The Supreme Court hears arguments on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act during six hours of oral arguments spread over three days starting this coming Monday. What’s all the hoohah about, you ask? Can’t remember what caused the whole uproar? Your friends at NPR are here to help, with a brief and cogent summary of the issues at hand that even non-lawyers can digest.
Category Justice
America moves one step closer to gay marriage rights, and the silence from opponents speaks volumes
Today a panel of a federal appeals court in California ruled that state’s Proposition 8, an amendment to the state constitution approved by voters in 2008 to outlaw gay marriage, is an unconstitutional violation of the right to equal protection under the law. The appeals panel agreed with the federal district court decision which found marriage to be a fundamental right protected by the U.S. Constitution, and that there has to be a good reason to limit the exercise of that right to only certain people—in this case, one-man-and-one-woman couples.
Although the Constitution permits communities to enact most laws they believe to be desirable, it requires that there be at least a legitimate reason for the passage of a law that treats different classes of people differently. There was no such reason that Proposition 8 could have been enacted.
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All that Proposition 8 accomplished was to take away from same-sex couples the right to be granted marriage licenses and thus legally to use the designation of “marriage,” which symbolizes state legitimization and societal recognition of their committed relationships. Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California…
The ruling was limited in scope and does not address whether “same-sex couples may ever be denied the right to marry.” The court found that since “California had already extended to committed same-sex couples both the incidents of marriage and the official designation of ‘marriage,’ and Proposition 8’s only effect was to take away that important and legally significant designation, while leaving in place all of its incidents,” the court was able to rule on Proposition 8’s constitutionality without need to address the larger issue. But that is the grounds where the ultimate appeal will be argued. Supporters of this discriminatory and downright uncharitable proposition have the choice of appealing the case to either the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit or the United States Supreme Court; since that’s where we know the case is going to have to go eventually, I say let’s get on with it.
I’ll continue to argue that there is no good reason for gay people to be treated differently than straight people under the law when it comes to the exercise of the fundamental right to marry, or in fact the exercise of any fundamental civil right. Various religions may restrict their rites and sacraments among their members according to their beliefs, but civil law protects the rights of all Americans and there’s no room for exceptions that serve only to salve the theological objections of one religion or another. That’s what the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment is all about: no restrictions on an individual’s religious practice, but no religion’s law takes precedence in civil life.
Many of the voices opposed to gay marriage claim to believe they are protecting “family values” or “conservative values.” Fine; I take them at their word. What I’m arguing in favor of are American values: equality; liberty; fairness; tolerance; justice. The argument was made most persuasively by the plaintiffs’ attorneys in this case, Republican Ted Olson and Democrat David Boies. In August 2010, when the federal district court overturned Proposition 8, Olson made the case so clearly in a discussion with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. Click here to look at the clip and read the transcript.
We do not put the Bill of Rights to a vote….We ask judges to make sure that when we vote for something we’re not depriving minorities of their constitutional rights.
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…we have a 14th Amendment that guarantees equal rights to all citizens. It’s not judicial activism when judges do what the Constitution requires them to do, and they follow the precedent of previous decisions of the Supreme Court.
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If 7 million Californians were to decide that we should have separate but equal schools, or that we would send some of our citizens to separate drinking fountains, or have them be in the back of the bus, that would be unconstitutional.
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…we believe that a conservative value is stable relationships and a stable community and loving individuals coming together and forming a basis that is a building block of our society, which includes marriage…We also believe that it’s an important conservative value to sustain the rights of liberty of our citizens and to eliminate discrimination on invidious bases, whether it’s race, or sex or sexual orientation. It should be a liberal and a conservative value. It is a fundamental American value.
As I’ve argued before, the tide has turned. Homosexuals serve openly in the armed forces; more states have legalized marriage between two people of the same sex, and are giving up efforts to stop gay people from adopting children; and now, when One Million Moms (hardly…it’s the American Family Association) calls on J.C. Penney to drop Ellen DeGeneres as its spokeswoman because she is openly gay, even Bill O’Reilly thinks it’s a McCarthy-esque “witch hunt”! Surely, the times they are a-changing.
You wouldn’t mind if we just arrested you a little bit, would you, since you look like you might hate America?
Did you ever run across something that’s so bizarre, so out there, so freakin’ weird, that you think you must have heard it or read it wrong? I did recently, when I read the story that the Congress of These United States was ready to pass a law making it perfectly legal for the government to use the Army to arrest American citizens here in America and hold them in custody, indefinitely, without charges or trial, if in the government’s wisdom that person was a terrorist threat.
Wait, what?
Yes. Apparently still shivering with fear over the possibility of another September 11-type attack, Congress was ready to pass an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would authorize the use of the military as a domestic police force and give clearance to arrest and detain citizens on the mere suspicion of terrorist complicity; there would be no messy and time-consuming need for formal charges to be filed, or for due process or habeas corpus to be respected. Congress seemed confident that the American sheeple either wouldn’t notice or were so scared of terrorists that they would happily line up to trade in some of their Constitutionally-protected liberties for an unkeepable promise of safety in the future and the warm confidence that comes from thoughtlessly submitting to government authority over their lives.
(When, please, are we going to stop being scared of terrorists? I’m not saying we should ignore threats, or even that we should demand to keep our shoes on at the airport, but living our lives in quaking fear of possible terrorism isn’t much different from looking over your shoulder all day every day just in case there’s a tornado following you.)
But Congress didn’t pass that law, because enough people saw what was coming and made enough noise to shame the members into backing off. They approved an additional amendment that specifically disallows the arresting-American-citizens-here-in-America-without-charges part.
What in the wide, wide world of sports were they thinking? Seriously: what drives the thought process of supposedly mature and rational adults to think it’d be OK to do this, even though the Constitution expressly forbids using the military as a domestic police force and forbids indefinite detention without charges?
One of the richly ironic results of this misadventure is that it caused political enemies and philosophical opposites to unite: the “Say what?” reaction came from liberals and conservatives and moderates, who all recognized a ham-handed attempt to take a big bite out of the personal liberties that America promises to all of its citizens. And they rose together—as Americans—to emulate Buckley and yell “Stop!”.
The lesson? Keep your eyes and your ears open, because someone will try something like this again; they always do. It’s up to us—all of us—to see that they don’t get away with it.
OK, now that you’ve eaten all your vegetables, here’s dessert:
Thanks to Tom the Dancing Bug and his friend Ruben Bolling.
New information on the Penn State mess may exonerate the graduate assistant of cowardice (unless he’s lying)
Take a minute to check out The Morning Call, the Allentown, PA newspaper that’s been breaking news on the Penn State scandal. This morning it reports that the graduate assistant in the Penn State football program who’s taken a ton of flak from a lot of people (including me) for not doing anything to stop the rape of a child he says he witnessed in the locker room shower may actually have done exactly what he should have done. The paper has seen an e-mail that Mike McQueary sent to a friend of his a week ago in which he says he did stop the assault he claims he witnessed, and he did report it to police. The grand jury report, the basis for all public information on the case up to now, doesn’t indicate that McQueary took any action against accused child rapist Jerry Sandusky when he caught him in the shower with a 10 year old, and says McQueary only talked to his own father and then to football coach Joe Paterno about what he’d seen.
If true: good for you, McQueary, and apologies for the unwarranted criticism.
OR NOT:
Now all the polices say, uh, nope, we got no record that McQueary reported the crime to us…so sorry.
Ball back in your court, McQueary…
Joe didn’t do anything wrong? Oh yeah, he did
The fact that he is who he is, and that he did what he did, makes it even worse than it already is.
For most of us who are not in western Pennsylvania, this came out of the blue last week: a grand jury indicted a former Penn State University football coach on accusations he sexually assaulted young boys. When I first saw the story in the paper last weekend, and read that head coach Joe Paterno had been told by an eyewitness that Jerry Sandusky assaulted a young boy in the shower and Paterno had relayed the information to his immediate superior but done nothing else about it, I felt like he should have done more. But then I turned the page, because I don’t care about college football or Penn State, and because I didn’t want to really think about what was actually going on here. Shame on me.
By Wednesday, the winningest coach in major college football history had been fired by his university, but he was not the only person in Happy Valley shamed by the incident. Far from it. More’s the pity.
Sandusky, the long-time Penn State assistant coach who gets a lot of the credit for the team’s history of turning out great defensive players—especially linebackers—stands accused of being a serial pedophile, of sexually assaulting at least eight boys over a 15 year period. He also founded a charitable organization called The Second Mile in 1997, which provided services to children in need.
One of the saddest ironies of the sexual abuse charges against Sandusky that stunned and sickened the nation last weekend is that if the allegations that he assaulted eight boys over a 15-year period are true, he may have been allowed to prey on those children in large part because no one at Penn State would go that second mile for his victims.
Sports Illustrated’s Phil Taylor is one of many who’ve made the point: where the hell were all the adults at Penn State who should have done something about this? I’ll tell you where—they were all busy protecting a wealthy university and its vaunted football program and its reputation, for surely those things were more important than the lives, and the futures, of pre-teenaged children whose parents had turned to Penn State for help. What is Sandusky accused of doing? McClatchy summarizes the timeline here, and it shows just how many people at Penn State didn’t stand up for these kids.
Sandusky was cashed out as the team’s defensive coordinator after admitting to having showered with a 10 year old boy, but the school and the coach only took his job away—Sandusky was allowed to keep using university facilities for his charity’s activities.
In 2000 a janitor saw Sandusky having sex with a young boy in a campus football building and told his supervisor, but neither of them called the police.
In 2002 a graduate assistant (a former player; a grown man) saw Sandusky having sex with a young boy and did not do anything to stop the assault that was going on right in front of his eyes; he did not call the police, not even the university police; he went home and called his own father and asked what he should do; and it wasn’t until the next day that he told Paterno what he’d seen. Paterno told the athletic director, and left it at that. About this time, school officials told Sandusky not to bring children to the campus any more, although he himself still used the facilities.
Paterno made a lot of his reputation for insisting that Penn State was different from other big college football programs, that Penn State did things the right way—it followed the rules, it graduated its student athletes, and it was successful on the field. Bull. Despite the high graduation rate and the championships and the bowl games, we now know that Penn State was just as sleazy as any other program. Maybe more so. Ohio State’s in trouble for its players selling equipment to get discounts on their tattoos; Miami is in trouble (again) over impermissible benefits given to players by a booster. But no one else is in the news for making the conscious decision to protect their own ass by turning a blind eye to the alleged child rapist in their midst. For years.
Where was the “Hey, you can’t do that” reaction the first time someone saw this man naked with a child? Where was the unconscious and visceral “stop that” response? Where was the call to the cops? Where is the humanity?
Yesterday, Penn State played its first football game in the post-Paterno era. It lost the game. But the university community may have taken the first baby steps to recognizing what’s important in life, certainly more important than a university’s bruised ego or loss of financial support.
"It felt like we all banded together. And it wasn’t just about football," said Melissa Basinger, a 2005 Penn State grad who made the trip from Charlotte, N.C. "It was about coming together as a school, and showing the country, world or whatever that this does not define who we are."
We’ll see.
HEY, IT'S PAT RYAN'S BLOG! 