“There goes the neighborhood” is a phrase I grew up hearing from racist neighbors in the white, middle-class suburbia of my 1960s and 1970s childhood. The phrase — or better said, epithet — packed a lot of meaning. It expressed the opinion that when a black family moved into an all-white neighborhood, expectations were that [...]

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the political organ of the American Catholic hierarchy, is promoting National Organization for Marriage’s upcoming marriage discrimination rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court with a “five reasons” list. Reason number one that the Catholic bishops say that people should rally with NOM: Pope Francis is a [...]

Families come in all shapes and sizes but have one thing in common: love.  As the March 26-27 hearing dates near for the legal challenges to Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Washington Post observes that the families of the Supreme Court justices themselves exemplify the diverse American [...]

Finally he’s moving the goal posts up to Loving v. Virginia, right where it belongs as Supreme Court decisions dance around the issue of full equality of gays and lesbians to marry. From Buzzfeed: The Supreme Court will be hearing a challenge to one such ban, California’s Proposition 8, on March 26. The Obama administration weighed [...]

National Organization for Marriage has done it again.  They’ve attracted more foreign than domestic support to one of their Facebook event pages. In this case, it seems that Parisians are the primary supporters of their March 26 protest at the U. S. Supreme Court against equal protection of the laws for same-sex couples. In contrast, [...]

Fifty-nine percent (59%) of American registered voters oppose Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), according to a new poll commissioned by the Center for American Progress and Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD). Section 3 of DOMA is the portion of the law which prohibits the federal government from recognizing [...]

It seems to me that any U.S. Supreme Court Justice belching out homophobic nonsense like this needs to recuse himself from the Prop 8/DOMA cases coming up on the docket.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced on Friday that it has decided to grant review in Hollingsworth v. Perry, California’s Proposition 8 case. The amendment barring same-sex couples the right to marry was declared unconstitutional by Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker in 2010. That was subsequently upheld by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The [...]

UPDATE: No action today, via SCOTUSblog: #scotus did not act today on #ssm petitions. Could issue orders Mon, but Dec 7 more likely. 2 other grants, including gene patents.” Today the U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether to hear the Proposition 8 Case (Hollingsworth v. Perry [formerly Perry v. Brown]).  When Prop 8 passed in California [...]

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a request by Protect Marriage Washington that the state be blocked from releasing further copies of Referendum 71 petitions while PMW appeals an earlier Federal District Court decision that ordered their release. The request had been made to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy who apparently referred it to [...]