It would be hard to find a close, or perhaps even a casual, observer of the Court who would predict with any confidence that the Court will deny review of all seven pending filings on same-sex marriage, from five states. The Court actually has been quite active on the issue this year: on three occasions, it has temporarily blocked lower court rulings that would have cleared the way immediately for same-sex marriages to begin or to be recognized, in Utah and Virginia.
Those orders suggest, if they don’t actually prove, that the Court is preserving either a chance for the issue to be explored further in lower courts without thousands of new same-sex marriages occurring, or a chance for the Justices themselves to weigh in on the issue before that happens.
Moreover, it would only take the votes of four Justices to grant review of any one of the seven new petitions, and there are four Justices who strenuously objected in dissent last year when the Court struck down a key part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act — a ruling that actually set off nearly three-dozen rulings by lower federal courts, striking down (with only one exception) state bans on such marriages.
When the Court privately discusses the new cases, as it almost surely did at last Friday’s closed-door Conference, it would not be hard to predict that those four Justices would be arguing energetically to take on the issue, provided that they had some reason to hope that, after such a review, they might gather a fifth, majority-making deciding vote from another Justice.
Those four Justices also surely know that, if the Court does opt to deny review of all of the cases at this point, such a denial would trigger the full implementation of appeals court decisions that would spread in a short period of time to eleven more states beyond the nineteen (along with Washington, D.C.) that currently allow same-sex marriage. That would almost certainly add an inevitability to the campaign to win same-sex marriage rights across the nation.
So, after the silence on Thursday, the focus now turns to Monday. The new list of orders, mostly denials, will emerge first and, before the end of the day, the Court will indicate whether it is rescheduling the same-sex marriage cases for another look, at a private Conference set for next Friday morning.
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Too Busy Talking to Ourselves | October 3, 2014
Most of us are too busy talking to
ourselves to even contemplate what might be vivid and apparent should we
ever learn to shut up.
- Bonnie Myotai Treace, Sensei, "The Sword Disappears in the Water"
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A landmark report released today paints a stark picture of the added financial burdens faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Americans because of anti-LGBT laws at the national, state and local levels. According to the report, these laws contribute to significantly higher rates of poverty among LGBT Americans and create unfair financial penalties in the form of higher taxes, reduced wages and Social Security income, increased healthcare costs, and more. The momentum of recent court rulings overturning marriage bans across the country has created the impression that LGBT Americans are on the cusp of achieving full equality from coast-to-coast. But the new report, Paying an Unfair Price: The Financial Penalty for Being LGBT in America, documents how inequitable laws harm the economic well-being of LGBT people in three key ways: by enabling legal discrimination in jobs, housing, credit and other areas; by failing to recognize LGBT families, both in general and across a range of programs and laws designed to help American families; and by creating barriers to safe and affordable education for LGBT students and the children of LGBT parents.Read the full report (PDF).
The report documents the often-devastating consequences when the law fails LGBT families. For example, children raised by same-sex parents are almost twice as likely to be poor as children raised by married opposite-sex parents. Additionally, 15 percent of transgender workers have incomes of less than $10,000 per year; among the population as a whole, the comparable figure is just four percent. To demonstrate the connection between anti-LGBT laws and the finances of LGBT Americans and their families, the report outlines how LGBT people living in states with low levels of equality are more likely to be poor, both compared to their non-LGBT neighbors, and compared to their LGBT counterparts in state with high levels of equality. For example, the denial of marriage costs gay and lesbian families money; same-sex couples with children had just $689 less in household income than married opposite-sex couples in states with marriage and relationship recognition for same-sex couples, but had an astounding $8,912 less in household income in states lacking such protections.
Shortly after her wife died in March, Arlene Goldberg had to give up the beloved South Florida home that the couple shared. Because Goldberg’s 2011 marriage to her partner of 47 years wasn’t recognized as legal in Florida, she was denied her wife’s social security benefits. Without that income, Goldberg, 67, couldn’t pay her mortgage. “I’m trying to figure out how I am going to get through this time,” she said from Fort Myers, Florida. “I really can’t even pay my bills.”
Goldberg is among an untold number of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people nationwide who suffer economic distress and in some cases, poverty, as a result of anti-gay laws such as same-sex marriage bans, or from a lack of legal protections, like non-discrimination ordinances, according to a new report by two think tanks, the progressive Center for American Progress and the pro-LGBT Movement Advancement Project.
Census data and other research over the last decade have shown higher rates of financial hardship and poverty among gays. But the report’s authors make the connection between those difficulties and specific laws and policies by analyzing current incomes and poverty rates for LGBT people and their heterosexual counterparts in states that have protections and those that don’t.
Attitudes to homosexuality are clearly becoming more liberal but there are still pockets of resistance. In total, 16% of Britons continue to believe that homosexuality should be outlawed. Men (19%) are more likely than women (13%) to advocate the banning of gay sex, and rejection of homosexuality peaks in London and the south-east, where more than one in five (21%) feel it should be illegal. However, at a total level, the proportion of Britons who believe gay sex should be illegal has reduced by eight percentage points, from 24%, since 2008.According to the same survey, same-sex marriage support stands at 63%.
