Popcorn and a Movie: Part I

Hey guys, come on in!  Welcome to the Blue Truck Theater.  Admission is free, but here's the deal: first you have to get through all the popcorn - i.e., my exposition of the way I see the legal issues now before the Supreme Court - then you can watch the movie, which I guarantee will be a crowd-pleaser. Deal? Now turn off those damn cell phones, and take that gum out of your mouth.

Everybody else and his brother is expatiating on these cases, even when they don't know what the hell they are talking about, so I figure I might as well too, and if you pay attention, you just might learn something you didn't know before - though in all honesty, I must begin by telling you that I am not an attorney or an expert in the law.

But a few things I do know, and I think I have the overall gist of things right, so I'll share those little nuggets with you, and add my observations, which you can take or leave as you please. Some of this is a repetition of an exchange I got into over on Box Turtle Bulletin, but I'd already planned to write this post on the Blue Truck, as much to jog my own memory as anything else.

First of all, the most obvious point to make: nobody has a crystal ball, and no one can be certain how the Court will rule on Prop 8 and DOMA until they issue the actual rulings. When we do get the rulings, to avoid being unduly elated or disappointed, it's important that you understand what the Court is deciding, and why, and what the constitutional background is, the rules of the game, as it were.

Continued after the jump . . .

Sound Familiar?

OMG!  If we let those people marry, it will destroy the whole institution of marriage - not to mention the whole country - and bring the world to a screeching halt!  It just ain't Christian, I tell ya.  We have to stop this terrible thing before it destroys us all - and think of the poor little babies too . . . and yada yada yada.

Since Judge Walker posted his ruling last week, there's been a lot of good stuff on marriage equality coming out, and here's another bit I just found, from a commenter on the Guardian's article about the ruling:

“[If interracial couples have a right to marry], all our marriage acts forbidding intermarriage between persons within certain degrees of consanguinity are void.”

(Source: Perez v. Lippold, 198 P.2d at 40 (Shenk, J., dissenting, quoting from a prior court case)

“The underlying factors that constitute justification for laws against miscegenation closely parallel those which sustain the validity of prohibitions against incest and incestuous marriages.”

(Source: Perez v. Lippold, 198 P.2d at 46 (Shenk, J., dissenting, quoting from a prior court case)

“[T]he State's prohibition of interracial marriage . . . stands on the same footing as the prohibition of polygamous marriage, or incestuous marriage, or the prescription of minimum ages at which people may marry, and the prevention of the marriage of people who are mentally incompetent.”

(Source: Excerpted United States Supreme Court oral argument transcripts from Loving v. Virginia, from Peter Irons and Stephanie Guitton, eds., May it Please the Court (1993) at 282-283, quoting Virginia Assistant Attorney General R. D. McIlwaine, arguing for Virginia's ban on interracial marriage)

“Each [party seeking to marry a member of a different race] has the right and the privilege of marrying within his or her own group.”

(Source: Perez v. Lippold, 198 P.2d at 46 (Shenk, J., dissenting, quoting from a prior court case)

“When people of [different races] marry, they cannot possibly have any progeny, . . . and such a fact sufficiently justifies those laws which forbid their marriages.”

(Source: A judge in a Missouri case, quoted in Eric Zorn, Chicago Tribune, May 19,1996)

Allowing interracial marriages “necessarily involves the degradation” of conventional marriage, an institution that “deserves admiration rather than execration.”

(Source: A U.S. representative from Georgia quoted in Eric Zorn, Chicago Tribune, May 19, 1996)

“[S]uch laws [banning interracial marriage] have been in effect in this country since before our national independence and in this state since our first legislative session. They have never been declared unconstitutional by any court in the land although frequently they have been under attack. It is difficult to see why such laws, valid when enacted and constitutionally enforceable in this state for nearly one hundred years and elsewhere for a much longer period of time, are now unconstitutional under the same constitution.”

(Source: Perez v. Lippold, 198 P.2d at 35 (Shenk, J. dissenting))

 Note - Perez v. Lippold, aka Perez v. Sharp, is the landmark 1948 decision by the California Supreme Court allowing interracial marriages in that state.

Loving v. Virginia is the 1967 ruling by the U. S. Supreme Court striking down Virginia's miscegenation law, and ending all such bans on interracial marriage throughout the nation.

It's important to understand that both of these cases determined that the laws in question violated the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment - which is exactly what Judge Walker found to be wrong with Prop 8 in the Perry case.


All these points of comparison and more are found in an excellent handout produced by Vermont Freedom to Marry: download the entire 2-page pdf document here.

Send a copy to your nearest and dearest while you're at it.  Probly won't change anybody's mind - but at least now you can quote them chapter and verse, if that's what they like to do to you.


P.S. - From the New York Times, November 12, 2000:

Alabama voters quietly removed one piece of arcana from their Jim Crow-era constitution: a 1901 state law banning marriage between a Negro and Caucasian. The Supreme Court struck down such laws in 1967, but until last week, when voters passed a ballot initiative to purge that law from the books, it held on as the last such state law in the nation. The margin by which the measure passed was itself a statement. A clear majority, 60 percent, voted to remove the miscegenation statute from the state constitution, but 40 percent of Alabamans -- nearly 526,000 people -- voted to keep it.

Also, FYI:  That Texas sodomy statute that the Supremes struck down in 2003?  It's still on the books here in God's Country.  Old times here are not forgotten, oh hell no.


Check out this parody of a Prop 8 ad, from the 2008 election in California: