As you probably know, next Thursday, Dec. 8, is the date for the final two hearings in the 9th Circuit appeal of Perry v. Brown. At 2:30 pm PST, the appellate panel will hear arguments regarding the release of court recordings made during the trial, and at 3:30, the panel will hear arguments regarding the motion to vacate Judge Walker’s decision because he has been in a long-term relationship with a man. Both hearings will last one hour. There will be no further arguments on the constitutional issues of the case, and the 9th Circuit could issue a decision at any time after next Thursday.
As always, we will be providing full coverage of the court proceedings. Courage Campaign’s Rick Jacobs and Arisha Hatch will be at the James R. Browning Courthouse in San Francisco, liveblogging the proceedings, and Adam and I will be on P8TT helping them and bringing you all the day’s news.
The 9th Circuit panel has also agreed to allow the proceedings to be videotaped for a later broadcast by C-SPAN and NBC-7 San Diego. For those living in San Francisco, the court will also be providing a live stream of the hearings in Courtroom One to other parts of the Browning Courthouse. (There will also be limited public seating in the courtroom itself). A live remote feed will also be available at the Richard H. Chambers Courthouse in Pasadena, the U.S. Pioneer Courthouse in Portland and the William K. Nakamura Courthouse in Seattle. Finally, the audio and video recordings will be available on the court’s website at or before noon of Dec. 9. For more information on watching the live video streams in San Francisco or elsewhere, check here.
If you don’t happen to live in one of those cities or can’t make it to the courthouse to watch the live stream, make sure to follow next Thursday’s proceedings here at Prop8TrialTracker.com!
Hi, I’m Matt Baume from the American Foundation for Equal Rights, and welcome to special edition of Marriage News Watch. I’m up at the Russian River for thanksgiving right now, but there’s been some marriage equality news so let’s do a nice quick update so we can be back to eating.
We’re closer than ever to the next Prop 8 decision. The case has been working its way through the courts in little bits and pieces, but this week the ninth circuit court of appeals consolidated some of those pieces. Our next hearing is in ten days, on December 8 at 2:30pm. We’ll be discussing the release of the tapes of the trial, and then we could have a ruling on the entire appeal anytime thereafter.
The other Prop 8 news this week is an announcement from AFER about the LA debut of Dustin Lance Black’s play, “8,” based on the transcripts of the trial. After its huge premier on Broadway in September, the show will have an LA premier on March 3 at the Wilshire Ebell Theater with an all star cast. Casting and ticket info will be coming out soon.
And in Spain, the conservative Popular Party won big in national elections. Party leaders have vowed to repeal the country’s marriage equality law, so now Spanish LGBTs are rushing to marry before lawmakers have a chance to make good on their threats.
Those are the headlines, visit us over at AFER.org for more on next week’s hearing, or marriagenewswatch.com for more about marriage equality around the country and the world.
Hope you had a great thanksgiving — and we’ll see you next week.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has voted to repeal the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act. Now it moves to a Senate that’s hostile to marriage equality — but that’s actually okay.
On one side: ten Senate co-sponsors of the Respect for Marriage Act. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, Dianne Feinstein of California, Chuck Schumer of New York, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Al Franken of Minnesota, Christopher Coons of Delaware, and Dick Blumenthal of Connecticut.
On the other side: eight opponents of marriage equality. That’s Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Jon Kyl of Arizona, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John Cornyn of Texas, Michael Lee of Utah, and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.
Right now the case against DOMA is racing through all three branches of government. This latest advance is in the Legislative branch, but the Executive branch also stands against DOMA, and there’s a slew of cases working their way through federal courts.
Meanwhile, although AFER’s case, Perry v. Brown. concerns Prop 8 instead of DOMA, the arguments are similar: marriage discrimination violates the Constitution of the United States, whether it’s DOMA or whether it’s Proposition 8.
Orrin Hatch may have had the hearing’s strangest argument — he claimed that DOMA protects states’ rights. But no. Look at the law. DOMA has 3 parts. Part 1′s just the name. Part 2 prevents LGBT couples from moving their marriage from one state to another — so if you’re married in Iowa and you move to Utah, your marriage evaporates and there’s nothing Iowa can do to protect you. And Part 3 is even worse: it changed the federal definition of marriage, forcing federal agencies to ignore marriages. So even if you’re married in Iowa and you stay in Iowa, every single federal agency will work to undermine that marriage.
That’s why this state-by-state patchwork of marriage laws is so unfair. You’re married over here, you’re not over there, you’ve got to fill out four different sets of taxes, the YMCA can tell that you’re married but the IRS can’t. This is why full federal marriage equality is the only solution.
Senator Whitehouse put it best. He said that his constituents in Rhode Island are “prejudiced needlessly under this law. … We owe them better. We should treat [their] commitment with respect.”
And Senator Franken was even more succinct. “DOMA hurts families.”
The 10-to-8 victory for the Respect for Marriage Act means it now moves to the full Senate, where it has the support of 31 Senators. It’s pretty unlikely that it’ll be brought up for a vote anytime soon, but that’s fine — it gives time for support to grow in Congress.
Meanwhile, our case continues its expedited progress through the federal courts. Ari Ezra Waldman had a great piece on Towleroad this week about why we get more strength from legal arguments than from popular elections. Remember the misleading ads in California? Our opponents spent millions to trick Californians into thinking that Prop 8 had something to do with protecting marriage.
But when they’re in court, they’re under oath, and “limited by the compulsion to tell the truth.” And that’s why they’re trying to hide. They want to hide their names. They want to hide their arguments. They want to hide the tapes of the trial … because they know they have no case.
And if the country had voted on interracial marriage, it wouldn’t have been legal until the 1990s. It was a visionary Supreme Court that ruled in Loving v. Virginia that marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” and that marriage bans are “subversive to the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
In fact, the Supreme Court has ruled 14 times that marriage is a fundamental American freedom. And soon, we’re going to make that 15 times. See you in court.
A rather impressive brief filed by the proponents of Prop 8, if only for the length of documentation that went into it. There are 42 — forty-two — exhibits to underscore their argument that releasing the tape recordings from the trial phase of Perry v. Brown would lead to turmoil, just absolute mayhem. Exhibits like pieces from the Los Angeles Times from December 2008 about “A life thrown into turmoil by $100 donation to Prop 8″ and how Los Angeles City College was sued by the Alliance Defense Fund over a classroom dispute on a student against same-sex marriage. The arguments would have you believe that these isolated incidents represent all of the supporters of equality and all of this will happen if you let the tapes be released, oh noes. In reality, the trial was 100% live-blogged (right here) and covered extensively by the media in the 21 months or so since it occurred. The people who testified are nearly all public figures, and if they’re weren’t public or extremely well-known, they wouldn’t be hard to find. Yet we haven’t seen angry mobs outside their house or radio announcers giving out their phone numbers. The proponents fear democracy and transparency of their weak case because it shows the public, well, how bad their arguments are. In short, the spotlight has been on this for well over a year. Now let the sunshine in further.
Aside from that, an interesting money line at the end of the brief:
CONCLUSION
This Court should stay the district court’s order pending appeal. Should the Court disagree, Proponents request a seven-day stay to permit us to seek a stay from the Supreme Court.
Want to know where things stand with the Prop 8 trial?
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