Supreme Court strikes down DOMA; rules it interferes with states, ‘dignity’ of same-sex marriages

Liz Goodwin, Yahoo! News, 06/27/13

The Supreme Court released two major decisions expanding gay rights across the country on Wednesday as hordes of cheering demonstrators greeted the news outside. The justices struck down a federal law barring the recognition of same-sex marriage in a split decision, ruling that the law violates the rights of gays and lesbians and intrudes into states' rights to define and regulate marriage. The court also dismissed a case involving California's gay marriage ban, ruling that supporters of the ban did not have the legal standing, or right, to appeal a lower court's decision striking down Proposition 8 as discriminatory.

The decision clears the way for gay marriage to again be legal in the nation's most populous state, even though the justices did not address the broader legal argument that gay people have a fundamental right to marriage.

The twin decisions throw the fight over gay marriage back to the states, because the court ruled the federal government must recognize the unions if states sanction them, but did not curtail states' rights to ban gay marriage if they choose.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court's conservative-leaning swing vote with a legal history of supporting gay rights, joined his liberal colleagues in the DOMA decision, which will dramatically expand the rights of married gay couples in the country to access more than 1,000 federal benefits and responsibilities of marriage previously denied them.

"The avowed purpose and practical effect of the law here in question are to impose a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages made lawful by the unquestioned authority of the States," Kennedy wrote of DOMA. He concluded that states must be allowed by the federal government to confer "dignity" on same-sex couples if they choose to legalize gay marriage. DOMA "undermines" same-sex marriages in visible ways and "tells those couples, and all the world, that their otherwise valid marriages are unworthy of federal recognition."

Eighty-three-year-old New Yorker Edith Windsor brought the DOMA suit after she was made to pay more than $363,000 in estate taxes when her same-sex spouse died. If the federal government had recognized her marriage, Windsor would not have owed the sum. She argued that the government has no rational reason to exclude her marriage (she and her late partner, Thea Spyer, had been married since 2007, and together for more than four decades) from the benefits and obligations other married couples receive.

DOMA, which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996, prevented the government from granting marriage benefits in more than 1,000 federal statutes to same-sex married couples in the 12 states and District of Columbia that allow gay marriage.

With this decision, Kennedy furthers his reputation as a defender of gay rights from the bench. He wrote two of the most important Supreme Court decisions involving, and ultimately affirming, gay rights: Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and Romer v. Evans (1996). In Romer, Kennedy struck down Colorado's constitutional amendment banning localities from passing anti-discrimination laws protecting gays and lesbians. In Lawrence, Kennedy invalidated state anti-sodomy laws, ruling that gay people have a right to engage in sexual behavior in their own homes free from the fear of punishment.

Legal experts said the DOMA decision lays the foundation for a future Supreme Court ruling that could find a broader right for same-sex couples to marry.

The decisions mark the first time the highest court has waded into the issue of same-sex marriage. Just 40 years ago, the Supreme Court tersely refused to hear a case brought by a gay couple who wanted to get married in Minnesota, writing that their claim raised no significant legal issue. At the time, legal opinions often treated homosexuality as criminal, sexually deviant behavior rather than involuntary sexual orientation. Since then, public opinion has changed dramatically on gay people and same-sex marriage, with a majority of Americans only just recently saying they support gay unions. Now, 12 states representing about 18 percent of the U.S. population allow same-sex marriage. With California, the percentage of people living in gay marriage states shoots up to 30.

With the Proposition 8 decision, the Supreme Court refused to wade into the constitutional issues surrounding the California gay marriage case, dismissing the Proposition 8 argument on procedural grounds. The legal dodge means a lower court's ruling making same-sex marriage legal in California will most likely stand, opening the door to marriage to gays and lesbians in the country's most populous state without directly ruling on whether gay people have a constitutional right to marriage.

California voters passed Proposition 8 to ban same-sex marriage in 2008, after 18,000 same-sex couples had already tied the knot under a state Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage. A same-sex married couple with children, Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, sued the state of California when their 6-month-old marriage was invalidated by the ballot initiative. They argued that Proposition 8 discriminated against them and their union based only on their sexual orientation, and that the state had no rational reason for denying them the right to marry. Two lower courts ruled in their favor, and then-California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announced he would no longer defend Proposition 8 in court, leaving a coalition of Proposition 8 supporters led by a former state legislator to take up its defense.

Chief Justice John Roberts joined with Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan to rule the defenders of Proposition 8 did not have the standing to defend the ban in court. The unlikely coalition of liberals and conservatives argued that the Proposition 8 supporters could not prove they were directly injured by the lower court's decision to overturn the ban and allow gay people to marry.

Same-sex marriage will most likely not be immediately legal in California, because the Ninth Circuit has several weeks to confirm the court's decision.

The Proposition 8 case was argued by two high-profile lawyers, Ted Olson and David Boies, who previously faced off against each other in Bush v. Gore. Olson, a conservative and Bush's former solicitor general, and Boies, a liberal, have cast gay marriage as the civil rights issue of our time.

Boies said on the steps of the Supreme Court on Wednesday that the court had shown gay marriage does not harm society. "Today the United States Supreme Court said as much," Boies said. "They cannot point to anything that harms them because these two love each other.”

President Barack Obama also reportedly called Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign gay rights group, to congratulate him on the legal victory. "We're proud of you guys, and we're proud to have this in California," the president said, according to audio on MSNBC.

"The laws of our land are catching up to the fundamental truth that millions of Americans hold in our hearts: When all Americans are treated as equal, no matter who they are or whom they love, we are all more free," the president said in a statement.

Olson made the argument that gay marriage should be a conservative cause in a recent interview with NPR. "If you are a conservative, how could you be against a relationship in which people who love one another want to publicly state their vows ... and engage in a household in which they are committed to one another and become part of the community and accepted like other people?" he asked.

The Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, a coalition of mostly Republican House lawmakers, defended DOMA since the Obama administration announced it believed the law was unconstitutional in 2011. (Roberts criticized the president for this move during oral arguments in the case, saying the president lacked “the courage of his convictions” in continuing to enforce the law but no longer defending it in court.)

"While I am obviously disappointed in the ruling, it is always critical that we protect our system of checks and balances," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said in a statement. "A robust national debate over marriage will continue in the public square, and it is my hope that states will define marriage as the union between one man and one woman."

Rachel Rose Hartman contributed to this report.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/news/supreme-court-strikes-down-doma-140330141.html

A Nation Divided Against Itself

Charles M. Blow, The NYT, 06/19/13

Along with — and because of — dramatic social and demographic changes, America is quickly dividing itself into two separate nations, regional enclaves of rigid politics, as the idea of common national priorities fades further into a distant past.

Rich Morin, a senior editor at the Pew Research Center, wrote about a new study on public opinion on Wednesday and found that:

“Americans often say they want their representatives in Congress to put the country’s needs over local concerns. But four novel experiments suggest that the public does just the opposite.”

He continued:

“Respondents rated a member of Congress far more favorably if the lawmaker put the interests of his or her district or state over those of the country as a whole.”

He concluded, in part, with this damning line:

“The study’s author says legislators who ‘nobly’ put national preferences ahead of local ones will be punished by constituents.”

Here’s why this is so problematic: on a state level, and even on a county and community level, we as a country continue to self-sort into ideological islands.

According to the author Bill Bishop, who in 2008 published “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart”:

“In 1976, only about a quarter of America’s voters lived in a county a presidential candidate won by a landslide margin. By 2004, it was nearly half.”

And the country’s seismic demographic and cultural shifts threaten to make our tribalism permanent.

There has been the rapid rise of minority populations and stagnation in the growth of the non-Hispanic white population in this country.

Now, non-whites represent a majority of all births in America, and last week The New York Times reported on census data that revealed that “deaths exceeded births among non-Hispanic white Americans for the first time in at least a century.”

In fact, according to an Associated Press report last week, which cited government reports: “For the first time, America’s racial and ethnic minorities now make up about half of the under-5 age group.”

But there were also some worrisome statistics in the report that could help to signal those children’s views on policy. According to the report: “Black toddlers were most likely to be poor, at 41 percent, followed by Hispanics at 32 percent and whites at 13 percent. Asian toddlers had a poverty rate of 11 percent.”

As a Pew Research Center report found in 2009, while top earners (those earning $100,000 or more) were almost evenly split among Democrats, independents and Republicans, the lowest earners (those making $20,000 or less) were more than twice as likely to be Independents than Republicans, and were nearly three times as likely to be Democrats than Republicans.

Furthermore, what constitutes a family and who is seen as the head of that family has also changed. According to a March report titled “Knot Yet,” which was sponsored by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, the Relate Institute and The National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia:

“By age 25, 44 percent of women have had a baby, while only 38 percent have married; by the time they turn 30, about two-thirds of American women have had a baby, typically out of wedlock. Over all, 48 percent of first births are to unmarried women, most of them in their 20s.”

In fact, the report found that “for women as a whole, the median age at first birth (25.7) now falls before the median age at first marriage (26.5), a phenomenon we call ‘The Great Crossover.’ ”

But in almost every case, the states that went for Barack Obama in 2012 had the higher ages of first marriage, and the ones that went for Mitt Romney had lower ones.

It would stand to reason that attacks on contraception and a full range of family planning options — including a woman’s right to an abortion — might be viewed differently by these families.

And, we are becoming less blindly religious and more blindly militaristic. (The former is a good thing; the latter, not so much.)

According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans saying that they have quite a lot or a great deal of confidence in “the church or organized religion” went from 68 percent in 1975 to 48 percent in 2013. Over the same period, those expressing the same amount of confidence in the military has gone from 58 percent to 76 percent.

This means that on the moral front, more liberal views — like support for same-sex marriage — are allowed to quickly spread and have gone from being seen as radical to mainstream. But even on this issue, we are becoming two Americas: one where same-sex marriage is legal in some states and another where it’s specifically outlawed.

But on the military front, it means that revelations about recent government snooping on Americans doesn’t sound as many alarms as it should have. Politically, it also means that some of the old ideological battle lines on national security have been scrambled so that Republicans no longer get all the credit, nor Democrats all the blame.

These new realities have changed the conversation about the role and size of government, about the line between individual liberty and the collective good, about the meaning of personal responsibility and societal responsibility.

They have also signaled that conservative arguments on many of these issues are losing their resonance nationally, and that the Republican pool of potential voters is shrinking while the Democratic pool expands.

So, to defend themselves, their ways of thinking (and, to their minds, their way of life), Republicans are pulling every lever to slow the change on the state level — gerrymandering, limiting voter access, passing anti-immigrant laws, cutting assistance to the poor.

This means we’re now at a point where people may not worry as much about all of America as about their slice of America. In the tumult and transition of change, we may be becoming a nation divided against itself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/opinion/blow-a-nation-divided-against-itself.html?src=recg

How US Politics Is Broken

Tanya Lewis, LiveScience Staff Writer, 04/20/13

NEW YORK -- For all of their differences, liberals and conservatives seem to agree on one thing: politics in America is broken.

"What the public wants doesn't get reflected in what happens in Washington," said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, at an event Friday (April 19) on Columbia's campus. The way "politics has been taken over by powerful groups absolutely has to change in this country," Sachs said.

Sachs, who is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals, and former Congressman Joe Scarborough (R-Fla.), host of the MSNBC show Morning Joe, discussed some of these problems here at an event entitled, "A Conversation on America's Future."

Illustrating the sorry state of politics, both panelists pointed to hot-button issues and recent events. Earlier this week, the U.S. Senate failed to pass a bill that would require background checks for gun buyers, even though the majority of Americans support gun reforms, polls show. The nation continues to battle a crippling national debt, as politicians continue to debate a solution. And health-care costs remain sky-high, in spite of attempts to reform the system. [7 Great Dramas in Congressional History]

Gun control blocked

Following the gun control bill's defeat, Scarborough lambasted his fellow Republicans -- and some Democrats --for their role in blocking the bill. "We're talking about passing a bill that 90 percent of Americans support that would simply require background checks to make sure people aren't gang members, make sure they aren't terrorists, make sure they aren't convicted felons, make sure they aren't violent past offenders. Who can be against that?" Scarborough said.

Republicans need to stand up to the extremists in their party, Scarborough said. "I've always criticized liberals for being too weak," he said, but "it's Republicans now who are cowering in the corner."

The vote on gun control reflects a pervasive theme across politics, Sachs said. "We've seen that Americans want us out of wars, for example, and yet the wars continue. We've seen Americans […] want higher taxes on rich people, but that of course hasn't happened. The American people were disgusted by what Wall Street perpetrated, and every day we see more crimes being settled [out of court]," said Sachs, referring to the corruption of Wall Street executives.

Skyrocketing costs

When it comes to tackling the national debt, both Republicans and Democrats harbor fantasies, Sachs said: Republicans think cutting taxes is the best way to stimulate the economy, whereas Democrats think spending money is the way to go.

Scarborough said he would happily spend "$3 trillion" on a stimulus bill if it were investing more heavily in rebuilding America's infrastructure, and supporting a new generation of scientists like the ones that put a man on the moon. These things would resurrect the economy, Scarborough said, but he claimed the government's stimulus package has failed to do that.

Both Scarborough and Sachs also agreed that politics has failed in health care. The problem is two-fold, Sachs said, with progress on one issue stopping progress on the other. First of all, the United States is one of the only high-income countries where you can't be assured of health care. "We've had a solid 10 or 15 percent of Americans that are without coverage, and they somehow falls through the cracks." Secondly, the United States has the most expensive health-care system in the world, Sachs said -- the United States spends way more per capita per year on health care as other countries. "The prices are out of site and out of control," Sachs said.

In 2000, the United States spent an average of $4,500 per person on health care compared with Switzerland, which spent an average of $3,300 per person, after adjusting the per capita spending rates to international dollars, according to the University of California, Santa Cruz, Atlas of Global Inequality.

The problem with "Obamacare," Sachs said, was that Obama was completely focused on the first problem -- providing universal access to health care -- which he addressed "by sacrificing almost anything on the second problem [i.e., the costs]," Sachs said. Lowering costs would be unpopular with pharmaceutical companies, whose support Obama needed to pass his bill, Sachs said. The power of lobbyists is "crazy," he added. "If you let special interest groups determine politics, you have to do things in the back room because it's so ugly."

Given how the system is broken, "we have to try to find that heart of decency again in American politics," Sachs said.

Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

·        5 Milestones in Gun Control History

·        The 5 Strangest Presidential Elections in US History

·        6 Politicians Who Got the Science Wrong

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.