Its a big day in the marriage equality movement. While weve had a run of district court decisions overturning state marriage bans as unconstitutional, a federal appeals circuit court is examining a states marriage ban later this morning for the first time since the Prop 8 trial in the 9th Circuit. At 10 am Mountain Time in Denver, a three-judge panel of the 10th Circuit (covering Utah, Oklahoma, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Kansas) will be hearing Utahs appeal of the lower court decision that ruled that states marriage ban unconstitutional. Next week that same panel will hear Oklahomas appeal of a different lower court decision that found that states ban unconstitutional as well. Utahs legal team has been particularly incompetent and sloppy, even setting aside that there just arent any good legal arguments for upholding such bans. Theyve repeatedly requested more time to submit their briefs, more words for their arguments, and more time to argue; they actually had to submit two errata, one for all the typos and mistakes in their original brief, and another to account for four incomplete pages in the original; and at the 11th hour theyve filed a notice admitting that the social science study they had been relying on to attack gay parents has been found paid for by anti-gay sources, produced specifically to try to influence court opinions, intentionally misleading, and essentially reduced to irrelevance by the entire legitimate social science community. The latest argument theyve thrown against the wall, as of this last-minute filing, is that somehow the children of straight parents are harmed when gay people are allowed to marry (how does that happen? they havent yet explained), and the state further indicated that its the children of straight parents for whom the state is concerned, not the children of gay parents who clearly are harmed when their families are denied the legal protections of marriage. If you thought the pro-Prop 8 legal team would be hard to beat in terms of non sequiturs, sheer incompetence, legal malfeasance, and anti-gay animus, Utahs has plumbed new depths. Regardless of what the 10th Circuit rules -- and we likely wont have a ruling for a few months -- one of these two cases or another like them (several other Circuit courts have their own marriage ban appeals coming up in the next few months) seem almost certain to be before the U.S. Supreme Court in the next year or two.
Posted on: Thu, 10 Apr 2014 08:01:26 +0000
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