Wow, the Supreme Court making two good rulings with the ACA and Gay Marriage. I applaud this. Unfortunately it will also prompt the dregs of society to come out of the woodwork and declare how america is going to hell in a handbasket.
The same-sex marriage movement was shockingly quick. Sure, there'll still be opposition for a little while, but consider how long previous civil rights movements have taken. It took America 80 years to outlaw slavery, and then another 100 before eliminating Jim Crow. Most first generation suffragettes didn't get to live long enough to see their cause victorious and vote themselves. But now, I'm not even very old, and I remember the first victory in the gay marriage case -- I was even politically cognizant enough to write a letter to Romney urging him to sign a law that was going through the state legislature on the issue (the law later became irrelevant after the MA courts ruled that it was equal protection under the State Constitution). It's a swiftness that is unprecedented in American history.
That is less so now than any time previous. Modern medicine keep old people alive now like it never could in the 19th Century. Yet still, this went faster than the movements of that time.
Reading through the opinion right now and hit this bit:
"The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a character protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning."
Scalia and Thomas are going to have a bone to pick with this one.
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed.
"If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: 'The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,' I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie."
SCOTUS, you're not on my good side yet. For every gay couple who can get married, there's 20 people of color whose right to be represented in a representative government was trampled on by your Voting Rights Act decision. Marriage is not an institution that offers opportunity for further advances. It presents no threat to the established power structure that systematically routinely disenfranchises people. Your advance in civil rights today is but a speck compared to the oppression you have supported before.
"If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: 'The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,' I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie."
Twelve years ago today, when the Supreme Court struck down US sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas, Scalia's dissent warned that the Court's reasoning would inevitably lead to them ruling to allow gay marriage, while the majority opinion assured readers that that wasn't necessarily the case.
For once in possibly ever, I'm glad he was right about something.
For once in possibly ever, I'm glad he was right about something.
Scalia has the right of it in some criminal procedure issues; he was one of two justices who said Hamdi should receive a trial because it was required by law. The second justice? John Paul Stevens, arguably the most liberal member of the court at the time. The other opinion released today, Johnson v. United States, was authored by Scalia, and there the court held that imposing an increased sentence under the ACCA's residual clause violated due process.
The man sticks to his strict constructionism regardless of the issue. Sometimes it works out for the better for society, sometimes not.
He was one of the justices that ruled (on the losing end of the case) that fish are a tangible object in Yates v US -- a case only noteworthy because of its bizarre premise and Kagan's dissent citing Dr Seuss.
Defining words as far as the law is concerned is hard at the best of times. I wish I had to define something like that over the last two weeks instead of 'religion' and 'religious organization'.
Louisiana and Texas are both attempting to defy the Supreme Court ruling.
At what point can we arrest people for treason?
Once they're no longer in positions of power.
So never.
Why can't we do it when they are in power?
I'm only 70% joking.
Because they have a lot of economic/political power and nobody wants to challenge that too much.
So it just comes down to testicular fortitude
To use an historical example: At the end of the civil war, for all of the economic/political transformation, we didn't have the testicular fortitude to arrest the traitors then. See Reconstruction. Even with hundreds of thousands dead, we didn't do it. After the Amnesty Act of 1872 only the top 500 military officers of the Confederacy were barred from holding office, they weren't even arrested. Only 15,000 confederates were disenfranchised before that Act. What makes anyone think we would have the stomach to do it now?
For enforcing court decisions, it comes down to creating a political coalition with sufficient power to oppose the conservatives and make good on the decision. People have been good about putting together coalitions to enforce court decisions when it comes to things like desegregating marriage and many forms of de jure legal segregation. The record of stopping massive reactionary resistance to many other kinds of court decisions around discrimination, de facto segregation, redlining, or workplace protections to name a few, has been "spotty" to put it charitably. The resisters rarely ever face real consequences for their resistance in American history.
Comments
We won.
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf
I applaud this. Unfortunately it will also prompt the dregs of society to come out of the woodwork and declare how america is going to hell in a handbasket.
Mine is better because I quoted the decision.
"The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a character protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning."
Scalia and Thomas are going to have a bone to pick with this one.
"If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: 'The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,' I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie."
SCOTUS, you're not on my good side yet. For every gay couple who can get married, there's 20 people of color whose right to be represented in a representative government was trampled on by your Voting Rights Act decision. Marriage is not an institution that offers opportunity for further advances. It presents no threat to the established power structure that systematically routinely disenfranchises people. Your advance in civil rights today is but a speck compared to the oppression you have supported before.
I love it.
QQ moar nub
For once in possibly ever, I'm glad he was right about something.
The man sticks to his strict constructionism regardless of the issue. Sometimes it works out for the better for society, sometimes not.
Though in Texas, a few counties said "EABOD" to the AG and started issuing marriage licenses this morning.
So never.
I'm only 70% joking.
For enforcing court decisions, it comes down to creating a political coalition with sufficient power to oppose the conservatives and make good on the decision. People have been good about putting together coalitions to enforce court decisions when it comes to things like desegregating marriage and many forms of de jure legal segregation. The record of stopping massive reactionary resistance to many other kinds of court decisions around discrimination, de facto segregation, redlining, or workplace protections to name a few, has been "spotty" to put it charitably. The resisters rarely ever face real consequences for their resistance in American history.
Oh god that made me laugh so much.