Hi again. It's been too long since I posted, but not much has happened.
The big news is the midterm elections here in the US. "Midterm" means half way between Presidential elections, when all of the House and 1/3 of the Senate are up for re-election, plus many state and local elections. The GOPs (which is an acronym for Grand Old Party, or the Republicans - why are they grand and old? The Democratic party is older and the Republicans are not grand) regained control of the House and lowered the Democratic margin in the Senate. Some good people won't come back to DC - Russ Feingold in the Senate and Patrick Murphy in the House come to mind first. The New Hampshire legislature will have Republican majorities that can undo the same sex marriage law, and they have a veto-proof margin, so the Democratic governor can't stop it. But the most upsetting elections to me were the ouster of three judges in Iowa who ruled that marriage discrimination was unconstitutional under state law. Why get rid of a judge for upholding the law? Bigotry has no limits, I guess.
One election that has not been decided since the votes are still being counted is the state Attorney General here in California. Kamala Harris, the Democrat from San Francisco, has a very small lead over Steve Cooley, the Republican from LA. The legal strategist in me (that is a joke) wonders how that outcome might affect Prop 8. The current governor and Attorney General, who is also the governor-elect, refused to defend Prop 8 in court, so its backers did. But whether they have legal standing to defend it is an issue. If Cooley wins, he will defend it, but will the courts let him since he wasn't in office when the case was argued in the district court? If the appeals court finds that the backers of Prop 8 don't have standing, and the only people who do, the governor and Attorney General, refuse to appeal, the courts may let the ruling that 8 is unconstitutional stand. Then the backers would likely ask the US Supreme Court to take the case. But it has been the conservatives on the Supreme Court who have made standing so narrow. I believe that Justice Scalia and a few others won't let a technicality like the law get in the way of their religiously based biases against gays and lesbians. But how would the Supreme Court rule? The court generally tries to duck controversial issues like this if it possibly can - look at the Newdow ruling about the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance case. This would all be interesting to ponder if people's lives weren't at stake. And lives really are on the line every time a court decides a case about gays and lesbians. Because when the government says that it is OK to discriminate against gays and lesbians, kids see that and take it as tacit approval of bullying or as another sign that everyone is against them. I remember how devastating the Bowers versus Hardwick decision finding that gays don't have a right to have sexual intercourse was in the 1980s and don't want to see something like that for marriage equality.
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Michael Bowers was quite a peach.
ReplyDeleteA few years after Bowers vs. Hardwick, he rescinded a job offer to Robin Shahar, who graduated from Emory Law School at the top of her class, when he found out she was a lesbian. As a lesbian, she would not be able to properly uphold the state's sodomy laws, he claimed. She sued in district court and lost but won on appeal. So Bowers appealed to the 11th Circuit Court and won. When she tried to get the Supreme Court to hear the case, they said nothing doing, dyke.
In 1997, Bowers revealed he had been conducting a decade long, adulterous affair with a woman who was not his wife. Adultery was against state law both when he prosecuted Hardwick for sodomy and when he rescinded the job offer to Shahar.
welcome back to the blogosphere... ive missed you.. i am pissed about the three judges being recalled in iowa as well... it has happened here in california you know... remember rose bird? jerry brown was gov then too....
ReplyDeleteseems like deja vu all over again... now if we can just get willie brown back in the assembly speakers chair.... thatd be sweet....
~ cheers...
Baltimore, yes I remember that. I lived in Georgia until 1990, so I think that I was there when that happened. The wrong wing think that laws don't apply to them.
ReplyDeleteDavid, I wasn't living in California then but I heard about Rose Bird. She and Jocelyn Elders, who was fired for saying that masturbation was OK, are people who I think of as losing their jobs for doing the right thing.