[Washington Insider: Obama Member of Chicago Gay Man’s Club]
http://sharlaslabyrinth.blogspot.com/2015/02/its-two-way-street-what-americans-think.html
By MARK SHERMAN WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is inappropriately signaling it intends to clear the way for gay marriage across the nation, Justice Clarence Thomas complained Monday in a stinging dissent to the court's refusal to block the start of same-sex marriages in Alabama.
Bitterly objecting to Monday's
action, Thomas provided a rare insider's perspective on the widely held
view that the court's embrace of gay marriage is a done deal.
Thomas
filed a dissenting opinion after his colleagues rejected Alabama's plea
to put a hold on same-sex marriages in the state until the Supreme
Court resolves the issue nationwide in a few months.
He criticized his fellow justices
for looking "the other way as yet another federal district judge casts
aside state laws," rather than following the customary course of leaving
those laws in place until the court answers an important constitutional
question.
"This acquiescence
may well be seen as a signal of the court's intended resolution of that
question," Thomas wrote in an opinion that was joined by Justice
Antonin Scalia. "This is not the proper way" for the court to carry out
its role under the Constitution, he wrote, "and, it is indecorous for
this court to pretend that it is."
The opinion was remarkable less for the legal result it suggested than for its open criticism of fellow justices.
After all, many legal
commentators have predicted not only the case's outcome this spring (in
favor of same-sex marriage), but the vote (5-4) and the author of the
majority opinion (Justice Anthony Kennedy).
The number of states in which gay and lesbian couples can marry has nearly doubled since
October, from 19 to 37, largely as a result of terse Supreme Court
orders that allowed lower court rulings to become final and rejected
state efforts to keep marriage bans in place pending appeals.
"If you read the tea leaves the
Supreme Court is leaving, the bans on same-sex marriage can't be
permitted. They're unconstitutional," said University of
California-Berkeley law professor Jesse Choper.
Alabama
became the 37th state in which same-sex couples can marry, following
U.S. District Judge Callie Granade's ruling in January that struck down
as unconstitutional the state's statutory and constitutional bans.
Granade
had put her order on hold until Monday to let the state prepare for the
change, and State Attorney General Luther Strange had asked for the
delay to be extended for at least a few months.
Monday morning, probate
judges in Alabama began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples,
some of whom had been lined up for hours.
"It's
about time," said Shante Wolfe, 21, as she left the courthouse in
Montgomery with wife Tori Sisson. They had camped out in a blue and
white tent to be the first in the county given a license.
The Supreme Court often freezes
lawsuits in place when they raise the same issue the court already has
agreed to decide. And when federal courts declare state laws
unconstitutional, "our ordinary practice," Thomas wrote, is to prevent
those rulings from taking effect while they are being appealed.
But
since October, the justices have repeatedly turned away state requests
to keep same-sex marriages from taking place until appeals are resolved.
Alabama's
plea was the first since the court stepped into the issue last month to
take up a decision by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold
laws in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee that define marriage as
the union of a man and a woman.
The court has been silent
about the reasons for its actions in the gay marriage cases. It
similarly offered no explanation for orders in a series of challenges to
state voter ID and registration laws in the fall, or for a decision to
allow an execution in Oklahoma to proceed eight days before deciding to
hear a challenge to the controversial sedative the state uses in lethal
injection executions.
"Part of what gives us all a
sense of finality and a sense of acceptance about decisions is knowing
that the court has thought about it," said University of Chicago law
professor Will Baude, a former law clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts.
Baude uses the term "shadow docket" to refer to unexplained orders. "For
the public at large, that can over time harm the court's legitimacy."
Thomas
has previously made known his support for keeping the same-sex marriage
prohibitions in place until the court issues its decision. Although he
did not note it in October, he later said he had voted at that time to
take up gay marriage when the court rejected appeals from five states
seeking to preserve same-sex marriage bans.
Thomas
and Scalia also have been in dissent from the three major pro-gay
rights decisions at the Supreme Court since 1996, all written by
Kennedy. When the court struck down part of the anti-gay marriage
federal Defense of Marriage Act in 2013, Roberts and Justice Samuel
Alito also dissented.
Michael Dorf, a former Kennedy
law clerk who teaches at Cornell University, said the absence of Roberts
and Alito from Thomas' dissent Monday suggests those justices could be
part of a broader majority in favor of same-sex marriage this year, with
Roberts the more likely candidate.
Other
than that, Dorf said, the justices' order allowing same-sex marriage to
begin in Alabama, "is further evidence that the court intends to
reverse the 6th circuit and find a constitutional right to same-sex
marriage."
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