Calif. Gay Marriage Heads To Federal Court

[davidinalameda]

http://www.365gay.com/newscon05/01/012605calMarr.htm

They filed their lawsuit almost as an afterthought. But a legal challenge by a gay couple from suburban Orange County against laws banning same-sex marriage has suddenly become an important case in a thinning field of litigation on the issue.

Christopher Hammer and Arthur Smelt plan to be in U.S. District Court on Thursday as their attorney argues that the federal Defense of Marriage Act and California's Proposition 22 are violations of civil rights akin to slavery or denying women the right to vote.

The hearing comes two days after gay couples in Florida decided to drop their lawsuits, leaving the California case as the only federal court challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act.

[Maat]

1. Is there a fund we can contribute to - in order to cover legal

expenses? I'm a law student, and I know that some attorneys charge lesser fees, or even no fees, but there are still expenses that can be covered. I'd like to see this case go all the way!

[Technowitch]

2. My wife and I have stopped holding our breath on this

Or more to the point, we're done hoping for anything.

We've got domestic partnership rights in California, which is damned nice -- but there are fundie and radical-conservative forces trying desperately to get them overturned and outlawed.

We have roughly half the states in the Union passing laws to make sure my wife and I are never accorded legal status within their boundaries.

Some, like Virginia ("VA is for Haters") take it a step further and would nullify even our attorney-created paperwork granting such rights as medical decision-making, simple Wills, and power-of-attorney.

Meanwhile, the President and the rest of his fascist GOP friends have made it clear they'd love to enshrine this little steaming nugget of discrimination in the Constitution of the U. S. of A.

We did the San Francisco thing last year. It was great, and we have that lovely piece of paper, our marriage license, as a souvenir showing that we stood up to be counted. We are among the nearly 4000 same-sex couples who wed during that time.

Before then, we signed up for the Domestic Partnership registry in California the same week it went into effect. We have that certificate, too.

But the fundies and rad-cons are screaming that we're not allowed to be a couple, not a 'real' family in the eyes of their angry, gay-hating God. An abomination not to be tolerated, but rather to be shoved violently back into the closet... or better still, trucked off to reorientation camps, where we can be cleansed of our unholy desires for those sharing a matching set of chromosomes.

Frankly, I'm sick of the bastards. Sick of them trying to push their selective morality onto me. Sick of their selective buffet-style reading of barbaric Old Testament laws. (Anyone up for stoning the shellfish eaters? And men who cut their temple hair and shave their beards? And I can't remember the last time I saw a proper tassel, but those worn by my Orthodox Jewish friends...) Sick of their demands for special rights for heterosexual couples, and pretending this isn't discriminatory towards everyone else (including any unmarried people, in my considered opinion).

Sick of the hypocrisy of saying that because we can't breed with each other, we're not deserving of equal protection under the law. This argument in particular is the most appalling.

Why hypocrisy? Because by that rationale, the elderly, the infertile, and those who simply choose not to have babies ought to be denied marriage rights, too. And for that matter, gays and lesbians are perfectly capable of having babies. Just not with each other. And since when does a so-called 'illegitimate' child nullify a marriage, before or even after the case?

Sometime this year, we're probably going to take a trip to Vancouver. While we're there, we're going to marry. And since Canada is a sensible, progressive country that actually has an ounce of compassion towards its minorities, I actually have some hope that the marriage will be a legal and lasting one.

And if we like it well enough, we may just move on in. Provided Canada doesn't mind immigrants from a nation as regressive, intolerant, and bigoted as the United States of America.

-Technowitch

[Lexingtonian]

3. not a very informative article

in a technical sense. I can't even figure out which Amendment they're pleading. And there's nothing out there in a Google search- they don't seem to have any of the usual suspects as allies, either.

I'm of the 'justice delayed is justice denied' school. But I think the Florida plaintiffs, with all the counsel they got, have a point (even though they overstate it into a political cover). The judiciary has its own internal political agitation, a bit removed from the public arena (but attached to it), and I get the sense that things haven't settled enough within the judiciary for judges to have confidence in their own tier, let alone those above (and below) them on the issue at the moment. I think stalling and dismissals (however ridiculous they may be 'reasoned'- look at the one in Wilson v Ake/Ashcroft) are the order of the day in all but the Blue-est states' state courts and in most of the federal circuits. And the USSC obviously doesn't want to touch the issue at all at this point.

Litigating two years from now- and if any of the present litigation survives, it will still be running then- seems to me to be a much more efficient approach, moneywise and emotionally and diminishing all the legal-technical convolutions that the lot of bad faith and bad 'verdicts' impose, somewhat. And Rehnquist fading out on the USSC will have some kind of stylistic effect on how the federal judiciary operates- not necessarily all for the good, but probably changing the rhetorical roadmaps in a way that creates more opportunities and changes the certainties in the game.