to bring up the argument that Walker, as a man apparently in a long-term relationship with another man, should have recused himself; after all, in theory at least, the ruling could affect him directly. To the best of my knowledge, that argument was never made during the case itself, and if they didn't, as I understand it, they can't bring that issue up in appeal.

Possibly something of a side note: reportedly, MSNBC has said that there may be something about the case itself that means that the defendants other than the state of California -- which refused to defend the law and would have lost in a walkover had the other defendants not intervened -- lack the standing to appeal the hold. Unfortunately, I can't find anything that indicates why they would lack standing; it doesn't make a lot of sense, if they were allowed to attach themselves to the case as defendants, that they wouldn't be allowed to appeal their loss.

EDIT: Ah, here it is. Apparently, the other defendants have partially shot themselves in the foot with their argument for the hold. They're saying that the state will suffer irreparable harm if the hold is not extended while the decision itself is on appeal; the problem is that the state itself has said that it felt the law was indefensible in the first place, and that marriages should be allowed to proceed. Because they don't have the agreement of the state, they may not have standing to appeal in the first place. One assumes, of course, that they would appeal their lack of standing to the Supreme Court. One way or another, this case is getting all the way up there. Oddly enough, I would put the defendants' odds of winning that appeal as slightly worse than even; if they lose, the case itself never gets to the Supreme Court.

This would make for a very interesting situation. (Take the following analysis with a full mine of salt; IANAL and all that.) If the other defendants lack standing, that would mean that the only party with standing to appeal, the state of California, doesn't want to. That would mean the decision would take effect ... but only in California, because it could never get a hearing in the court of appeals on its merits, and thus couldn't go all the way to the Supreme Court. An appeal that went all the way to the Supreme Court could federalize any resulting decision; depending on the wording of the Court's decision, it could work like Lawrence v. Texas did for sodomy laws, striking down every state's ban on same-sex marriage, whether it was simply a DOMA-like law, or an actual state constitutional amendment, or if the decision was reversed, the Court could preserve them all. It does seem like that would produce a very peculiar situation, however; California would be prohibited on federal constitutional grounds from prohibiting a form of marriage banned by 47 other states. (New Mexico and New York are in the anomalous position of neither having laws banning same sex marriage, nor allowing it to proceed, because their attorneys general have stated that their constitutions require the legislature to make some affirmative or negative action regarding the process, and both state legislatures have declined to do either.)

Anyway, the video:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Questions? Comments? Etc.?

Posted by Iain Jackson at 03:17 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

prop. 8 struck down

...Well, that's nice.

In all seriousness, that's all the enthusiasm I can muster for this. It's ... nice. But at the moment, it's only slightly more than symbolic. The judge has already stayed his order; if he decides to allow the stay to remain in place until the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rules on his decision, then nobody gets married. If he doesn't allow the stay to remain in place -- and the case that people are harmed by not being allowed to marry is at least nominally stronger than the case that they aren't, given the grounds of the decision -- then the stay, or lack thereof, itself will get express appealed through the Ninth and possibly/probably up to the Supreme Court, which is, one suspects, rather more likely to prefer a stay than otherwise, since it will give the process time to work itself out with no change in the status quo. (And in this case, unlike Prop. 8 itself which was not retroactively applied, should the Court ultimately strike down this decision, there is a very good chance that it would take any marriages performed after the stay was released, since they shouldn't have been performed in the first place.)

It's going to be fascinating to see what happens with this decision and the one out of Massachusetts that's headed to the Third (I think) Circuit Court of Appeals which struck down part of DOMA when they get to the Court. (Assuming that they do, of course. I think if the Third and the Ninth decide to strike down the relevant decisions, the Court will almost certainly refuse to hear the appeals; that said, that opinion is based on nothing more than the fact that this Court has shown every sign of ardently wishing to avoid controversial big issues when possible, and issuing strangely small decisions when they can't.) If the Court does decide to hear the cases -- and depending on timing, I would think it would hear the California case first, because the case has implications for DOMA -- then it's going to be fascinating to see what happens. In terms of the Sotomayor and Kagan (assuming she gets through) appointments, we've more or less traded liberal-to-moderate votes for the same, so I don't think those votes would change. As other articles have noted, the balance would likely rest with Justice Kennedy. And while he voted one way on Lawrence vs. Texas, he might not do the same with Perry et al vs. California et al. (What on earth is the official name of this case, anyway?) When it comes to something tied as tightly to religion as marriage is, people may not be very consistent.

The thing about Perry is that if this decision stands, logically, it takes all sorts of laws outside California down with it. (To be sure, people will need to launch court cases to get things started, but that will happen.) For example, one logical consequence ought to be to enforce the Full Faith and Credit clause specifically regarding marriage. If you strike down, on Constitutional grounds, one law that forbids same-sex marriage in one state, as with Lawrence, it takes all of the others down with it. (Virginia notwithstanding. They keep passing purely symbolic sodomy laws, because their legislature is an ass.) Moreover, logically, it also takes out the concept that states need not recognize marriages from other states that "deeply offends the public policy." After all, same-sex marriage has to be the form that said policy would find most offensive; if you're going to require states to recognize that, then allowing Michigan to refuse to recognize a first-cousin marriage performed in Illinois is beyond illogical. (Yes, that's right. Illinois refuses to allow same-sex marriage, but says that under certain circumstances, first cousin marriage is just fine and dandy! This state is sometimes very strange. But I digress.)

Honestly, what I'm going to be very curious about is what Scalia says in his dissent. Clearly, given his position in his blistering dissent in Lawrence -- that states should be allowed to make laws about what they find morally repugnant, but also that the logic of the majority position would lead inevitably to same-sex marriage being allowed -- there may be a certain amount of judicial gloating. But mostly, I expect a relentlessly entertaining, relentlessly religiously-based and relentlessly bigoted decision out of him.

There's also the not-insignificant issue that gay marriage had moved off the front burners as a political issue, and this is likely to shove it right back up there. After all, a judge -- and a gay judge, at that -- struck down a state constitutional amendment produced by a vote of the people. The Republicans and the Teabaggers (I will do the GOP the courtesy of separating them, for now) are both likely to seize on this as evidence of judicial activism, and to agitate for more states to pass anti-same-sex marriage laws, and to use this to rally supporters around more conservative candidates for the House and Senate this year. The Democrats already stand to lose a certain number of seats, simply because the party in the White House usually does during midterms; they're not being helped by the Rangel and Waters scandals, which for the moment, and quite miraculously, make them look momentarily more corrupt (and worse at it) than the Republicans. That said, no such laws are up for vote this political silly season and couldn't make it to the ballot in most states. 2012, on the other hand, is a different issue altogether, especially since that will be about the time these decisions finally wend their way to the Supreme Court.

Any road, the next three years ought to be interesting on both coasts.

Questions? Comments? Brickbats? Cigars, Cigarettes, Cigarillos?

Posted by Iain Jackson at 10:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

supreme court applies second amendment to states and cities ... more or less

It's an interesting decision, I'll give it that.

The strange thing about these cases is that they didn't bother to reach the merits of the cases themselves, but only the constitutional issue. They sent the cases regarding the laws themselves back to the lower courts, which almost certainly means that they'll be back in front of the Court itself in two or three years, asking them to adjudicate the merits of the case -- do the laws of Chicago and Oak Park follow the profound lack of guidelines the Court has declined to set forth? Are they constitutional? Souter says that if the Court had bothered to decide the merits of the case, both laws would almost certainly have been struck down -- they are, after all, nearly complete bans on the possession of handguns within the city limits of both communities. You can scarcely abridge the right to bear arms more emphatically than by saying "thou shalt NOT."

Unfortunately, assuming she's confirmed, Kagan is unlikely to change the balance in decisions like these. Assuming that she lands on the moderate-to-liberal wing, she'll only replace Stevens' vote in this type of case.

In any event, for another year or two, the laws operate as they did (or didn't) as they did before, while the district and appeals courts decide what to do with them. Eventually, the Court will find itself bestirred and forced to directly strike down the laws, rather than sending them back to the lower courts to decide. And then it will be fascinating to see the conniptions and convolutions that various cities and states send themselves through to seriously restrict the right to bear arms, in accord with what will almost certainly continue to be a profound lack of guidance from the Court. And then those laws will go before the Court to be struck down repeatedly, until the states come up with a regulatory scheme that can somehow pass muster. (It's probably going to be something like "If you have more than 20-30 handguns, you got too many."

Posted by Iain Jackson at 03:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

gallup and gays

How very ... interesting.

See, I think it's that last one that matters ... but not necessarily the way Mr. Blow thinks. That said, what may actually be happening might, in its own way, be just as important.

I just have this feeling that what's happening isn't so much that the attitudes themselves are changing that fast, but that the attitudes about the attitudes are changing. What I mean is, not all that long ago, being seen as savagely antigay just wasn't that big a deal. In fact, it was considred, if not precisely a good thing, then as something normal and entirely expected. (And, usually, it was A Good Thing.) What I suspect is happening is that, yes, society at large is becoming less antigay. Not as fast as this study might indicate, though. But being seen as being savagely antigay is the sort of thing that is now no longer A Good Thing. Or at least, not as good a thing. It's a really odd social desirability bias showing up in the results -- and yes, I suspect that's the case even though it's an anonymous survey, they won't have their name attached to the results, and all that. People are more honest in these types of surveys ... but that doesn't mean that they're completely honest.

Then again, there is this:

Given that, way back in the day, Kinsey reported that something like over a quarter of all his respondent men had had sexual contact with a man to orgasm (25%-37%, depending on how the data is corrected), it may just be that self-reporting is coming more into alignment with reality.

Which, to be fair, is something in and of itself.

Posted by Iain Jackson at 09:50 PM | Permalink