Posted on 06/29/2013 3:38:21 AM PDT by Olog-hai
Same-sex marriages that were outlawed in California 4½ years ago resumed in a rush after a federal appeals court took the “unusual, but not unprecedented” step of freeing couples to obtain marriage licenses, before the U.S. Supreme Court had issued its final judgment in a challenge of the state’s voter-approved gay marriage ban. …
Although the couples fought for the right to wed for years, their nuptials came together in a flurry when a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a brief order Friday afternoon dissolving a stay it had imposed on gay marriages while the lawsuit challenging the ban advanced through the courts. …
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We are now an autocracy in a holding pattern waiting for the totalitarian dictators to push aside the legislative branch to assume the full totalitarian powers and right to rule.
Every body knows what it is and what it isn't!
LORD they mock YOU. LORD we love YOU. Please save us and America and please forgive us our sins.
Amen
I still don’t understand how the California supreme court found a dully passed constitutional amendment unconstitutional.
how is that possible?
This never even should of been in federal court.
How is that possible?
It’s a democrat controlled state it’s like one big Cook county.
but what I mean is... has there EVER in the history of our country been a time when a court has ruled a constitutional amendment unconstitutional?
seems impossible to me.
The California supreme court did no such thing. It upheld Prop 8 in Strauss v. Horton. The California supreme court doesn’t decide questions of U.S. constitutionality, no state court does. The U.S district court is the proper place to first hear those cases, and in the absence of a valid appeal, the district court’s decisions are just as statutorily binding as a U.S. supreme court decision.
The voters can still be heard but the only available path is amending the U.S. constitution. The U.S. constitution has supremacy. No state law or state constitution can violate it. I don’t care if 100% of the voters vote for it. If you don’t understand the process, you can’t be part of the solution.
thanks for clearing this up for me.
But didn’t the US Supreme Court just say this should be left to the states? So, if it should be left to the states, and the California supreme court ruled it constitutional ... then wouldn’t gay marriage still be illegal there?
Yes and no. Your confusion comes from conflating the DOMA ruling and the Prop 8 ruling.
The DOMA ruling basically got the feds out of the marriage business. It says it will recognize, for its own bureaucratic purposes, any union deemed legal by a state.
The district court ruling on Prop 8 says that prop 8 sepcifically was unconstitutional, but there may be a way for a state to enact a similar law/constitutional amendment that doesn’t violate the U.S. constitution. The feasibility of that is beyond my layman’s knowledge level.
You can use Roe vs. Wade as an analogy. Technically that decision left the question of abortion mostly up to the states. We could end 95% of all abortions in red states tomorrow if the idiots in charge would just add exemptions for rape, incest, and health of the mother. But instead, they keep putting through laws that we know will be struck down. (I know all the arguments against this approach, and it’s great that people want to stick to their principals, but in the meantime, their principals are allowing 1000s of preventable abortions to continue.)
Basically, there may be a way for a state to do it that doesn’t violate the constitution, but prop 8 wasn’t it.
I was doing more research on this and it looks like the US Supreme Court simply said the plantiffs didn’t have standing. The immediate result being the district court ruling stands (for now).
However, if a Republican governor got elected, he would have standing... and “could” then take it back to the supreme court to have gay marriage ended again in California.
Maybe, two problems with that.
One, I assume there is a time limit to appeals, I don’t know what that might be if someone wants to enlighten us, and the next election isn’t until 2014.
Two, the California republican is a different animal. I offer this article, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3037117/posts, as evidence. There is no reason to think any republican governor of California would choose to appeal. Schwarzenegger declined to appeal before Brown did, after all.
The more likely event is this: Some gay couple in Georgia, or another state with a prop 8-like law/amendment, uses this decision to challenge their state’s definition of marriage. The lower courts would probably be forced to side with the gay couple because the previous ruling is now statutory law. The Ga. governor would certainly appeal that ruling all the way to the supreme court, giving the supremes the opportunity to reverse both decisions, thereby reinstating prop 8.
Of course, the supreme court having the balls to do this is unlikely, they would probably frame their ruling so narrowly it only applied to the Ga case leaving Ca alone. On the bright side, the opposite is also true. If the supremes side with the gays in Ga, they would probably frame that decision narrowly also so we don’t have to worry about nationwide gay marriage. If that were to happen, you can kiss goodbye any chance of a U.S. constitutional amendment to fix things nationwide after gay marriage is “normalized” to that extent.
I just checked. It looks like the time limit is 30 days, 60 days in a case involving the federal government, so we’re already out of time.
Maybe it would be changed to 30 days from the supremes decision that the last appeal lacked standing, but either way, the next gubernatorial election in Ca is 2014, so no dice. For now, it’s settled in Ca., probably until the U.S. constitution can be amended.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/2107
It seems to me the people of California need to simply pass another constitutional amendment forcing the state to always defend the laws of the state when they are challenged in federal court.
Take away the bennies....see if they still rush to marry.
Agree maybe they fear back tracking and look the fool?.
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