Oral Arguments: 12-144.exe – 12-144a.pdf.
Addressing the merits of the case during the first of two days of arguments on same-sex marriage, Justice Kennedy voiced sympathy for the children of gay and lesbian couples.
“There’s some 40,000 children in California that live with same-sex parents,” he said, as the justices debated the state’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage. “They want their parents to have full recognition and full status. The voice of those children is important.”
via Justices to Hear Same-Sex Marriage Case Today – NYTimes.com.
Thanks for posting this, V., it’s important. 83 pages?! I may be a naive cock-eyed optimist or an idealistic dreamer but I can’t see that there should even *be* an argument against same sex marriage. Why should same sex couples be treated as somehow less human? What is this -the fifties, the middle ages? Proposition 8 is moronic and inhumane, but it makes me so angry I better shut up before I get a little sweary. Surely Prop. 8 has to be overturned and gay couples allowed dignity and proper acknowledgment.
P.S. E-mail recieved and replied to 🙂
The attorney who is trying to uphold the moronic and inhumane is arguing that the State has a vested interest in procreation, but his argument is pretty much destroyed in this exchange:
JUSTICE BREYER: What precisely is the way in which allowing gay couples to marry would interfere with the vision of marriage as procreation of children that allowing sterile couples of different sexes to marry would not? I mean, there are lots of people who get married who can’t have children …
JUSTICE KAGAN: Well, suppose a State said, Mr. Cooper, suppose a State said that, because we think that the focus of marriage really should be on procreation, we are not going to give marriage licenses anymore to any couple where both people are over the age of 55. Would that be constitutional?
MR. COOPER: No, Your Honor, it would not be constitutional.
JUSTICE KAGAN: Because that’s the same State interest, I would think, you know. If you are over the age of 55, you don’t help us serve the Government’s interest in regulating procreation through marriage. So why is that different?
MR. COOPER: Your Honor, even with respect to couples over the age of 55, it is very rare that both couples — both parties to the couple are infertile, and the traditional - (Laughter.)
JUSTICE KAGAN: No, really, because if the couple — I can just assure you, if both the woman and the man are over the age of 55, there are not a lot of children coming out of that marriage…
Ha! An asinine argument reduced to so much chum.
You Miss Lester have my vote…of pure love.
I thought of this while watching the Parks and Recreation Season Two opener – which I haven’t seen before – a few minutes ago. Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope accidentally marries two gay penguins – long story! – and becomes an unwitting hero of the gay community. The next day a pursed-mouth member of some “family” group (who surprise, surprise believe families should be all hetero) turns up not at all pleased at this, saying gay people getting married “spoils marriage for the rest of us”! Later, she wants Leslie to annul the marriage between the penguins or resign 🙂 It’s so hilariously stupid but not any more ludicrous than the real life anti-gay marriage arguments!