Tag Archives: ZZADF: 26561

Legal Times: “It is not unreasonable for the American people to have an opportunity to hear firsthand the arguments and opinions that will shape their society for years to come,” Durbin wrote to Roberts in a letter released Tuesday.

Tim Roder at Washington Post: Terms like husband, wife, mother, and father become up for grabs, and in effect meaningless. When terms become meaningless, it becomes more difficult to teach the realities they are meant to convey and to encourage young people to take such realities seriously. When the law and the culture it shapes say that mom and dad are interchangeable, it becomes harder to teach your kids otherwise.

Ryan T. Anderson at National Review: A hallmark of democratic self-government is that the people should discuss, debate, and vote on important policy matters. And in America their votes should count, except when they clearly violate the people’s more settled will as expressed in the U.S. Constitution. Where the Constitution is silent, the task of a conscientious judge is to respect the constitutional authority of citizens and their elected officials . . . To fill this void, the Heritage Foundation has worked with our allies at the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, and the National Organization for Marriage to produce a pamphlet using everyday language to explain, in Q&A style, why marriage matters. (You can download a free e-book at TheMarriageFacts.com.)

SCOTUS Blog: Following Monday’s decisions, there are fourteen merits cases from October Term 2012 that have not yet been decided. Although we do not know which decisions the Court will issue on which days, we expect the Court to issue all of these remaining decisions between tomorrow, Thursday, June 20, 2013, and the end of June, when the Court traditionally breaks for its summer recess.

Huffington Post: ”The question is, do those people have a standing to come before the court and defend it? Under Supreme Court precedent, they probably do not have standing,” Boies said. “The court is very restrictive in terms of to whom they grant standing, and they never granted standing to private citizens who do not have a fiduciary relationship to the state. And one way that the court could solve this particular case is to hold that these people do not have standing.”

Chris Geidner at Buzzfeed: Many outcomes are possible in the challenges to California’s Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act that are due to be decided by the justices in the coming weeks. A complex path got the cases — and the country — to a moment of waiting.

Rick Klein, Olivier Knox, Richard Coolidge, and Jordyn Phelps at Yahoo News: Moran says the justices “don’t want to be the judges of America when it comes to this issue” and predicts that they will find a way to defer to the states in the two cases dealing with same-sex marriage. “They see this roiling democratic debate that’s happening state-by-state, and the betting at the Supreme Court is that they’ll find a way to decide this issue by getting themselves out of it,” Moran says. “They won’t declare gay marriage legal all over the country or illegal. They’ll say, ‘Let the states handle it.’”

USA Today: The Supreme Court rulings are not as simple as whether gays and lesbians can marry or not, and whether they become eligible for federal benefits.

Yahoo News (AP) (includes video): Jim Campbell, a lawyer for Alliance Defending Freedom, said the court should not short-circuit a vigorous national debate. “The vast majority of the states have decided to retain the traditional view of marriage that has existed throughout Western civilization. This decision belongs to the people and should be decided by the people,” Campbell said.

Ryan Anderson at the Blaze: At stake in the two cases expected to be decided by the Supreme Court later this month is whether citizens and their elected officials have the constitutional authority to make laws that reflect the truth about marriage.

Reuters: Whatever the U.S. Supreme Court decides this month, gay marriage appears destined to face several more years of legal debate and at least one more round of argument at the high court.

MPR: Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens shares his views on controversial court decisions and the inner workings of the court, in a candid interview at the JFK Library in Boston May 20, 2013. Stevens comments on Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, affirmative action and same-sex marriage.

Juan Williams at The Hill: It is difficult to see how the Chief Justice arrives at such a consensus with these four culture war cases. It is more likely the decisions will give way to even more heated emotions, including anger and a further erosion of trust in yet another major American institution.

Howard Mintz at Mercury News: But there are about as many twists and turns in what the Supreme Court could do as there can be in a marriage. Among the possibilities . . .

Washington Times: “It’s quite American” to have different laws in different states, said Austin Nimocks, a lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom, which defends traditional marriage in lawsuits. “States should be able to maintain their own sovereignty on the marriage issue, as they always have done.”

CBN: Jim Campbell, a lawyer for Alliance Defending Freedom, says issue gay marriage is one for states to decide – not the Supreme Court. “The vast majority of the states have decided to retain the traditional view of marriage that has existed throughout Western civilization. This decision belongs to the people and should be decided by the people,” Campbell said.

Ken Connelly appeared on Wallbuilders Live to provide an update on the litigation shortly after arguments were heard in April. | MP3 audio 14:41 mins

Mark Sherman at FDL Reporter (AP): Jim Campbell, a lawyer for Alliance Defending Freedom, said the court should not short-circuit a vigorous national debate. “The vast majority of the states have decided to retain the traditional view of marriage that has existed throughout Western civilization. This decision belongs to the people and should be decided by the people,” Campbell said.

LA Times: Lawyers leading the fight for gay marriage in California have been quietly preparing state officials for the possibility the U.S. Supreme Court might dismiss the case on a technicality next month without deciding the fate of Proposition 8.

National Journal: “The vast majority of the states have decided to retain the traditional view of marriage that has existed throughout Western civilization,” attorney Jim Campbell of the Alliance Defending Freedom told the Associated Press. “This decision belongs to the people and should be decided by the people.”

CBS/AP: Jim Campbell, a lawyer for Alliance Defending Freedom, said the court should not short-circuit a vigorous national debate. “The vast majority of the states have decided to retain the traditional view of marriage that has existed throughout Western civilization. This decision belongs to the people and should be decided by the people,” Campbell said.

Washington Times: The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called for prayer and fasting in the days leading up to the Supreme Court’s decisions on two gay marriage cases.

Providence Journal (AP): Jim Campbell, a lawyer for Alliance Defending Freedom, said the court should not short-circuit a vigorous national debate. “The vast majority of the states have decided to retain the traditional view of marriage that has existed throughout Western civilization. This decision belongs to the people and should be decided by the people,” Campbell said.

Washington Post: Jim Campbell, a lawyer for Alliance Defending Freedom, said the court should not short-circuit a vigorous national debate. “The vast majority of the states have decided to retain the traditional view of marriage that has existed throughout Western civilization. This decision belongs to the people and should be decided by the people,” Campbell said.

Ken Klukowski at Breitbart: Several major cases will be decided by the Supreme Court over the next six weeks, including historic issues such as gay marriage and affirmative action. These cases make the remainder of the Court’s term—which ends in June—one of the most carefully watched terms by millions of Americans.

Bloomberg: “We would certainly hope that the Supreme Court would vacate everything that had happened since the beginning of the case,” said Austin Nimocks, a lawyer on the team defending Proposition 8. “If there’s no standing, then there never was an actual case, meaning that there were no legitimate rulings.” At most, Nimocks says, the two same-sex couples would be entitled to a so-called default judgment, letting them marry without affecting the rest of the state.

Lyle Denniston at Constitution Daily: If the Constitution takes at least part of its meaning from the way elected officials react to a high-profile public policy issue, the supporters of same-sex marriage have reason to be optimistic right now. In the space of less than a week, Rhode Island and then Delaware became the 10th and 11th states to allow gay marriage (along with Washington, D.C.). But is that a trend that the Supreme Court is ready to advance—or will choose to leave alone to see how it goes?

Benjamin Wiker at NC Register: While we wait until June to find out how the U.S. Supreme Court will rule in its two “gay marriage” cases, perhaps it will add a little energy to our prayers to understand that the judges in black will be making a stark choice: The choice is either “gay marriage” or religious freedom, but not both.

Ryan T. Anderson at Red State: When a baby is born, a mother always is nearby. The question is whether a father will be involved in the life of that child and, if so, for how long. Marriage increases the odds that a man will be committed to both the children that he helps create and to the woman with whom he does so.

Erwin Chemersinsky at ABA Journal: No decisions are more eagerly awaited from the U.S. Supreme Court than those in the marriage equality cases. Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor were argued on March 26 and 27, and most expect that the decisions will be announced at the end of June. Having just re-read the transcripts of the arguments, a few things seem clear.

Marvin Olasky at Townhall: Today’s justices have a chance to do not only what’s right but what’s logical: If the Supreme Court affirms states rights on marriage, why not on abortion?

Byron Babione on the Zeb Bell Show. | MP3 audio 15:10 mins | Hollingsworth v. Perry resource page

John G. Crandall at Public Discourse: Proposition 8 does not, contrary to Judge Vaughan Walker’s claims, treat equals unequally.

f the Supreme Court were to hold that Prop 8 proponents lack standing to defend Prop 8, the two rulings against Prop 8 below—Judge Reinhardt’s ruling for the Ninth Circuit and then-Judge Vaughn Walker’s district-court ruling—should both be vacated. So explains law professor (and former Blackmun clerk) Vikram David Amar, cogently elaborating the position that he has previously taken (and that I have also raised).

Ed Whelan at NRO: Nearly everyone seems to assume that, if she gets past the standing/jurisdiction issues to reach the merits, Justice Elena Kagan will vote to strike down the federal Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8. Somehow clinging to a naïve faith in the power of reason, I continue to hold out a tiny (okay—a very, very tiny) hope that she, and all of the other justices, will instead recognize that DOMA and Prop 8 are constitutionally permissible—that it is legitimate for the federal government in its realm and for the state governments in their realms to maintain the perennial definition of marriage as a male-female union.

Carson Halloway at Public Discourse: The oral arguments on Proposition 8 at the Supreme Court suggest that there is very good reason to believe that the declaration of a “right” to same-sex marriage will set us on the path to polygamy.

Kellie Fiedorek at Washington Examiner: In their recently filed brief before the U.S. Supreme Court, advocates for redefining marriage argued that “gay men and lesbians are a suspect class” and thus need special judicial protection of the “politically powerless.”

ChrisAdamo.com: So perhaps the Supreme Court in its arrogance believes it can forcibly impose a redefinition of marriage on America. Let it next endeavor to strike down the law of gravity as “unconstitutional” on the basis that it clearly affects citizens in a decidedly disproportionate manner and thus is a primary source of “inequality” among the people. Then every concurring jurist, bureaucrat, and countercultural activist who regards the court’s decision as credible will be free to find a high precipice from which to test its merits. We will then see benefit that can actually be reaped from blind faith in liberal arrogance.

Joan Frawley Desmond at NC Register: Cooper would not retreat: “[S]ociety’s interest in responsible procreation isn’t just with respect to the procreative capacities of the couple itself,” he said.
“The marital norm, which imposes the obligations of fidelity and monogamy, Your Honor, advances the interests in responsible procreation by making it more likely that neither party, including the fertile party to that … marriage will engage in irresponsible procreative conduct outside of that marriage,” Cooper continued. “That’s the … marital norm.”

NY Times Editorial: This may seem like ancient history. But there is a danger now that overblown fears of a backlash based on a false reading of politics before and after Roe v. Wade could lead the Supreme Court to shy from doing as it should — enforcing equal protection by declaring same-sex marriage a constitutionally protected right in every state.

Kellie Fiedorek at Alliance Defending Freedom: As I walked out of the Supreme Court last Tuesday, I had the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice Samuel Alito in my ears.

Albert Mohler at LifeSiteNews: The Court’s oral arguments on the DOMA case made the risks of moral argument clear. Justice Elena Kagan, pressing Attorney Paul Clement, the lawyer defending DOMA, asked him if Congress had made a moral judgment in adopting the Defense of Marriage Act. She then read from a House of Representatives report, issued in advance of the vote on DOMA, in which a clear moral argument was made. That report included these sentences: “Civil laws that permit only heterosexual marriage reflect and honor a collective moral judgment about human sexuality. This judgment entails both moral disapproval of homosexuality, [and] moral conviction that heterosexuality better comports with traditional (especially Judeo-Christian) morality.”

CBS: “It will be sued everywhere in the country if it’s declared to be a constitutional right,” said Krauthammer. “Because it would imply that anybody who opposes it does it only out of bigotry, for no other reason.”

Mercury News: As the U.S. Supreme Court last week weighed its many options in deciding the historic legal battle over gay marriage, the justices repeatedly revealed they are as divided as the rest of the country on when — and whether — to end the furor and give gay and lesbian couples the right to clutch a marriage license.

Politico: Conservatives watching this week’s gay marriage arguments at the Supreme Court are wondering if it will happen again: Unelected justices ignoring the will of legislatures and high-handedly imposing their own wishes on one of society’s most divisive moral issues. In political circles in Washington and elsewhere, a good number of these conservatives will also make a surprising confession: They are strongly rooting for that outcome exactly.

Erwin Chemerinsky at SCOTUS Blog: But still it is impossible to not think about what might happen in Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor.   There are two questions:  First, will the Court dismiss one or both cases without reaching the issue of whether gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marriage equality?   Second, if the Court reaches the merits what might it do?

Marty Lederman at SCOTUS Blog: Tom is right, however, that Tuesday’s oral argument raised the possibility of at least two additional outcomes: that the Court might dismiss the petition as improvidently granted – a “DIG”; or that the Court could vacate the court of appeals’ decision and remand the case for reconsideration in light of whatever the Court does in Windsor, the DOMA case. So which of these seven outcomes is most likely?

NPR audio: It was a busy week in the debate over gay marriage, with two Supreme Court cases and a number of members of Congress moving from opposition to endorsement. NPR’s Nina Totenberg and NPR political editor Ron Elving join host Scott Simon for a recap.

KTAR: Ken Connelly, a lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which defends the traditional definition of marriage, said he hopes the court will “let the debate continue where it should – at the people.”

Cronkite News: Ken Connelly, a lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which defends the traditional definition of marriage, said he hopes the court will “let the debate continue where it should – at the people.”

ABC 15: In Hollingsworth, California’s governor and attorney general abdicated their duties by refusing to defend their state constitution. So pursuant to California law, the sponsors of Prop 8 — officially registered with the state — stepped in to defend the law, represented by Charles Cooper at Cooper Kirk and the Alliance Defending Freedom.

NPR’s On Point audio and description here.

Caleb Dalton at Townhall: California and other states should maintain the right to support marriage: a private promise between a man and a woman with a public purpose—the only relationship that combines love with the procreative possibility of life and the highest probability of stable, nurturing homes for children.

Newsbusters: Yet, let’s do a flashback to 2009. Kagan was nominated to be the United States Solicitor General — the officer of the executive branch who represents the United States in controversies and cases which go before the U.S. Supreme Court — and was specifically asked about DOMA and same sex marriage (emphasis mine):

Mark Steyn at NRO: Three weeks ago, I wrote: An institution that predates the United States by several millennia will be defined for a third of a billion people by whichever way Anthony Kennedy feels like swingin’ that morning. The universal deference to judicial supremacism is bizarre and unbecoming to a free people.

Erick Erickson at Red State: The kids these days on the right are full of a great libertarian notion that “hey, let’s just get the government out of marriage.” “Rock on,” say other libertarians.They then all smugly self-congratulate themselves, pat themselves on the back, and move on to other issues.What they ignore is that the left will never take marriage out of the hands of the government. The left cannot. But it goes beyond that . . .

World Net Daily: Ken Connelly, a lawyer with the Alliance Defense Fund told WND in an interview that he “would not characterize it that way,” but yet said, “There is an inherent contradiction” today because the executive branch is refusing to enforce and defend the law of the land. He said that is “incorrect” from a legal standpoint . . . The Supreme Court has made clear that defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman is constitutional as a matter of public policy. Thus, Congress and President Clinton acted constitutionally when DOMA was enacted. The wisest course is for the Supreme Court to resist demands to prematurely end the national debate over the future of marriage. The court should respect the freedom of both Congress and citizens to affirm a bedrock social institution that diverse cultures and faiths have honored throughout the history of Western Civilization,” said Austin Nimocks, senior counsel for the ADF. [more]

John Bursch at SCOTUS Blog: Parsing Supreme Court oral argument transcripts to predict outcomes is a bit like using tea leaves to predict the future; neither method is very reliable. But at the risk of being left out of the prediction derby entirely, we can consider potential outcomes on a probability spectrum.

C-FAM: In the current case before the Court on Proposition 8, which will decide whether the people of California were within their rights to place man-woman marriage in the California Constitution, claims of evolving international standards are being made.

How Appealing has compiled a lengthy list of coverage on this week’s arguments here.

Byron Babione of the Alliance Defending Freedom & Ron Prentice of Protect Marriage on the Janet Mefferd Show. | Broadcast featuring Byron Babione: MP3 audio 19:18 mins | The Broadcast featuring Ron Prentice is here.

Dan Caleb appeared on Dan Celia’s Financial Issues Program on AFR Radio with Guest Host Fred Jackson. | MP3 audio 17:15 mins

Noah Feldman at Bloomberg: To understand the mess that would result if the court struck down DOMA without finding a general right to same-sex marriage, consider what would happen if the federal government recognized marriages performed in states that allow gay couples to marry while continuing to deny marital status to couples in other states.

Gerard Bradley at SCOTUS Blog: The Justices should be wary of the “science” route. Consider just the leading decisions mentioned during the arguments as instructive parallels to the instant cases. Consider, for example, Plessy v. Ferguson. Justice Sotomayor said that the Court let segregation “perk” for fifty years, until the Justices finally pulled the plug in 1954. But the Plessy Court did not wait upon social scientific evidence of the negative effects of segregation, as Sotomayor implied that it did. That Court was instead party to – at best – a sordid compromise with entrenched racist elements in American society.

Advocates of same-sex marriages can’t back up claims about positive long-term effects.

Wall Street Opinion Journal: Editorial board member Joe Rago on the Supreme Court oral testimony on California’s Prop. 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act. Photo credit: Associated Press.

Ken Klukowski at Breitbart: The likely swing vote on this issue of “standing” is Chief Justice John Roberts. Kennedy tipped his hand that he might regard the official sponsors of Prop 8—which the California Supreme Court unanimously held are empowered by the California Constitution to defend the measure in court—as meeting the U.S. Constitution’s requirements for the lawsuit to proceed.

Michael Foust at Baptist Press: Following are commonly asked questions about the Supreme Court’s two days of arguments in the gay marriage cases.

Tom Goldstein at SCOTUS Blog: Students of Windsor and Hollingsworth have always recognized a basic tension between the theories of gay-rights advocates in the cases. The challenge to DOMA is undergirded by a sense that marriage is a matter for state rather than federal regulation. The challenge to Proposition 8 is a direct challenge to just such a decision by a state.

LifeSiteNews: Thousands of Americans from all religions, races, and political parties gathered around the nation as the Supreme Court heard the first of two cases concerning the definition of marriage, with two boisterous and sometimes clashing crowds meeting outside the Supreme Court. (see Media Reseach video report here)

Wall Street Journal Video: Proposition 8 co-counselor Austin Nimocks discusses what the gay marriage case in the high court hinges on, and what he thinks are the consequences of the ban getting struck down.

PBS (video and transcript): We return to today’s same-sex marriage debate with one of our own, featuring two attorneys who were at the court today, California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who supports overturning the gay marriage ban, and Austin Nimocks, counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which supports Proposition 8.

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUS Blog: If the Supreme Court can find its way through a dense procedural thicket, and confront the constitutionality of the federal law that defined marriage as limited to a man and a woman, that law may be gone, after a seventeen-year existence. That was the overriding impression after just under two hours of argument Wednesday on the fate of the Defense of Marriage Act.

The How Appealing Blog links to numerous reports on today’s arguments in Windsor v. United States.

Austin R. Nimocks on the Hugh Hewitt Show | MP3 audio 5:36 mins