Tag Archives: equal protection clause

legal news

Hats off to local county clerks

If I were wearing a hat at this moment, I’d tip it to two Texas county clerks: Randall County’s Renee Calhoun and Potter County’s Julie Smith.

All they did was agree to adhere to their oath of office and will issue marriage licenses to gay couples who seek them.

This is in accordance with a Supreme Court decision this past week that legalized gay marriage across the nation. It also resists the notion that they could refuse to issue licenses to same-sex couples, which Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton authorized them to do.

Given the extreme partisan divide across the land, it’s fair to make this point: Both women, Calhoun and Smith, are Republican county clerks. The state AG also is a Republican. They are defying the state’s attorney general, who contends that clerks could object if they had religious objections to issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

The two county clerks plan to issue the licenses as soon as they get some paperwork matters straightened out.

Good for them.

Paxton’s decision to allow the clerks to refuse issuing the licenses has met with mixed response from county clerks across the state.

The attorney general’s approach to this matter is wrong-headed, as it seeks to allow these elected officials to disavow the oath of office they took, which is to follow the laws of the nation and the state.

The Supreme Court has determined — as the final arbiter of what is constitutional and what is not — that state bans on same-sex marriage violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Thus, gay marriage is now legal.

legal news

Kennedy channels Blackmun and makes history

It’s always risky to put too fine a point on some historical events, but today’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage in all 50 states tells me that the court has issued a ruling that is going to change the nation’s landscape … forever.

We can give credit — although some will assess blame — on one justice. That would be Anthony Kennedy, a normally conservative justice who sided with the liberals on the court and wrote the 5-4 majority opinion legalizing gay marriage.

Game, set and match? Not by a long shot.

Kennedy’s role, though, does have an interesting parallel with another justice from another time — with whom he served for five years on the same Supreme Court.

Harry Blackmun was selected to the court in 1971 by a conservative president, Richard Nixon; Kennedy joined the court in 1988 when another conservative president, Ronald Reagan, nominated him.

Blackmun eventually would veer far from where President Nixon thought he’d travel as he served on the highest court in the land. Blackmun became one of the court’s more liberal members.

In January 1973, he authored a landmark ruling that made abortion legal in the United States. Roe v. Wade was a case out of Texas in which the court overturned a Texas law that made getting an abortion a felony offense. Blackmun’s opinion stated that women essentially were entitled to control their own reproductive capacity. The 7-2 ruling set the stage for a debate that hasn’t let up over the course of the past 42 years, but it was a huge decision.

The man on the hot seat now is Kennedy, whoĀ remains a conservative jurist. But on this issue, gay marriage, he has decided — along with the court’s liberal wing — that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, with its equal protection clause, trumps states’ reluctance to allow gay couples to marry.

I doubt strongly we’re going to see Justice Kennedy become a flaming liberal in the wake of this ruling. He just happens to be right — and courageous — in making this decision.

Just as Roe v. Wade changed the landscape in early 1973, today’s ruling on gay marriage sets the stage for another gigantic sea change across the nation.

I wish I was a fly on Justice Kennedy’s wall when he talked this over with his court colleagues and his staff as he pondered how he would write this Earth-shattering opinion. Something tells me he heard the late Justice Blackmun’s voice.

 

legal news

14th Amendment means what it says

Well, it’s been an Earth-shaking couple of days at the Supreme Court of the United States, don’t you think?

First, the court upholds the Affordable Care Act, guaranteeing health insurance for all Americans.

Then today comes a ruling that makes gay marriage legal in every state in the Union.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/246249-scalia-gay-marriage-decision-shows-americas-ruler-is-supreme

Today’s ruling is going to cause considerable apoplexy among political conservatives, some of whom now are saying the Supreme Court overstepped its bounds. Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the dissenters in today’s ruling, said the nation is now being governed by a majority of justices.

Let’s hold on here.

The ruling tosses out statewide bans on gay marriage on the basis of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the document we use to establish a governing framework for the entire nation.

States’ rights? I believe the federal Constitution trumps those rights. The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment means what it says, that all citizens are guaranteed the right to “equal protection under the law,” which means that if gay citizens want to marry someone of the same gender, they are entitled under the law to do exactly that.

Is the battle over? Not even close.

It’s going to shift to the issue of religious liberty, where individuals will argue that their faith and their religious opposition to same-sex marriage also is guaranteed under the First Amendment. Some Republican candidates for president are calling for a constitutional amendment to make same-sex marriage illegal; good luck with that, as the 14th Amendment stands as the protector of all Americans’ rights to equal treatment under the law.

The court has done what it had to do. It has affirmed what the U.S. Constitution declares in guaranteeing every American the right to marry who they love — no matter what.

 

local news, State news

Gay marriage may become campaign issue

Let’s play this out a few moves.

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to decide whether states can ban same-sex marriage. R.G. Ratcliffe, writing for Texas Monthly, thinks the court is likely to rule that statewide bans violate the U.S. Constitution.

So, what happens when county clerks are forced to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Texas?

Do they follow the law? Or do they resign, as was the case over in Roosevelt County, N.M., when that state legalized same-sex marriages.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/burka-blog/social-conservatives-want-special-session-gay-marriage

Suppose, then, that Randall County Clerk Renee Calhoun and Potter County Clerk Julie Smith decide to follow the law. Will they face a stout challenge — likely within the Republican Party, to which they both belong?

Does the gay marriage issue become a campaign wedge issue here in the Texas Panhandle’s two largest counties?

Texas voters some years ago approved a Texas constitutional amendment that reiterated what was already on the books. The state has a statute that declares that marriage must involve a man and a woman. But, by golly, the Legislature referred the amendment to the voters to ensure that they said “Hell yes!” to a ban on same-sex marriage.

I’m betting that Ratcliffe is correct, that the Supreme Court is going to make all of this moot when it rules that the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause in the 14th Amendment cannot be violated.

I also am willing to bet that county clerks who issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples are going to face serious challenges in their next campaign for re-election.

Who would think a campaign for county clerk could be so, um, tumultuous?

 

 

legal news

Conservatives show quick trigger fingers

You have to hand it to conservative political leaders, who demonstrate time and again how quick they are to seize an initiative and outflank their liberal foes.

Take the call by religious leaders for liberal U.S. Supreme Court justices Elena Kagan and Ruth Bader Ginsburg to recuse themselves from an upcoming hearing on same-sex marriage.

http://thehill.com/regulation/240163-religious-leaders-want-justices-restrained-from-ruling-on-same-sex-marriage

They contend that Kagan and Ginsburg have put their personal views on the subject above the U.S. Constitution and thus have surrendered their moral authority to decide on this issue.

Is there a more impractical demand than this?

It wouldn’t fly any more than some liberal political interest — say, the American Civil Liberties Union — demanding that conservative justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas recuse themselves because of their often-stated bias against same-sex marriage.

The court is going to hear a case, Obergefell v. Hodges, involving same-sex marriage bans in four states — Ohio, Tennessee, Michigan and Kentucky. The justices might rule that states cannot supersede the U.S. Constitution that guarantees citizens the right to equal protection under the law; or, they might rule that states have that authority.

It should be decided, quite naturally, by the full court comprising liberals, conservatives and swing justices, such as Anthony Kennedy and, possibly, Chief Justice John Roberts.

Still, the hair-trigger response by faith leaders demanding the recusal by liberal justices offers a lesson in how to make a quick-strike political demand.

They’ve honed the strategy almost to an art form.

 

national news, State news

When did we realize these bans were illegal?

A question comes to mind regarding the recent spate of court rulings against statewide bans on same-sex marriage.

The 14th Amendment, which includes the “equal protection clause,” was ratified in 1868. Why has it taken until just the recent past to realize that equal protection means all citizens are guaranteed such protection under the law?

http://blog.mysanantonio.com/texas-politics/2015/02/texas-judge-rules-same-sex-marriage-ban-unconstitutional/

A Travis County probate judge recently ruled that the Texas ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. Judge Guy HermanĀ “ruled the stateā€™s ban violated the Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause of theĀ 14th Amendment,” according to the San Antonio Express-News.

The amendment has been on the books for 147 years! Only now has the issue come up as a reason to ban same-sex marriage.

It is true that gay couples have been largely hidden from public view for most of the history of the Republic. We didn’t have “gay pride rallies” at the turn of the 20th century, let alone in the middle of the 19th century. Same-sex couples lived in the shadows. They didn’t get married. They simply lived together, which was their right to do — except in some states, such as Texas, where it was actually illegal for same-sex couples (notably men) to be intimate; our state enforced something called an “anti-sodomy law” until it, too, was ruled unconstitutional.

So here we are now. Courts are ruling left and right that states cannot violate a civil right written into the U.S. Constitution just three years after the end of the Civil War.

It took us awhile to get to this point. But we’ve arrived. Finally.

 

national news, political news, State news

Gay marriage on its way … to Texas?

Do you ever feel as though you’re swimming against a tide that keeps getting stronger while it sucks the energy out of your efforts to fight it?

That’s how I’m feeling with this gay marriage issue.

I’m still grappling with the notion that it’s all right for people of the same sex to marry each other. I’m a traditionalist and my own values make it hard for me to embrace the idea of same-sex marriage as beingĀ the same as the marriage I have enjoyed for the past 43-plus years.

OK, I’ve laid down that marker.

I also understand what the law says, what’s in the U.S. Constitution and how all Americans are guaranteed equal protection under the law. Thus, it appears that states’ bans on gay marriage appear doomed.

That notion I will accept.

Florida has just begun allowing same-sex couples to marry. Federal judges — those damn “unelected judges,” in the eyes of conservatives — keep overturning state bans on same-sex marriage. A federal judge in Texas has ruled that our state’s ban — written into the Texas Constitution — violates the federal Constitution’s equal protection clause stated in the 14th Amendment. It grants full rights of citizenship to anyone born in the United States with zero regard to that people’s sexual orientation.

All of this makes perfect sense to me. If the states are governed by a federal framework — the Constitution — then the states are obligated to obey the rules set down within that framework.

Does any of this mean that all Americans must embrace the idea of same-sex partners getting married? Honestly, no.

All it means to me is that the law is the law and that states cannot impose their own laws that supersede the Constitution of the United States of America.

That includes bans on same-sex marriage.

I can feel that tide of political and cultural change getting stronger all the time.