Judge refuses to dismiss gay marriage ban lawsuit
(San Francisco) A federal judge in San Francisco has refused to dismiss a lawsuit seeking to overturn California’s same-sex marriage ban.
U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker also signaled Wednesday that the measure’s sponsors will need to show that allowing gay couples to wed threatens traditional male-female unions.
Walker said significant questions …
Tags: Chief Judge, District Chief, Federal Judge, Gay Couples, Gay Marriage Ban, marriage, same sex marriage, San Francisco, UnionsProp 8 campaign seeks to shield internal memos
(San Francisco) A federal judge is considering whether to order the sponsors of California’s voter-approved gay marriage ban to produce their internal campaign records to lawyers now suing to overturn the law.
U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco heard arguments Friday from lawyers seeking the information, including strategy …
Tags: Campaign Records, Chief Judge, District Chief, Federal Judge, Gay Marriage Ban, Internal Campaign, Internal Memos, Lawyers, marriage, San FranciscoCalifornia Equality: Wait til 2012 to attack gay marriage ban
(San Francisco) California gay rights activists are at odds over when to ask voters to repeal the state’s same-sex marriage ban, with one of the largest groups saying it needs until 2012 to put together a winning campaign and two others saying they plan go to the polls next year.
For …
Tags: Ban San, Equality, Gay California, Gay Marriage Ban, Gay Rights Activists, marriage, Odds, Polls, same sex marriage, San Francisco CaliforniaFour Okla. women continue fight against gay marriage ban
Four Oklahoma women have filed a new complaint challenging federal and state laws banning gay marriage, reports the Journal Record.
One of the couples, Susan Barton and Gay Phillips, were married in California in Nov., British Columbia in May 2005 and a civil union in Vermont in August 2001. The second …
Tags: Banning Gay Marriage, British Columbia, Civil Union, Couples, Gay Marriage Ban, Gay Oklahoma, Gay Women, marriage, Oklahoma Women, Phillips, State Laws, Vermont, Women MarriagePortugal’s high court keeps gay marriage ban
(Lisbon, Portugal) Portugal’s Constitutional Court on Friday upheld the country’s ban on gay marriage, rejecting a challenge by two lesbians who are seeking to wed.
The court said its five judges ruled 3-2 against an appeal lodged by the women two years ago.
Teresa Pires and Helena Paixao, divorced mothers in their …
Tags: Constitutional Court, Gay Marriage Ban, Gay Portugal, Helena, Lesbians, Lisbon Portugal, marriage, Paixao, Pires, Portugal Gay, Portugal PortugalHistory Is on My Side, Says Calif. Justice Who Voted Against Gay-Marriage Ban
Carlos Moreno stood alone in May when he dissented from the decision upholding Proposition 8. But the California Supreme Court justice says history will prove him right — that denying gays and lesbians the right to marry is illegal discrimination.
“Someday at some point my dissent will be the majority view in California,” he said during an interview in his San Francisco chambers late Wednesday. “I think that’s where the law is headed.”
“Equal protection is either equal or it’s not,” he added. “It’s not the kind of thing you can chip away at.”
Moreno, one of four justices to back same-sex marriage last year and the sole vote against Prop 8 this year, took time to talk to The Recorder about his votes, his brief moment on the Obama administration’s short list for the nation’s highest court, and U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s controversial “wise Latina” comment.
Moreno’s dissent in Strauss v. Horton, 46 Cal.4th 364, came at a touchy time for him. He had been contacted by the Obama administration a week earlier as a possible replacement for retiring U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Since President Obama has officially stated his opposition to same-sex marriage, it could be assumed Moreno’s position on marriage and Prop 8 might be troublesome.
But, Moreno said, Obama’s vetters didn’t ask him how his Prop 8 vote — which wasn’t yet public — would go.
“They just asked if there were any high-profile cases — past or present, including on the trial court — that would be the kind of case that would draw attention.”
See History Is on My Side, Says Calif. Justice Who Voted Against Gay …
Law.com
* Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual
| Published by |
 |
Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/07/history-is-on…
Gays Step Up Efforts to Reverse Gay-as-Godless Stereotype
A groundbreaking survey about the faith lives of gay Americans that the Barna Group put out last week got surprisingly little attention. In my latest God & Country column for U.S. News Weekly, I tied the Barna survey’s fascinating portrait of gay religious life to the gay rights movement’s recent efforts to ratchet up outreach and messaging. Much of the work is aimed at reversing the gay-as-Godless stereotype.
Here’s the top:
Though he was raised in the United Methodist Church, Harry Knox knew he couldn’t become a minister in his denomination because it doesn’t ordain openly gay members. He enrolled in a seminary of the more liberal United Church of Christ but was eventually denied ordination anyway. “My whole career as an activist is an accidental ministry,” says Knox, 48, who now works at the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay rights group. “I would rather be a local pastor.”
Instead, since 2005, Knox has built HRC’s “religion and faith program,” which works to combat the stereotype of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community as antireligious. “For far too long, LGBT organizations did not put religious allies at the forefront of our efforts,” Knox says. “That’s a mistake we’re making less often now.”
Those religious allies may be more plentiful than most Americans think. A Barna Group survey out last week shows that most gay Americans lead pretty robust faith lives. While 72 percent of straight American adults describe their faith as “very important” in their lives, so do 60 percent of gays and lesbians. Almost as many, 58 percent, say they’ve made a personal and ongoing commitment to Jesus Christ.
And though they are much less likely than straights to share the beliefs of born-again Christians—which comes as no surprise, since most churches in the born-again tradition condemn homosexuality—the Barna survey found that 27 percent of gays do hold those beliefs. “Many in the Christian community assume there’s this significant gap between heterosexuals and homosexuals in terms of faith beliefs and activities,” says George Barna, the country’s top pollster on religious issues, who supervised the survey. “While there are statistically significant differences, it’s the narrow size of the gap that’s most surprising.”
The poll unleashed a torrent of hate mail, mostly from believers furious with Barna’s conclusion: that many gays are Bible-believing Christians. But more and more gay rights organizations are joining HRC in stepping up efforts to highlight the faith beliefs of many gay Americans, largely through religious outreach programs. And some religious traditions and denominations are taking steps to welcome gay and lesbian members.
Gay rights activists say that the 2004 election, when voters in 11 states passed gay marriage bans that were heavily promoted through churches, was a wake-up call. To help counter the image of the gay marriage battle as a fight between gays and religious Americans, HRC, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and other national gay rights groups quickly hired religious outreach staff.
Read the full story here.
See Gays Step Up Efforts to Reverse Gay-as-Godless Stereotype
U.S. News & World Report
* Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual
| Published by |
|
Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/07/gays-step-up-…
Federal Judge Stresses Trial Record on Calif. Gay-Marriage Ban
Whatever Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker winds up deciding on Proposition 8, it’s clear he wants an airtight trial record to support it.
Holding his first hearing Thursday on the controversial measure that outlawed same-sex marriage, Walker repeatedly stressed the importance of establishing a record that will stand the test of time.
He told a packed courtroom that he was “reasonably sure” that the challenge launched by two high-profile litigators is “only touching down in this court” and merely a “prelude” for things to come.
“How we do things here,” Walker said, “is more important than what we do.”
He noted that other courts have rendered decisions on same-sex marriage without holding full trials, which he suggested was a “problem.”
Perry v. Schwarzenegger, 09-CV-2292, was filed in May by Theodore Olson, who represented George W. Bush in the landmark Bush v. Gore case, and David Boies, who represented Al Gore. Boies wasn’t present on Thursday. The suit attacks Prop 8 on equal protection and due process grounds.
Walker had already issued a tentative order allowing Prop 8 proponents to intervene and denying a preliminary injunction (pdf). He stood by both orders during Thursday’s 50-minute session.
Olson, a partner in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Washington, D.C., office who has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court 55 times, nonetheless made a fleeting attempt to persuade Walker to change his mind on the injunction.
“Every day that Prop 8 is enforced perpetuates a tragic injustice” on gays and lesbians, he argued, saying it “brands” them as “second-class citizens, unworthy and different.”
“The Supreme Court,” Olson argued, “has held again and again and again that the right to marry is the most important relationship in life.”
Representing the Prop 8 proponents, Washington attorney Charles Cooper, who was a top Justice Department lawyer during the Reagan administration, warned that the lawsuit could “sweep away” not only Prop 8, but the definition of marriage in 43 states and the federal government.
The Cooper & Kirk partner also argued that marriage has by tradition always been the union of a man and a woman, and said that every Supreme Court case that describes marriage has noted that its central purpose is procreation.
See Federal Judge Stresses Trial Record on Calif. Gay-Marriage Ban Above the Law
* Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual
| Published by |
|
Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/07/federal-judge…
Voter ‘animus’ to be issue in Calif marriage case
When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an amendment to the Colorado Constitution that outlawed discrimination protections for gay people, same-sex couples could not enter into civil unions or domestic partnerships anywhere in the nation, much less get married. But as they seek to persuade a federal judge to strike down California’s ban on gay marriages, lawyers for two unmarried gay couples are using that 13-year-old decision as their road map — one they expect will eventually lead the high court to take up the marriage issue. In the Colorado case, Romer v. Evans, the Supreme Court majority held that voters’ dislike of gays and the laws that several cities had approved to shield them from bias motivated the state amendment. Such “animus,” it said, was incompatible with the section of the U.S. Constitution that requires the government to treat its citizens equally absent a compelling reason to do otherwise. The attorneys behind the challenge to California’s Proposition 8 plan to argue during a pretrial hearing Thursday that by stripping gays of the right to wed, the voter-approved ban runs afoul of America’s founding framework in the same way — and for the same reason. “Romer is a strikingly similar situation to what we have here. You had a ballot initiative, a majority vote of the people, taking away a right,” said Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a member of the legal team led by former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson and veteran trial lawyer David Boies. “And there was no justification or rationale other than disapproval by that majority of that group.” U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker on Tuesday issued a tentative order to fast-track the case in his San Francisco court. Among the questions he said he wants covered at trial are whether sexual orientation is unchangeable, if permitting same-sex marriage “destabilizes” traditional unions and whether Proposition 8’s ballot history demonstrates the measure had “discriminatory intent.” California Attorney General Jerry Brown, a defendant in the case, has sided with gay rights advocates and declined to defend the ban, which overturned a California Supreme Court ruling that had legalized same-sex marriages. The state Supreme Court five weeks ago upheld the measure, saying it represented a valid exercise of voters’ authority to amend the California Constitution. Proposition 8’s sponsors, a coalition of religious conservative groups called Protect Marriage, has been given permission to intervene in the federal case. In court papers, the group’s lawyers rejected the assertions that anti-gay attitudes fueled the November measure and that the 1996 Colorado case was applicable. “Nothing in California law, either Proposition 8 or otherwise, indicates that Californians harbor animus towards gay and lesbian individuals,” they wrote. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision, attorneys for gay rights and Christian conservative groups have debated whether the Romer decision could be used to expand gay rights. The ruling marked the first time the Supreme Court determined that the Constitution’s equal rights guarantees extended to gays and lesbians. “The basic point of Romer is that government cannot ever act out of hostility toward a group of people, and whether that is in the context of marriage or anti-discrimination law, the point carries over,” said Suzanne Goldberg, who worked on the case and now directs Columbia Law School’s Sexuality and Gender Law Program. The ruling has been cited, though so far unsuccessfully, in past challenges to gay marriage bans in Nebraska and Florida. At the same time, gay rights groups mostly have shied away from pursuing federal marriage cases in favor of pursuing marriage rights in state courts. Legal observers on both sides of the debate agree, however, that California’s Proposition 8 presents novel questions that could make the issue ripe for federal action.
San Francisco Chronicle
* Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual
| Published by |
|
Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/07/voter-animus-…
Judge favors trial soon on Calif. gay marriage ban
A federal judge wants a trial on California’s same-sex marriage ban to proceed quickly but says he likely won’t suspend the voter-approved ban in the meantime.
U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker said holding a speedy trial on the merits of a lawsuit challenging Proposition 8 would avoid novel issues that might be raised if he issued a temporary injunction.
See Judge favors trial soon on Calif. gay marriage ban
| Published by |
|
Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/06/judge-favors-…
