Saturday, April 6, 2013

United States v. Windsor

US v. Windsor will be finished at the end of today, and before it is done I want to present my prediction.

The Supreme court will approve gay marriage across the United States and strike down discriminatory laws for the same reasons they struck down the bullshit Jim Crow Laws back in the 1960s and passed Lawrence v. Texas in 2003. It will be a 7-2 decision, the people who will support the decision will be Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Roberts (he has argued in favor of gay rights before), Alito (who was an advocate for legalizing sodomy and argued against employment discrimination), Sotomayer and Kagan, and those who are opposed will be Scalia and Thomas. I base this on their histories of voting and their personal philosophies, being mostly libertarian, this outcome is likely. Given the jurisprudence and history of the Supreme Court cases given gay rights and human rights at large this is likely.

They will overturn Section 3 of DOMA and they will give rights to all married couples in the United States for the same reason that they overturned Jim Crow Laws in Brown v. Board among other very important decisions that overturned local laws because they were counter to the United States Constitution.

One place where the decision they will make is not completely clear to me is whether the State Constitution amendments which say that gay marriage is illegal is unconstitutional under the 14th amendment 2nd section's equal protection clause. I could understand the argument stating that is illegal, and if that isn't illegal than how could the state rights that were curtailed under Brown v. Board be considered valid? The only valid decision regarding these state laws based on jurisprudence would be to invalidate these laws because they run counter to the 14th amendment 2nd section, or throw out that crucial part of our constitution. Whether the states must perform gay marriage should be done under the same jurisprudence which was done in the 1960s with interracial marriage.

On this issue I feel optimistic that the Supreme Court will make the right choice to recognize gay marriage at the Federal level, looking at the history of each Justice's opinions over the years.

This month I am doing one blogpost every day, BEDA, Blog Every Day April, as inspired by Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers. DFTBA!

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