I guess I will repost.

We do things right once in a while.

Congrats to ourselves, particularly to those who were denied their rights before.

I thought a thread with a clear OP that actually explained what the issue was might be needed. Considering the courts just overturned a millennium of bigotry.

Wooo!

So were they granted purely on the "hey fucktards they should have equal marriage rights" or more of a "you weren't allowed to ban equal marriage rights because of these legality/technicality" way? Was a positive statement for equal marriage rights, or a negative statement on how/whether they were banned?

You can read the full opinion here, it's actually only 30 some pages and is an interesting read. But it was a combination of both.

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf

I know I can read the full opinion...or SCOTUS blog...if we're going to have random political threads on a webDip forum rather than a relevant forum I thought I'd also ask questions. Unless the point was simply to publish the headline as if we weren't already inundated with the news, and then point us elsewhere afterwords?

Well it was mainly to celebrate a massive step forward in ending over 1,000 years of bigotry. But sure, I think a conversation/questions would be interesting too. I haven't read the dissenting opinions yet, so when I do I'll give answering your questions a shot.

http://imgur.com/87WS5Rb

Congratulations to everyone, especially those who worked tirelessly for years on this issue.

It's nice waking up in a better country than the one you went to bed in.

Pride weekend is going to be insane.

This is a great day for many and one worth celebrating for all. I just hope that the Supreme Court and similar bodies in our government continue to promote freedom and prevent the useless violation of basic rights on the part of smaller governments rather than changing course now, particularly when a number of new justices are installed in the coming years.

There is not even a shadow of a legal argument in the opinion. This should perturb people. If it does not, please at least consider reading the Chief Justice's dissent.

I get it that many people are very happy with the outcome. Congratulations, good. But there is going to come a day when a Supreme Court case comes down whose outcome you are not happy with. On that day, do you want it to be the Court nakedly saying, "We think this is better, and we have the power, so we're doing it"? Will you -- that day -- be happy that they have arrogated to themselves the power to do that? Or would you like at least a pretense of legal interpretation?

The democratic process was churning along on this issue, in the messy way that is the only way it ever works when it works at all. Now it has ended, and people are celebrating. Nobody who wants this country to continue as a democracy should be happy (about the process, anyway -- by all means be happy about the result if you wanted it).

This country isn't a democracy.

From Scalia's dissent:

"Judges are selected precisely for their skill as lawyers; whether they reflect the policy views of a particular constituency is not (or should no
t be) relevant. Not surprisingly then, the Federal Judiciary is hardly a cross-section
Take, for example, this Court, which consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful law-yers18 who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School. Four of the nine are natives of New York City. Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States. Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between. Not a single Southwesterner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count). Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans19 ), or even a Protestant of any denomination. The strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s social upheaval would be irrelevant if they were functioning as judges , answering the legal question whether the American people had ever ratified a constitutional provision that was understood to proscribe the traditional definition of marriage. But of course the Justices in today’s majority are not voting on that basis; *they say they are not*
. And to allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation. "

Too bad, jmo.

The 14th Amendment provides the grounds for this decision. How much legal talk and lawyer blabber do you need to hear? Just read the Constitution.

lol.

"The 14th Amendment provides the grounds for this decision. How much legal talk and lawyer blabber do you need to hear? Just read the Constitution."

But if he did that then he couldn't try and hide his bigotry behind an invalid argument.

Check out the Chief Justice's dissent, bo, which is one of the best written opinions I have ever seen. You may disagree with it, but you will be smarter for having considered its arguments.

For reference, an excerpt from the 14th amendment:
"No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Ditto at jmo.

Query. Is there any facet of your political beliefs that you would be perturbed to have enacted by fiat by a majority of the Supreme Court justices? Something that you think should happen, but which you think should happen legislatively?

As for the argument that the Supreme Court is too overreaching, I cannot stop laughing at that one. Do you not understand that the courts never had the power of judicial review? They took it, because it was necessary as a check/balance against other parts of government.

The government does not have the right to impose bigoted constraints against people. Yet they did it anyways. No part of government besides the courts have the power to correct that problem, and they only have that power because they solidified it in 1803 with Marbury v Madison after taking it 1794 by declaring an act of congress unconstitutional. By arguing the Court is overreaching he is going against the history of taking the power needed to stop the overreaching legislative branch, which means he's effectively condemning many of the decisions he's been a part of.

I applaud the SCOTUS for taking the step of curbing laws that are inherently unequal, the very thing the Constitution and Amendments were made to stop, it is making the Constitution server as a living document as intended by it's authors.

Thanks Brankl. I do know the fourteenth amendment. But pretenses aside, all clauses need interpretation. All laws treat people unequally, and some rationale is needed for why. This case provided none.

Perhaps it could have. Maybe there's a knock-down argument for why the fourteenth amendment means gay marriage is required. If so, how sad that the majority chose not to give it.

Oh I understand the foundation of the argument semck, I just do not agree with it.

jmo,

The courts did, in fact, have the power of judicial review. It was extremely clear in Federalist 78, which was written before the Constitution was even ratified, for example.

"The government does not have the right to impose bigoted constraints against people."

OK. Who defines what a bigoted restraint is, and what a necessary definition is? That's at issue, not whether they can impose such restraints. The justices are lawyers, not moral philosophers. As a lawyer, I can promise you that you don't want lawyers making your moral decisions for you.

So, for example, is the fact that polyamorous people can't get group marriages unconstitutional? Is it bigotry? Some of them would certainly say so. I'm not saying, by the way, that that is the same as gay marriage morally. I'm saying that there is no clear legal distinction, and if it's just a moral one, well, haven't we just said that it's the Supreme Court, not the legislature, that decides such things? Should it be?

Or perhaps you think it *is* unconstitutional.

And call me bigoted all you want, but please don't pretend that that's an argument, or any way to rule a country.

jmo,

Nothing in your posts suggests that you understand the foundation of the argument. But I don't suppose you're going to expose your mind to a well-written explanation of it, such as Roberts's, are you? Oh well. Nothing I can do about that.

@OBGK

Well said, brother.

I find it cute you think you know the law better then 5 members of the Supreme Court. I find it disgusting you continue to hide behind that argument to defend bigotry.

As for your "argument" -- the Chief Justice is keenly aware of the fact that Supreme Court sometimes needs to declare acts unconstitutional. What he is also aware of -- and what has been one of the central questions in Constitutional scholarship for the last 50 years -- is that, if any form of democracy is to survive, there needs to be some principled line about when the court can and can't do it, and the line can't be "whenever we disagree with a law." The CJ's argument is that the Court has stepped across all of the lines people have tried to give, and has explicitly refused to suggest a replacement, and that (qua decades of Supreme Court and academic warnings) this is immensely destructive of democracy.

But I'm sure you understand his argument much better without having read either it or any scholarly discussion whatsoever of the problems that come with the benefits of a right-protecting Supreme Court.