Whether homosexual sodomy was prohibited by a law targeted at same-sex sexual relations or by a more general law prohibiting both homosexual and heterosexual sodomy, the only relevant point is that it was criminalized -- which suffices to establish that homosexual sodomy is not a right "deeply rooted in our Nation's history and tradition."
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Today's opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.
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Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe to be immoral and destructive.
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Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means. Social perceptions of sexual and other morality change over time, and every group has the right to persuade its fellow citizens that its view of such matters is the best. That homosexuals have achieved some success in that enterprise is attested to by the fact that Texas is one of the few remaining States that criminalize private, consensual homosexual acts. But persuading one's fellow citizens is one thing, and imposing one's views in absence of democratic majority will is something else. I would no more require a State to criminalize homosexual acts -- or, for that matter, display any moral disapprobation of them -- than I would forbid it to do so. What Texas has chosen to do is well within the range of traditional democratic action, and its hand should not be stayed through the invention of a brand-new "constitutional right" by a Court that is impatient of democratic change.

Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader and New York State's highest-ranking Republican, said Monday evening that he would not seek re-election in November, after a 32-year career in the Senate.
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A key question for Senate Republicans will be whether several other older members will stay on. Mr. Bruno had persuaded them to stand for re-election in recent years and it was not clear if, given his departure, other senior senators in their late 70s and 80s would follow.

"His resignation, I think, will have an effect on their ability to hold on to their majority," said Assemblyman Michael Benjamin, a Democrat from the South Bronx. "He was the center. And when the center falls, everything falls apart."

She said the government regulates such religious authorities' ability to perform marriages because the state didn't create marriage and doesn't create marriages. Rather, legal authorities merely recognize and regulate an institution that already exists and is rooted deeply in the society's history and traditions.

Government is in the marriage business because encouraging the best environment for raising and protecting children is a benefit to society at large, Gallagher noted. That's why the institution has special legal privileges and responsibilities attached to it that aren't given to other intimate adult relationships.

"There's a reason the government has always been involved in marriage but not in baptism or my priest's vow of celibacy," Gallagher, who describes herself as an "orthodox Catholic," said. "Marriage is not a sacrament that has only religious implications, like baptism."

Oddly, I could be persuaded to support this idea. If the government were to allow churches to define marriage and then recognized and enforced those religiously distinctive marriage contracts, gay people could marry in every state of the union and in any nearly every city that had a Unitarian Universalist fellowship, a Quaker meeting, or a United Church of Christ congregation.

Of course, one could just as easily turn around and say that the government will issue marriage licenses to all, but let the religious groups craft a new, additional and exclusive status just for themselves.

Call it "holy matrimony," "covenant wedding," "sacramental union" or "zoop-de-do." Whatever you like. And they can have it all to themselves. But marriage stays a government institution subject to constitutional standards of equal protection and due process.

Think Gallagher would go for that?

Me neither.

At least 14 employees in the San Diego County Clerk's Office raised religious objections to performing gay wedding ceremonies but were told by their boss they couldn't pick and choose between marriage applicants.
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"It would unfairly burden other employees and would directly compromise the services we provide to the public ... you should realize that it will be impossible for you to remain in your current assignment," employees were told in the June 5 e-mail.

Given that answer, Smith said, several employees withdrew their objections, but a few chose reassignment.

[T]he anti-gay Family Research Council ... in the promotional materials for their annual Values Voters Summit... is running a promo page of pics featuring 24 named speakers. Only problem? Only 10 of these names — ones that mostly make up the lesser-known, more conservative contingent — have actually confirmed that they'll be in attendance[.]

Researchers using brain scans have found new evidence that biology — and not environment — is at the core of sexual orientation. Scientists at the Stockholm Brain Institute in Sweden report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that gay men and straight women share similar traits — most notably in the size of their brains and the activity of the amygdala — an area of the brain tied to emotion, anxiety and aggression. The same is true for heterosexual men and lesbians.

Study author, neurologist Ivanka Savic–Berglund, says such characteristics would develop in the womb or in early infancy, meaning that psychological or environmental factors played little or no role.

Courts and commentators interpreting Lawrence diverge over the doctrinal approach employed to invalidate the petitioners' convictions. Some have read Lawrence to apply a rational basis approach. Others see the case as applying strict scrutiny. And a third group view the case as applying a balancing of state and individual interests that cannot be characterized as strict scrutiny or rational basis. Lawrence's doctrinal approach is "difficult to pin down." But we are persuaded that Lawrence did indeed recognize a protected liberty interest for adults to engage in private, consensual sexual intimacy and applied a balancing of constitutional interests that defies either the strict scrutiny or rational basis label.
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Lawrence is, in our view, another in this line of Supreme Court authority that identifies a protected liberty interest and then applies a standard of review that lies between strict scrutiny and rational basis. [Footnotes and citations omitted.]

• The Fifth Circuit extend Lawrence to commercial transactions.


• The Ninth Circuit explicitly hold that Lawrence requires heightened scrutiny based on sexual privacy precedent.


• The First Circuit do likewise based on liberty interest grounds apart from sexual privacy precedent.


• The California Supreme Court declare sexual orientation a suspect class for equal protection claims.

The [Kern County, California] office will issue same-sex marriage licenses beginning June 17 as state law requires but will stop solemnizing weddings due to lack of staff and space, Auditor-Controller-County Clerk Ann Barnett announced in a news release Wednesday evening.
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Julie Poochigian, chief deputy clerk-recorder of Tulare County, said her office plans to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples starting June 17. She said the office has never performed wedding ceremonies for couples.

"Some other counties do that, but Tulare County does not," she said. "We are not staffed to perform the services."

San Diego County plans to comply with a state Supreme Court ruling that allows same-sex marriages but will not force employees to perform the ceremonies if they cite religious or moral objections.

County Assessor-Recorder-Clerk Greg Smith, whose office issues marriage licenses, said he has informed the roughly 115 employees deputized to conduct ceremonies to tell him if they object to same-sex marriages.

The Journey, a megachurch of mostly younger evangelicals, is representative of a new generation that refuses to put politics at the center of its faith and rejects identification with the religious right.

They say they are tired of the culture wars. They say they do not want the test of their faith to be the fight against gay rights. They say they want to broaden the traditional evangelical anti-abortion agenda to include care for the poor, the environment, immigrants and people with H.I.V., according to experts on younger evangelicals and the young people themselves.

"Evangelicalism is becoming somewhat less coherent as a movement or as an identity," said Christian Smith, a sociology professor at the University of Notre Dame. "Younger people don't even want the label anymore. They don't believe the main goal of the church is to be political."

As the general election kicks off, Senator John McCain will tout his reputation as a maverick, an independent, a moderate who will work with both parties to get things done. However, a look at Senator McCain's record paints a very different picture.

• cast a deciding vote against the federal Employment Non Discrimination Act.


• voted three times against expanding the federal hate crimes law to include sexual orientation.


• supports Don't Ask, Don't Tell and does not believe that gays should serve in the military.


• voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits same-sex couples from receiving federal rights and benefits in any state.


• campaigned for a ban on same-sex relationship recognition in his home state of Arizona — even appearing in a campaign television ad.

The mayor of a Greek island has defied the threat of prosecution to carry out the country's first gay "marriages".

Two men and two women were "married" by Tassos Alfieris in the ceremonies on the eastern Aegean island of Tilos.
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Although homosexual practices were widely tolerated in ancient Greece, the modern nation is exceedingly hostile towards gays, he adds. The conservative Greek Orthodox Church has expressed strong objections, and the country's Justice Minister, Sotiris Hatzigakis, said he believed gay marriages were illegal.

Two Spanish men have been arrested in The Gambia accused of making homosexual advances to taxi drivers, police say.

Last month, President Yahya Jammeh[] threatened to behead gay people at a political rally and said they had 24 hours to leave the country.

Mr Jammeh's statements have been condemned by gay rights activists but the AP news agency says it was backed by the country's Supreme Islamic Council, which said the president had taken a "principled stand".

"It's a perfect example of a governor overstepping his authority and sidestepping the democratic process," said Brian Raum, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, a national organization opposed to same-sex marriage. "It's an issue of public policy that should be decided by the voters.

Paterson was simply implementing the unambiguous recent ruling by NY courts (up to and including the state equivalent of a denial of certiorari) that long-standing NY statute and precedent require recognition of valid out-of-state marriages, even when those marriages could not be entered into in NY itself.

How is "doing what the courts say must be done" a case of "executive activism"?

But the governor's action effectively circumvents the state's highest court, bows to foreign law and violates the principle of separation of powers by superseding the legislature. Again, we are witnessing the advance of the homosexual agenda by the most undemocratic means possible. The governor of New York and the appeals court judges should be impeached.

Minority children in foster care are being ill-served by a federal law that plays down race and culture in adoptions, a report released on Tuesday said.

The report, based on an examination of the law's impact over a decade, said that minority children adopted into white households face special challenges and that white parents need preparation and training for what might lie ahead.
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The report recommends that the law — the Multiethnic Placement Act, which covers agencies receiving federal dollars and promotes a color-blind approach — be amended to permit agencies to consider race and culture as one of many factors when selecting parents for children from foster care.

The report points out that transracial adoption itself does not produce psychological or other social problems in children, but that these children often face major challenges as the only person of color in an all-white environment, trying to cope with being different.

But many of you have also come up to me and said, "Barr, why did you offer the Defense of Marriage Act? If you're so set against the Patriot Act, why did you vote for it?"

Well, let me tell you. I have made mistakes. But the only way you make mistakes, the only way you get things done is by getting out there in the arena and making those mistakes, and then realizing as things go on the mistakes that you've made.

And I apologize for that. For example, as I mentioned to you all last night with the Defense of Marriage Act. As I mentioned to you all last night and I reiterate it here today, standing before you and looking you in the eye: the Defense of Marriage Act — insofar as it provided the federal government a club to club down the rights of law-abiding American citizens — has been abused, misused and should be repealed. And I will work to repeal that.

Barr's mea culpa rings quite hollow.

Making a mistake is better than doing nothing in the first place? In the context of issues such as DOMA and the Patriot Act? Is he serious?

And to make matters worse, he says this to a crowd of self-appointed libertarian standard-bearer purists and gets — applause?

I recently called the Big-L Libertarian Party a "freak show" — and I stand by that description.

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Barr also said in that clip that DOMA is being "abused and misused."

Um, "abused and misused" — how?

I know of no instance — none whatsoever — where DOMA has been "abused and misused." It has been, and will continue to be, used exactly the way Barr originally intended: to discriminate against gays and to legitimize anti-gay bigotry.

Please do not mistake this microphone-addicted conservative has-been for a "libertarian."

Vik Amar registers a small disagreement with me over how to characterize the interplay between the California Supreme Court and the voters of California. In explaining why I thought the Cal S Ct was right to apply the principle of equal protection as expounded in its cases, rather than simply following public opinion on the permissibility of banning same-sex marriage, I said "California constitutional law [does not] embrace the view that minority rights turn on the majority's willingness to recognize those rights." Not so fast, says Amar. "In a very real sense, California constitutional law – and all constitutional law, for that matter – does embrace that exact view" because the continued existence of minority rights depends on the majority not amending the constitution to eliminate them. He approvingly quotes the other Professor Amar (his brother Akhil) for the proposition that "[i]n the end, individual [and minority group] rights in our system are, and should be, the products of ultimately majoritarian processes."

Amar is wrong — especially where he posits, "rights in our system are, and should be, the products of ultimately majoritarian processes."

B's natural right to his own life is (partially) dependent on A's willingness not to kill him. That is a metaphysical axiom completely independent of the secondary question of whether the society in which A & B live forbids, condones or celebrates murder. But that secondary question — "forbids, condones or celebrates" — does not define B's right; it only succeeds or fails in securing it.

A constitution attempts to reflect, but not does not define, what is proper and improper in a civilized society.

Different constitutions achieve this with greater or less success. To the extent that a constitution fails to achieve its purposes — one of which must surely be "equal protection" (i.e., protecting insular minorities from the tyranny of the majority) — it is defective.

Conveniently [co-counsel] was there to conjure up those very dreams, darkening the nightmare with the bogies of race, civic disorder, and excessively universal franchise. ... [He] warned of what might lie ahead if the men of science were given license to interpret the statutes of the state.

Even as these flippant voices rose to hail the legal affirmation of common sense and common usage, a second chorus, or perhaps a mumble, sounded a lower note. As men ... circulated word of the court's decision among the learned circles of Philadelphia and Boston, heads collectively shook at this new performance of New York's stridently philistine culture. Whales as fish? The better sort knew better.

It remains puzzling why the California Supreme Court, in its recent same-sex marriage decision, rejected the most formally powerful argument for its result: the argument that denying licenses to same-sex couples is sex discrimination. ... [T]he Court had to work very hard to reject the sex discrimination argument, using tired old arguments that had been used long ago to defend miscegenation laws: since both blacks and whites [both men and women] are equally burdened, there's no discrimination.

I, as a gay libertarian, have always found the "it's not sex discrimination" thesis to be the one and only talking point against gay marriage that is totally reasonable and utterly inoffensive.

Straight men and straight women are treated equally (i.e., better than gays). Gay men and gay women are treated equally (i.e., worse than straights). That is simply not "sex discrimination."

Meanwhile, note that California's anti-miscegenation law (like the Virginia version struck down in Loving*) did NOT treat the races equally: Blacks could marry, e.g., Asians, Hispanics and American Indians. Whites could only marry other whites (see Page 86 of In re Marriage Cases**).

If you (correctly) rephrase the anti-miscegenation law as "a non-white may marry outside his race, but a white may not marry outside his race" then the fallacy of the "racial symmetry" argument becomes self-apparent.

That is yet another reason why the right to gay marriage is better rooted in the anti-miscegenation invalidations than in sex discrimination claims.

Gay rights activists have condemned Gambian President Yahya Jammeh's threat to behead homosexuals.

Last week he told a political rally that gay people had 24 hours to leave the country.

He promised "stricter laws than Iran" on homosexuality and said he would "cut off the head" of any gay person found in The Gambia.

Correspondents say a number of homosexual men have fled to The Gambia from neighbouring Senegal after a crackdown there following arrests at a "gay wedding" in February.

Both countries are predominantly Muslim and President Jammeh cultivates an image of being a devout Muslim.

Single women and lesbian couples won landmark parental rights last night as MPs voted to remove the requirement that fertility clinics consider a child's need for a father.

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill will replace the rule with a "need for supportive parenting" after opponents were defeated in two votes by unexpectedly wide margins.
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It will stop fertility clinics turning away lesbians and single women because their children will not have a father or male role model. While the current law does not block such therapy, it is sometimes used to justify refusals.

San Diego County plans to comply with a state Supreme Court ruling that allows same-sex marriages but will not force employees to perform the ceremonies if they cite religious or moral objections.

County Assessor-Recorder-Clerk Greg Smith, whose office issues marriage licenses, said he has informed the roughly 115 employees deputized to conduct ceremonies to tell him if they object to same-sex marriages.

When I wasn't ducking the epithets, I was being laughed at, mocked, and given the crazy-uncle-at-the-holidays treatment by the media. Or I was being told I should resign from my leadership post by some Senate colleagues.

Five years later, do I regret sounding the alarm about marriage? No.

I'm just saddened that time has proved right those of us who worried about the future of marriage as the union of husband and wife, deeply rooted not only in our traditions, our faiths, but in the facts of human nature: as Pope Benedict said, "The cradle of life and love," connecting mothers and fathers to their children.

(Cue epithets: Bigot! Hate-monger! Homophobe!)

We cannot reconcile what the Supreme Court did in Lawrence with the minimal protections afforded by traditional rational basis review. First, the Court overruled Bowers, an earlier case in which the Court had upheld a Georgia sodomy law under rational basis review. If the Court was undertaking rational basis review, then Bowers must have been wrong because it failed under that standard[.] But the Court's criticism of Bowers had nothing to do with the basis for the law; instead, the Court rejected Bowers because of the "Court's own failure to appreciate the extent of the liberty at stake."

Long before gay marriage specifically was on anyone's radar screen, the "Holy Grail" of gay rights litigation had been simply to get courts to afford gays the same kind of protection that women had been granted — "intermediate scrutiny."

The Oregon Court of Appeals on Wednesday upheld the ban on gay marriage that state voters approved by a wide margin in 2004.

The court rejected two procedural arguments that attacked the scope of the initiative, Measure 36, and whether it should have been placed on the ballot.

There are two ways to change the Oregon Constitution: by initiative, which allows citizens to propose discreet changes; and by revision, which allows the Legislature to propose sweeping changes. Gay-rights advocates argued that Measure 36 was a revision because it fundamentally altered the constitution.
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Gay-rights advocates promised to appeal to the Oregon Supreme Court.