Human Rights Victory For the Gay Community is Coming

 
I might have a feeling of how things might go for the gay community with the Supreme Court but any of us can have that feeling too so I wanted to give you someone who is a ‘pea body’ award winner and many respect, he is Hank Plante and he wrote the following post on USA today:

By the end of June, we're expected to have a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court on California's Proposition 8 case, which banned gay marriage, and on DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act.

While journalists should probably stick to telling you what happened yesterday, I'll go out on a limb with a couple predictions of what I expect the court to do, based on the fact that I covered the original Proposition 8 case in San Francisco and interviews with the parties since then.

Bottom line: I expect a "bronze medal" win for gays and lesbians, with the Supreme Court upholding lower-court decisions that ruled Proposition 8's ban on gay marriage unconstitutional. Similarly, I expect the portion of DOMA that's being challenged to be thrown out, giving gay and lesbian couples more than 1,000 federal benefits that straight couples now get.

But why a bronze medal win rather a gold? I don't expect the Supreme Court to issue a sweeping, 50-state ruling on gay marriage. Instead, look for the justices to confine their ruling only to California, probably finding that the proponents of Proposition 8 had no "standing" to bring the case since they were private parties, rather than the governor or the state attorney general. This one-state victory for gays is why the San Francisco City Attorney's Office characterizes it as the "bronze medal scenario."

After that, other states can continue to decide same-sex marriage on their own.

Then there will most assuredly be lawsuits filed immediately after the high court's ruling, claiming, for example, that the ruling only applies to the two couples who brought the Proposition 8 case to the courts in the first place. Those challenges will be quickly fought, and, I predict, successfully defeated.

Why am I so confident that the high court will rule in favor of gays? Judge Vaughn Walker, who presided over the original Proposition 8 case and ruled it unconstitutional, recently spoke to the Harvey Milk Diversity Breakfast in Palm Springs. He told the crowd the critical point in the Supreme Court arguments came when proponents of Propostion 8 admitted that marriage is the only benefit that they think gays should be denied. That would mean their opposition to gay marriage is based purely on discrimination.

Judge Walker pointed to this exchange between Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor and the lawyer defending Proposition 8, Charles Cooper.

Sotomayor: "Outside of the ... outside of the marriage context, can you think of any other rational basis, reason, for a state using sexual orientation as a factor in denying homosexuals benefits or imposing burdens on them? Is there any other rational decision-making that the government could make? Denying them a job, not granting them benefits of some sort, any other decision?"

Cooper's response: "Your Honor, I cannot. I do not have anything to offer you in that regard."

On DOMA, I predict the result will be much more of a gold medal win for gays and lesbians. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see a 7-to-2 ruling in favor of gays, with Justices John Roberts and even Justice Clarence Thomas joining in, based on their strong feelings about states' rights. Marriage has always been governed by the states, not the federal government.

It's also worth remembering that Chief Justice Roberts actually did pro bono work for gays on a previous Supreme Court case when Roberts was a private lawyer working in Washington.

Meanwhile, if I'm wrong on all this, rest assured that we'll have gay marriage in California anyway, because it will head back to the ballot, where it would pass. The latest affirmation of that came in this week's USC/Los Angeles Times Poll, which shows nearly six in 10 Californians now support same-sex marriage.

As for when gay and lesbian marriages could begin in California, rulings from the high court usually take about 25 days to take effect. But the celebrating will happen when the ruling comes in June, which also happens to be Gay Pride Month across the country.

Hank Plante

Hank Plante is an Emmy- and Peabody-winning journalist who spent three decades as a reporter for the CBS TV stations in San Francisco and Los Angeles. This originally appeared in The Desert Sun.