SCOTUS To Hear WA's Referendum 71 Case Doe v Reed

The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari in the now high-profile case of Doe v. Reed on Friday, just like I had hoped for in late October.

This was the second time this week the nation's highest court has intervened in the controversy over whether heterosexual supremacists will be able to shield themselves from public oversight while advocating for public policy changes which would harm the LGBT community. The first action was in their ruling upholding a stay preventing the broadcast of the Perry v. Schwarzenegger federal trial.

The second action is summarized by the Washington Post:

The court agreed to decide whether it was unconstitutional for the state of Washington to make public the names of 138,500 voters who signed a petition for a referendum on whether to overturn a state "everything-but-marriage" law. The statute expanded rights for those who entered into domestic partnerships, both homosexual and heterosexual.

The group that championed the referendum said rival organizations planned to make the petitioners' names available on the Internet and subject them to "threats, harassment and reprisals." Those groups denied such intentions, and the state said its public-records law required disclosure of the names as part of the transparency that comes with democratic participation.

Protect Marriage Washington was successful in getting the issue to referendum last fall, but not at the ballot box. Washington voters endorsed the law by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent.

But the petition-signers' names have not been disclosed. The Supreme Court blocked the release in October while considering whether the case presented a significant question about political speech. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit said Washington's public-records law did not violate constitutional protections.

It should be interesting to see if the Supreme Court will really decide to strike down Washington State's public disclosure law because of an alleged right of people to participate in enacting (and abolishing) laws through the electoral process anonymously.
This claim makes a mockery of the notion that democracy occurs in an open exchange of ideas and I hope the Supreme Court realizes that and rules for the defendant-appellants, the State of Washington, and upholds the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

(It should be noted tat the Supreme Court under Chief Justices Roberts and Rehnquist has taken great delight in overturning the 9th Circuit on multiple occasions.)

UPDATED 11:59 01/17/2010:

The specific questions the Supreme Court has asked both sides to consider are:

1. Whether the First Amendment right to privacy in political speech, association, and belief requires strict scrutiny when a state compels public release of identifying information about petition signers.

2. Whether compelled public disclosure of identifying information about petition signers is narrowly tailored to a compelling interest, and whether Petitioners met all the elements required for a preliminary injunction.

I would say the answer to both questions is "Yes." Let's hope the SCOTUS agrees.

Gay Marriage Tipping Point Reached?

Kevin Drum and Joe.My.God both blogged about the above graph from Andrew Gelman at FiveThirtyEight.com in the last few days. The key paragraphs are:

Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips put together a dataset using national opinion polls from 1994 through 2009 and analyzed several different opinion questions on gay rights. Here I'm going to talk about their estimates of state-by-state trends in support for gay marriage.

In the past fifteen years, gay marriage has increased in popularity in all fifty states. No news there, but what was a surprise to me is where the largest changes have occurred. The popularity of gay marriage has increased fastest in the states where gay rights were already relatively popular in the 1990s.

In 1995, support for gay marriage exceeded 30% in only six states: New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, and Vermont. In these states, support for gay marriage has increased by an average of almost 20 percentage points. In contrast, support has increased by less than 10 percentage points in the six states that in 1995 were most anti-gay-marriage--Utah, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Idaho.

These are definitely important and interesting observations, but digging deeper, there is even more.

Most other commenters did not also discuss this even more interesting graph, which shows the current percentage of people who, when polled who support marriage for same-sex couples and/or civil unions.

Looking closely at the dark red dots, notice that marriage for same-sex couples is basically only legal in the states where it is above 50 percent. The three states which have marriage (within margin of error) at 50 percent but do not have marriage equality right now are Rhode Island, California and New York.

Clearly, a state to look at closely at in the future is Iowa which legalized marriage equality though a unanimous court decision in April.

Other interesting data to include here would be to indicate the states which have comprehensive non-discrimination laws that include sexual orientation (and gender identity).

Anti-LGBT Marriage Amendment Fails To Clear AZ Legislature

Finally some good news on the gay marriage front. According to 365gay.com and Equality Arizona:

Bills that constitutionally limit would limit marriage to opposite-sex couples were filed earlier this year in both the House and Senate by Republican lawmakers and appeared to have enough support for passage.

But just before the House was to vote Rep. Kyrsten Sinema added a clause to the bill that would grant unmarried couples, both same and opposite-sex, many of the rights of marriage but without the name.

With the amendment in place the House voted 28-27 to give the measure preliminary approval. If it won final approval in both houses with the clause intact it would have gone to voters.

The bill's chief sponsor in the House, Jim Weiers (R), angrily denounced the maneuver saying it made the ban on gay marriage meaningless.

So Mr. Weiers reaction makes it very clear that these statewide initiatives "definiing marriage as one man and one woman" is not just about preventing gay and lesbian couples from accessing marriage, but it is really about preventing substantial governmental recognition of same-sex couples.

Let's hope that just as Arizona fails to have a vote on this issue in 2008, so will California.

Super Tuesday Results: Obama and Clinton Battle On

Joe.My.God has this great graphic (that I snagged and reproduced here) showing the current delgate counts of the two leading Democratic presidential copntenders. Although Barack Obama won more states (13 to 8) than Hillary Clinton, Clinton won the more populous states like California, New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey. Pam over at The Blend has a slightly different tally (825 to 732).

By states, the Senator from Illinois won Alaska, Alabama, Connecticutt, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota and Utah while the Senator from New York won Arizona, Arkansas, California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

In the big enchilada of California, Clinton crushed Obama 52 to 42% (so now we know that Zogby's polls are trash while SUSA and the Field poll are more accurate).

As Joe.My.God points out, according to exit polls (1879 total respondents) 4% of the electorate in California was gay or lesbian and they went for Hillary 60 per cent to 25 per cent.

John McCain won the most states and the most states and the most delegates, ahead of both Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, and now seems poised to become the Republican presidential nominee.

On the statewide intiatives, they all went the way that Mad Professah endorsed yesterday, except for Proposition 93, which apparently has lost 53.6 to 47.4%. This means that the two most important satate legislative leaders, State Senate Pro-Tem Don Perata and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez will be unable to run for re-election in November.

Endorsements for February 5, 2008 Statewide Election

Here is who (and what) I voted for and urge you to do similar in California's statewide presidential primary election today:

Democratic Presidential Primary
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Barack Obama
Statewide Ballot Measures
PROPOSITION 91 (Sequestering of Transportation Fees): No
PROPOSITION 92 (Guaranteed Community College Funding): No
PROPOSITION 93 (Modifying Term Limits Initiative): Yes
PROPOSITION 94 (Indian Gambling Compact): Yes
PROPOSITION 95 (Indian Gambling Compact): Yes
PROPOSITION 96 (Indian Gambling Compact): Yes
PROPOSITION 97 (Indian Gambling Compact): Yes
Local Ballot Measures
PROPOSITION S (City Tax For Municipal services): Yes

Oregon DP Law Enjoined From Going Into Effect January 1

The Oregon Family Fairness Act, a statewide domestic partnership act which was enacted by the Democratic-controlled Oregon Legislature and signed into law by Governor Ted Kulongoski on May 9, 2007 has been prevented from going to effect on Tuesday January 1 by an injunction issued at the behest of heterosexual supremacists at the Alliance Defense Fund in an ongoing dispute about whether enough signatures had been gathered to put a measure on the statewide ballot to repeal the measure. The Oregon Equality Act, a non-discrimination law which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity will go into effect on Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman issued the injunction late Friday December 28 and set a hearing date of February 1, 2008.

Local TV Coverage of California's Dirty Tricks Initiative

Saturday's Los Angeles Times carried a story which made it seem likely that the proposed ballot measure to change California's allocation of presidential electoral votes from winner-takes-all (as it is for for more than 520 of the 538 votes up for grabs in 48 of 50 states) to a district-based method is going to fail to qualify for the June 2008 ballot. Dubbed the Dirty Tricks Initiative by actor/activist Bradley Whitford, the measure would probably make it impossible for a Democrat to win the White House in 2008 if it were to be enacted.

Frankly, Mad Professah (and his readers) thinks the measure clearly violates the Federal constitution, since Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution gives to the Legislatures the right to assign Electors. It is doubtful whether the People of the State of California can change how Electors are allocated by exercising some legislative authority that the State Legislature has ceded them through enactment of the Initiative process, but that will be up for the United States Supreme Court to decide. Bush v. Gore, anyone?


Anyway, the story is starting to get local attention: