Gays win, blacks lose. That’s the upshot of this week’s landmark Supreme Court decisions. … Why did the Supreme Court treat the two minorities so differently? Because the two minorities face significantly different problems. Since the civil rights laws were passed in the 1960s, inequality has become a bigger problem […] Read more »
The GOP’s Gay-Marriage Challenge
… Republicans — the party and the rank and file — largely oppose same-sex marriage, as seen in the poll numbers, while Americans as a whole have now come to narrowly favor same-sex marriage, amid a sharp shift in recent years. If, in the wake of the court’s rulings, voters […] Read more »
The Emerging Marriage Majority
… The legal patchwork faced by married gay couples in the wake of Windsor now make the state-by-state battles that have been taking place over the right to marriage even more important. In their midst will be sympathetic politicians and judges who nevertheless hesitate to usher in sweeping changes due […] Read more »
What if Marriage Equality Is Loving Instead of Roe?
… The fact that Windsor and Perry leave a two-tiered legal regime in place for most gay couples begs an even bigger question: why didn’t the Court simply establish marriage equality as the law of the land? The five justices making up the Court’s majority in Windsor clearly empathize with […] Read more »
As a Long-Term Political Issue, Gay Marriage Will Be More Like Abortion than Integration
… When people discuss the inexorable rise of support for gay marriage, they talk about it like racial integration. The supporters of Jim Crowe [sic] were routed: it became impossible to publicly support segregation, and the opposition eventually died or flipped. But there’s another possibility: that gay marriage is somewhat […] Read more »
Court underscores political shift on same-sex marriage
… Everything about the decisions on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California’s Proposition 8 suggests that the justices fully recognize the direction the national debate is heading in and were not prepared to stand in the way. … By every measure, more and more Americans are coming to accept the […] Read more »