« Law - "Too Rich to Live? " | Main | Ind. Courts - "Some candidates are judges, and some are attorneys who practice in different areas of the law. One is a state senator." [Revised] »
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Courts - "Supreme Court Review: Campaign Cash, Controversy"
NPR's Nina Totenberg had a 7 min 36 sec review of the SCOTUS term on Morning Edition today. Read and listen here. Here is a brief quote from about 2/3 into the story:
The justices also injected themselves into a trial testing the right of gay couples to marry in California. In an unsigned opinion, the court's five most conservative members bowed to a plea from gay-rights opponents who claimed that they would be harassed if the trial were broadcast in even the most limited way. The five-justice majority nixed a plan approved by the federal trial and appellate courts that would have allowed the proceedings to be broadcast to a few other federal courthouses.Indeed, the whole subject of gay rights seemed to generate disputes about who is an oppressed minority.
Dellinger, the former solicitor general, observes that gay and lesbian groups see themselves as an oppressed minority, as do "Christians and traditional marriage people" — and the justices are dividing, sometimes in unexpected ways, over "who they think needs protection from a larger culture."
Opponents of gay rights lost two cases in which they contended they were the victimized minority. In one, they objected to public disclosure of the names of petition-signers seeking to get an anti-gay-rights initiative on the ballot. In another, the court rejected an appeal brought by a campus religious group that lost its school subsidy at a state law school because the group refused to admit homosexuals as members.
The 5-4 clash of views in this last case was crystallized in a passionate dissent from Justice Samuel Alito and a majority concurrence from Justice John Paul Stevens. Alito accused the majority of putting "political correctness" ahead of the right to free speech and association, and Stevens responded that while a free society "must tolerate" groups that exclude homosexuals — or Jews, or blacks, or women, for that matter — "it need not subsidize them."
Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 13, 2010 10:02 AM
Posted to Courts in general