Despite public apathy towards her, Elena Kagan was sliding towards confirmation. There was no big reason to oppose her and she was about as good a nominee as Republicans were likely to see from President Obama.
But now a federal judge in California has ruled that, as a matter of federal constitutional law, marriage cannot be restricted to one man and one woman. That decision will likely end up in the Supreme Court. To predict that this improves Republican prospects for the mid-terms is easy; gay marriage loses whenever people vote. But I wonder if it also puts pressure on sitting Republican senators (and, for that matter, Democratic senators from strongly anti-gay marriage states who need to get reelected in November) to oppose Kagan. The vote is scheduled for tomorrow, which means a lot would have to happen quickly.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
My question is, if the district judge's ruling is sustained, what happens to the laws against plural marriages?
It's hard to see that bigamy laws survive if all partners agree, but Mormans and Muslims will not be as well positioned as the polymorphously perverse. The key to this decisions seems to be same-sex attraction. That implies that groups whose members claim to all be attracted to each other are more likely to be able to marry than a husband is to be able to have multiple wives, when the wives aren't attracted to each other.
Well, that's always true. I recall an anecdote from my childhood reading of National Geographic. The place was, I think, Kenya.
The white guy asks the black guy why he doesn't have more than one wife.
The answer, more or less, was that if you have two, they'll fight; and if you have three, two will gang up on one; so you have to have a minimum of four, and that's expensive.
Post a Comment