Great success, if accurate: Big news: According to a source who has seen the 136-page decision, U.S. District Court Judge Walker has ruled Proposition 8, the California voter-approved ban on gay marriage, unconstitutional under both the due-process and equal-protection clauses. We’re staying tuned and will report more details when we get them. Update. Here’s the …
Gay Rights are Human Rights
Guess Who
“President Obama has the power to stop this ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ business. Just sign an executive order. I don’t know why it’s taking so long—it’s not fair. We should stop this nonsense.”
Conservatives are strange people
I don’t know who Noah Millman is, but he’s one of those thoughtful conservatives we’re always hearing about: There’s no way to make this other than personal, so I’ll just say it straight out: my anxieties about gay marriage had little really to do with real, practical concerns about “the state of marriage in America” …
Excuses, Excuses
Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle waited until the last minute to veto a civil union bill, supposedly because she was contemplating it deeply. Judging from the stories on this, it looks like she was actually spending time cooking up lame excuses: “It would be a mistake to allow a decision of this magnitude to be made …
Kind of Surprising
This took me by surprise: A big step forward for the push to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell: Senator Ben Nelson, who has been aggressively lobbied for months by gay rights groups, is announcing that he’ll support the repeal compromise. I figured we would lose Webb and Lincoln and Nelson and pick up Snowe, Collins, …
But He Didn’t Do It in the Loudest and Most Disruptive Manner Possible, So It Doesn’t Really Count!
Meanwhile: Congress appears poised to repeal the ban on gays in the military, with the quiet support of the White House and without opposition from the Pentagon, according to statements out from gay rights groups this evening. The repeal is a careful dance: The Pentagon has remained publicly neutral in the process, while the Administration …
Eleventh Dimensional Gay Chess
Over at Elena Kagan OutWatch, Sullivan has a new “theory:” So what if the third option is correct and Obama is actually being extremely shrewd? If he or Kagan had announced her sexual orientation from the get-go, it would allow the Christianist right to portray her nomination as a “homosexual-lesbian” take-over of the court, enabled …