Will the Supreme Court fall on the right side of history when it decides landmark marriage equality cases?
Eugene Robinson at
The Washington Post provides a snapshot of what's at stake:
Don’t take anything for granted. The conservative activists on the Supreme Court may not be able to halt the inexorable shift toward acceptance of gay marriage, but we probably should expect them to try.
The two big cases being argued before the court this week could turn out to be landmarks that confirm the nation’s progress toward marriage equality — or speed bumps that impede it. Either way, the destination is clear: Nearly 60 percent of Americans approve of gay marriage, according to a Post-ABC News poll, including 80 percent of adults under 30. That looks like less a question than a decision. [...]
Christopher Ott at
The Boston Globe:
Opponents of equality for lesbian and gay people have understood one thing: how quickly their support would evaporate if the freedom to marry arrived and survived anywhere. The speed with which their support collapsed and made way for equality has astonished even most us who worked for it.
In just under a decade since the pioneering Massachusetts breakthrough for equality in 2004, the freedom to marry for lesbian and gay couples has gone from something unimagined, by most people, to growing a reality — some might say even commonplace. Nine states plus the District of Columbia have legalized it, Rhode Island recognizes marriages performed elsewhere, and this trend shows no signs of stopping.
Head below the fold for more analysis on the day's top stories.
The New York Times calls for a "50-state ruling":
Support now for same-sex marriage — more than half in favor, about one-third against — is roughly the public divide on the question of public school desegregation in 1954 when the Supreme Court outlawed segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education. But the court’s call then for states to end racial discrimination in public schools “with all deliberate speed” was a big error. It gave states far too much latitude to move slowly and gave them an excuse for resistance, which delayed desegregation in many school districts for many years.
The court should avoid that kind of error in the same-sex-marriage cases. It should broadly declare that under the Constitution the right to marry applies equally to all couples, period, and that this principle applies to the federal government and every state.
Meanwhile,
the editors at The Washington Post join in and also write a long editorial supporting marriage equality:
The arguments of those defending discrimination against gay couples are beyond far-fetched. Proposition 8’s advocates, for example, contend that restricting marriage to heterosexual couples must be rational because for thousands of years people widely agreed that the institution involved only the union of a man and a woman. That reasoning stinks of the faulty logic used to justify the persistence of all sorts of discrimination. They also argue that marriage’s purpose is to ensure that children are born into stable families; therefore, California should be allowed to limit marriage to only those capable of biological procreation. That is a narrow and insulting view of marriage. Would it then be constitutional to deny sterile heterosexual couples the right to marry? How about older couples? Moreover, lesbians can bear children and gay men can adopt. Why wouldn’t society want their parents to be wed, too?
Over at CNN,
John D. Sutter profiles "the county where no one's gay":
Statistically speaking, Franklin County should be straighter than John Wayne eating Chick-fil-A. The middle-of-nowhere rectangle in southwest Mississippi -- known for its pine forests, hog hunting and an infamous hate crime -- is home to exactly zero same-sex couples, according to an analysis of census data. In other words: It's a place where gays don't exist. At least not on paper. [...]
In a place where "everybody knows everybody," as Richard Pickett put it, very few seem willing to talk about the possibility of gay residents. You could blame that on the would-be gays. "If (a gay couple) did live together, they would probably keep it quiet," the 54-year-old told me. "They're not going to march up and down the street with a sign" announcing their homosexuality. The common Franklin County wisdom seems to be that gays, like unicorns or dragons, are living over the next pine-covered hill, out of sight and out of mind. They're not my kids. Not my neighbors. They're somewhere else. Maybe.
But here's the thing: There certainly are gay people in Franklin County. And for the most part, they're not in the closet. Many are happy to talk about it. It's their neighbors and families who aren't.
Switching topics,
Juan Williams at
The Hill tells Democrats to stand up to Republican filibuster bullies:
The GOP filibuster strategy is proving to be the tool of choice for draining momentum from President Obama’s reelection mandate.
It stops the Democratic majority in the senate from controlling the Senate. And it makes it difficult for the president to put his nominees in place to govern the country.
The GOP is betting that voters will blame Democrats for the dysfunction in Congress as much as they blame the GOP.
And so far, the bet is paying off, because the press is failing to call out the GOP for an extreme and nasty political strategy of demanding a super-majority of 60 votes —the votes required to break a filibuster — to get anything done.
Paul McMorrow at
The Boston Globe points out that Wall Street is up to its old tricks:
A lawsuit the federal government filed against JP Morgan in late 2011 alleged the bank consistently overstated the quality of the loans it packaged into mortgage bonds; that it inflated home values to make mortgages seem safer than they were; and that JP Morgan and its brokers didn’t adhere to their own underwriting standards. Federal lawsuits against other Wall Street banks made similar claims. Post-crisis investigations have revealed that outside auditors told banks that they were handling bad mortgages, but the banks stuffed them into bonds and sold them off anyway. The banks did all this while knowing they would have to own any mortgage fraud that investors discovered. Just imagine what they’ll be tempted to pull once they let themselves off that hook.
Keven Ann Willey at
The Dallas Morning News says Michele Bachmann "gives us license to never listen to her again":
There comes a point when some folks prove themselves so careless so consistently with the facts that the rest of us should have license to ignore any additional utterance ever to leak from their lips.
That time has come with regard to Michele Bachmann.
The not-so-esteemed congresswoman from Minnesota crossed a new threshold last week (just how many thresholds can there be?) when she blasted President Obama’s lavish lifestyle of “excess” (a claim of such lavish excess itself that it prompted even Bill O’Reilly to dress her down for it) and called for a repeal of the Affordable Health Care Act “before it literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens.”
Breathtaking. And I don’t mean that in a positive way.