homesmillbrae.com » Defense Of Marriage Act

Proposition 8 same-sex marriage battle heads to Supreme Court: Bay Area …

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 12:55:42 +0000

From a cupcake bakery in Oakland and a Latino church in San Jose to the snowy steps of the U.S. Supreme Court, Bay Area residents are anxiously awaiting arguments to begin Tuesday in the contentious and historic same-sex marriage debate that began on the steps of San Francisco City Hall.

“It’s the civil rights issue of our time,” said Jordan Haedtler, of Oakland, who traveled to Washington and has been camping out in the wet snow in front of the Supreme Court for three days hoping to snag a seat for Tuesday’s arguments.

“We always said if it went all the way to the Supreme Court, we’d go,” said Haedtler, who is straight but wants his gay friends to gain the right to marry.

Whether they have a direct stake

in the issue or not, people across the Bay Area are closely following a case that challenges traditional notions of family, but one that many believe is a fundamental issue of equality. Tuesday, the justices will hear arguments over whether California’s voter-approved same-sex marriage ban, Proposition 8, is unconstitutional. On Wednesday, the court takes up the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which bars same-sex couples from receiving federal benefits.

The court’s decisions in the landmark cases are expected in June, more than nine years after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom defied state law by allowing gay weddings at City Hall. California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who was San Francisco’s district attorney when the first gay

weddings were performed there, has a reserved seat in the courtroom.

So does San Franciscan Jean Podrasky, who is the first cousin of Chief Justice John Roberts and traveled to Washington this week with her lesbian partner. Despite his conservative reputation, Roberts sided with the majority last year upholding President Barack Obama’s health-care law and is considered unpredictable on same-sex marriage.

In an open letter she wrote for the National Center for Lesbian Rights published on Monday, Podrasky called Roberts “a good man” who is “wise enough to see that society is becoming more accepting of the humanity of same-sex couples.”

It is an issue, however, that still divides the state and country. But just as ?Obama’s position on same-sex marriage “evolved” since he first took office in 2009, many have changed their attitudes. While 52 percent of voters approved the Proposition 8 ban in the 2008 election, a Field Poll last month shows 61 percent of California voters approve of same-sex marriage now. Only 32 percent disapprove.

Nestor Morales, a pastor at Amor Agape church in South San Jose, is one of them. While he isn’t “crusading” against gay marriage, he hopes the court upholds Proposition 8.

“We love gay people, and Jesus loves them, too. But we are just going to maintain our ground that marriage is sacred, and is between a man and a woman,” Morales said. “We are not judges; God will judge. God is the highest authority, and he is going to judge even the judges.”

Henry Heller, 85, lives in an assisted living facility in Gilroy and said the same-sex marriage debate is one more sign that the “Democrats’ war on religion is paying off.”

Marriage, he said, should remain between a man and a woman. “If two women want to live together or two guys, all right, fine,” he said, “but I don’t think they should be considered man and wife.”

Angella ?Tai, a 34-year-old real estate agent from Los Altos, says she hopes people will change their minds like her conservative Chinese mother did.

“It took me years with my mother, but she has changed her point of view and absolutely adores my fiancée,” said Tai, 34, who plans to wed her partner next summer. “We would like it to be legal. In our hearts we really want that.”

But the case is bigger than that, she said. “We have the opportunity to become a better nation, a nation of equality and a nation of fairness.”

It’s an ideal shared by Dashiel Ridolfi-Starr, the 17-year-old son of Linda Starr and Cookie Ridolfi of San Jose, who have been a couple for 25 years. The high school senior and his older sister were conceived through artificial insemination. While his mothers have no immediate plans to marry, the whole family is fixated on the case.

“It would allow my family to have the same opportunities that every other family has and to be perceived as every other family is,” Ridolfi-Starr said, “not just some makeshift collection of relatives.”

In Oakland, Janet Appel has seen firsthand the power of marriage among same-sex couples. She performed the first gay marriage ceremony in Alameda County in 2008 during the five months gay marriage was legal in California before Proposition 8 banned it.

“For them to have lost that right is just gut-wrenching,” said Appel, a volunteer deputy marriage commissioner for the county clerk-recorder’s office. “When they bury Prop. 8, please dear God, it will be redemption for most of us that believe that all people are equal.”

Kevin Bell is 36, a veteran raised in Livermore and living in Manteca who calls the whole debate “silly.”

“I think we’re going to look back in 20 years and say ‘Why were we still arguing about this stuff?’ ” said Bell, who is married with three children and runs That Takes The Cake bakery in Oakland. “I don’t have a huge stake in the whole thing. It doesn’t affect me directly. But it just seems … why shouldn’t we allow people to be who they want to be with and have the same rights as everyone else?”

Staff writers Katy Murphy and Mike Rosenberg contributed to this report.

Article source: http://www.insidebayarea.com/breaking-news/ci_22866977/same-sex-marriage-battle-heads-supreme-court-bay.html

Gay marriage: The long road to Supreme Court

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 00:30:28 +0000

Click photo to enlarge

A little over nine years ago, when then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom decided to flout California law and hand out marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples, it provoked such a local and national furor that even his own political party and his Catholic neighborhood base wanted to tar and feather him.

At the time, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry couldn’t distance himself enough from Newsom’s gay rights stunt. No state had yet to legalize gay marriage. Opinion polls firmly and consistently showed the majority of Americans, including in California, opposed same-sex marriage. There was not a civil rights lawyer in the country ready to challenge gay marriage in a conservative U.S. Supreme Court.

But now, as the Supreme Court this week takes on gay marriage for the first time in history, attitudes on this generation’s most contentious civil rights issue have shifted dramatically since couples lined up at San Francisco City Hall to take part in Newsom’s short-lived wedding ceremonies.

“I thought perhaps it would happen in my lifetime,” Newsom, California’s lieutenant governor, said of the Supreme Court deciding gay marriage. “But I never imagined it would happen within a decade.”

Shifting views

No doubt, the nine justices who will hear the legal challenge to California’s Proposition 8 on Tuesday and the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act the following day are well aware of

the pace of events on same-sex marriage. The president now supports gay marriage. Opinion polls show a significant majority of Americans now endorse it, as well.

Dozens of prominent conservative Republicans have lined up against gay marriage bans, as well as hundreds of the nation’s most powerful businesses, including Apple and Google. And gay marriage is now legal in nine states.

But despite the apparent momentum, the real question looming over this week’s proceedings is whether this is the right time in history for the Supreme Court to end the legal debate. Has the societal shift finished its arc? As gay marriage foes are quick to emphasize, 37 states outlaw same-sex marriage, still a vast majority.

Indeed, as civil rights struggles go, this one has arguably simmered for less time than the battles over school integration and interracial marriage when they reached the high court decades ago. By the time the Supreme Court declared laws against interracial marriage unconstitutional in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, only about a dozen states still banned the unions, although public sentiment remained against such marriages.

Jim Campbell, a lawyer for Alliance Defending Freedom, which backs Proposition 8, stresses the political battle over gay marriage is “at some point in the middle. … The Supreme Court should resist demands to prematurely end the national debate.”

Legal experts agree the Supreme Court has always been reluctant to get too far in front on social issues, and that will weigh heavily on how far they will go in the same-sex marriage cases.

“Given the moving picture, my hunch is that they are going to move incrementally, not dramatically,” said Jane Shachter, a Stanford University law professor.

California’s moment

On Tuesday, the court will first consider California’s epic struggle over same-sex marriage rights, which has reached a crucial point in the larger battle over whether any state can forbid gay and lesbian couples to wed.

The Supreme Court is reviewing a federal appeals court’s decision last year declaring California’s 2008 voter-approved ban unconstitutional because it stripped away a previous right to marry for gay and lesbian couples. In May 2008, the California Supreme Court struck down the laws barring same-sex marriage, allowing more than 18,000 couples to wed before voters approved Proposition 8 the following November.

Before same-sex marriage supporters took their fight to the federal courts, the state Supreme Court rejected a challenge to Proposition 8. The court found voters’ decision to amend the state constitution trumped its authority to interfere. Only Justice Carlos Moreno dissented.

Backed by a powerhouse legal team led by former Republican U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson and trial lawyer David Boies, two same-sex couples triggered the Supreme Court case by challenging Proposition 8 in the federal courts. Berkeley’s Kristin Perry and Sandy Stier were one of those couples.

“We felt (turning to the courts) was a better approach because it would be a permanent solution,” Stier said in an interview last week. “People were voting on our rights at the ballot box.”

At that time, not everyone in the gay rights movement agreed with the strategy, expressing concern Olson and Boies had moved too quickly to push the issue into the federal courts and toward the U.S. Supreme Court. Even in 2008, just a trickle of states were moving to legalize gay marriage, politicians were against it and opinion polls, while shifting, remained unfavorable.

“I think many of us did have concerns,” said Jon Davidson, legal director for Lambda Legal, a leading gay rights group. “I don’t think anybody thought we’d see quite the progress we’ve made and the number of advances we’ve made since the (Proposition case has been pending.”

Added Therese Stewart, a San Francisco chief assistant city attorney: “Have we been anxious a little bit? Of course.”

So far, the lawsuit has won at every turn. Former San Francisco Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker struck down Proposition 8 in 2010, and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed last year, although in a much narrower ruling that, if endorsed by the Supreme Court, would limit the impact only to California’s marriage laws.

Just last month, the Obama administration threw its weight behind same-sex couples, calling Proposition 8 unconstitutional and for the first time standing against a state’s right to ban same-sex marriage.

Proposition 8 supporters, however, have continued to defend traditional marriage, arguing states can restrict licenses to heterosexual couples. In briefs to the Supreme Court, they argue government has a compelling interest in banning gay marriage — crucial under anti-discrimination law — because of the importance of procreation and child-rearing to the institution.

Twenty states have sided with that argument, although 13 aligned with same-sex couples. Conservatives believe it will be hard for the Supreme Court to ignore the 37 states that retain gay marriage bans.

“You’re talking about a rather dramatic decision,” said John Eastman, chairman of the National Organization for Marriage and a law professor.

Moreno, now retired from the state Supreme Court, believes the time is right for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the law. He hopes his reasoning, that Proposition 8 violates same-sex couples’ equal protection rights, will be vindicated.

“I think it’s not a big leap in terms of the law,” said Moreno, also a former federal judge. “But,” he cautions, “the idea it should remain with the states, let the people decide, that also will resonate with a number of the justices.”

The issue of benefits

The challenge to the federal gay marriage restrictions, known as the Defense of Marriage Act, is considered a more straightforward opportunity for the justices to jump into the legal fray. It may not carry the broader implications of taking on state laws that dot the country from Alabama to Idaho.

In the case to be heard Wednesday, the justices will review a federal appeals court’s ruling that found it unconstitutional to deny federal benefits to married same-sex couples. The case involves Edith Windsor, a New York woman who was forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal estate taxes when her spouse died because federal officials would not recognize their marriage rights.

At its core, the issue is whether the federal government can deny benefits, which range from tax exemptions to Social Security, to couples who marry in states such as New York that have legalized same-sex marriage.

The Obama administration has sided with Windsor and other similar challenges to the federal law around the country, including a case involving San Francisco couple Karen Golinski and Amy Cunninghis who married before Proposition 8 was passed. There is high anxiety now that the issue has reached the grandest legal stage. The Supreme Court could issue a ruling at the end of June that amounts to a summer blockbuster on same-sex marriage rights, or decide history is not ready and let the fight over gay marriage percolate further.

In both the federal and Proposition 8 cases, the justices do not even have to address the broader legal questions surrounding same-sex marriage. The Supreme Court must first resolve whether Proposition 8′s backers can defend the law when the governor and attorney general refuse to do so, and the same uncertainty has clouded House Republicans’ right to challenge the Defense of Marriage Act in place of the executive branch.

If the Supreme Court finds those gay marriage opponents can’t defend the laws on their own, the two cases could end without any historic proclamations on same-sex marriage rights from the nation’s high court.

But for Golinski and others watching the legal and political conflict over same-sex marriage accelerate, the hope is that the Supreme Court resolves the issue once and for all.

“There is a lot of uncertainty,” Golinski said, preparing to head to Washington, D.C., to attend the arguments. “And most people don’t like to live their personal lives with this level of uncertainty. I still find it all somewhat stressful.”

Howard Mintz covers legal affairs. Contact him at 408-286-0236. Follow him at Twitter.com/hmintz.

Article source: http://www.insidebayarea.com/breaking-news/ci_22853888/gay-marriage-long-road-supreme-court