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Obama Files Brief Asking Court to Overturn Proposition 8

Obama Files Brief Asking Court to Overturn Proposition 8

Last updated on: December 29, 2014 at 8:18 pm by Rebecca Hamilton

Obama Files Brief Asking Court to Overturn Proposition 8 2014-12-29T20:18:31-07:00 Rebecca Hamilton

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Think back ten months ago to when President Obama announced that his position on gay marriage had “evolved.”

What his position had in fact evolved from was his prior position when he promised the American people that he was against gay marriage. That was in 2008 when he was working to get elected president. Ten months ago, he announced that his thinking had evolved past his earlier promise and he was now in favor of gay marriage.

At that distant, and now forgotten time of ten long months ago, he promised the American people that his newly-evolved support for gay marriage was just his “personal opinion” and that it would have no effect on the actual laws concerning marriage. After all, the laws in question were not federal laws, and as President of the United States he had no power to or intention of trying to influence state legislatures.

That, as they say, was then. This is now. And right now it appears that our president has every intention of using the force of his office in whatever way he can to push gay marriage on the country. The fiscal cliff/sequester fight may have robbed him of the economic wherewithal to use his powers as Commander in Chief to send aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf, but evidently there is still plenty of money to buy ink for his office printers.

Yesterday, the president filed yet another of his briefs suggesting to the Supreme Court how they should rule on the question of gay marriage. In this particular brief, he asked them to overturn a vote of the people in California. I realize that President Obama is not one to care about things like consistency in his actions, but I still think it’s interesting that a man whose power of office comes entirely from a vote of the people would be so flip about overturning other votes of the people.

The people spoke in California. But evidently, the president’s opinion on votes of the people is evolving right along with just about everything else he tells us he believes. So far as I can tell, the only promises this president can be trusted to keep are the ones he made to Planned Parenthood and the abortion on demand crowd. For them, he will do anything.

You can find the full text of the brief here.

A New Yorker article describing the brief says in part:

Thursday night, just hours before a filing deadline, President Obama’s Justice Department submitted an amicus curiae brief asking the Supreme Court to strike down Proposition 8—California’s gay-marriage ban. Even more importantly, it did so by asserting a bold claim to full equality for gay and lesbian Americans, which is a significant development in the nation’s rapidly moving consideration of the issue.

The brief—which President Obama, according to a report on SCOTUSblog, personally helped craft—did not directly ask the Supreme Court to declare marriage equality a constitutional right. Even so, its legal reasoning points squarely in that direction. If the Court accepts the full weight and reasoning of the President’s arguments, any state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage would fail the test of constitutionality. Twenty-nine states, in addition to California, have such amendments now.

Theodore Boutrous, one of the lead attorneys in the small group of legal heavyweights representing the Proposition 8 plaintiffs (a team including David Boies and Ted Olson), said on a conference call for reporters which was quickly arranged after the brief was filed, that they were “extremely pleased” that the government had taken a strong stand for marriage. He added, with respect to other anti-gay marriage bans, “I don’t see any way these laws could survive” under the legal test urged by the Justice Department in its brief.

It would have been close to impossible to imagine these developments less than a year ago.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/03/socarides-on-prop-8.html#ixzz2MJ1WdW7a

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