Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court found today that the Bay State can’t award marriage licenses to out-of-state same-sex couples. It is a sad day for the gay rights movement, but I think the court’s decision is completely unsurprising. It just points out the obvious, which is that until the nation as a whole comes to its senses and realizes that gay marriage is deserving of the same respect and legal recognition as straight marriage we’re all kind of screwed.
Anyway,
Court: Gays Can’t Come to Mass. to Marry
BOSTON — In a disappointment for the gay rights movement, the state’s highest court ruled Thursday that same-sex couples from states where gay marriage is prohibited cannot tie the knot in Massachusetts.
Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican who is a considering a run for president in 2008, welcomed the decision, saying he did not want Massachusetts to become “the Las Vegas of same-sex marriage.”
Romney is just warming up here. It gets more offensive later!
The Supreme Judicial Court upheld a 1913 state law that forbids nonresidents to marry in Massachusetts if their marriage would not be recognized in their home state.
If the court had struck down the law, Massachusetts would have been thrown open to gay couples from across the country to get married. Then they could have returned to their home states to fight for legal recognition for those marriages.
Massachusetts “has a significant interest in not meddling in matters in which another state, the one where a couple actually resides, has a paramount interest,” Justice Francis Spina wrote.
The state “can reasonably believe that nonresident same-sex couples primarily are coming to this commonwealth to marry because they want to evade the marriage laws of their home states, and that Massachusetts should not be encouraging such evasion.”
This is the part where the court makes an actual legal determination based on a sober look at what the laws on the Massachusetts books show is the only, obvious (if unfortunate, in my opinion) holding in this case.
The ruling leaves in legal limbo an undetermined number of out-of-state gay couples who got married in 2004 in Massachusetts when it became the first state to let gays wed.
Arline Isaacson of the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus called the decision “a painful reminder that we remain second-class citizens.”
“It’s painful to know you’ll be treated equally under the law if and only if you happen to live here,” she said. “Otherwise, you are completely unequal as a gay person.”
So this is the part where I have to criticize people for whom I have a lot of sympathy. I am a proponent of granting full and equal rights to homosexual couples, definitely including the right to marry, but to suggest (as I think Isaacson may be, here, and as I think a lot of activists do, generally) that the court should have ruled otherwise because it is, in some sense, the “right” thing to do, is a bad move. The problem isn’t the judges; the problem is the laws. I think Isaacson is hinting at that in this quotation, but I wouldn’t mind seeing it more explicitly stated somewhere (here?).
But the governor said: “It’s important that other states have the right to make their own determination of marriage and not follow the wrong course that our Supreme Judicial Court put us on.”
Okay, this is what I was talking about before. What a dickhead. What does Romney get out of this statement, which antagonizes his constituency and marks him as a strong opponent of gay marriage? Oh, right. The whole running-for-president thing. Well, I’ll just state that I look forward to his embarrassing failure in the primaries and move on.
More than 6,000 gay couples have married in Massachusetts since the same court ruled in a landmark decision in 2003 that the state Constitution gives same-sex couples the same right to marry as heterosexual ones.
Eight gay couples from surrounding states had challenged the 93-year-old law. Five of those eight couples received marriage licenses in Massachusetts before the governor ordered city and town clerks to enforce the 1913 law.
In Thursday’s ruling, six justices ruled against the gay couples in two separate opinions. Only one member of the seven-justice court dissented.
However, the court sent the cases involving couples from Rhode Island and New York back to a lower court, saying it was unclear whether those states prohibit same-sex marriage.
New York’s top officials have said same-sex marriage is illegal in the state, although that interpretation is being challenged.
“We do consider ourselves still married,” said Amy Zimmerman, 33, of New York City, who has a marriage license with Tanya Wexler, 35. “There is a limbo element to it. We are not exactly sure what is all means yet.”
Hey, check it out–somebody alluding to the fact that this decision did nothing but stir up already-muddied waters. Isn’t rational thought neat?
In arguments before the high court in October, a lawyer for the gay couples said the 1913 law had been unused for decades until it was “dusted off” by Romney in an attempt to discriminate against same-sex couples.
As far as I can tell, this argument is pretty weak. I mean, the specific law may have been anachronistic, but the idea behind it seems like a pretty fair understanding of how the federalist system works. Every state must recognize every other state’s sovereignty, but it’s far from clear that a state may essentially force another state to follow its lead. Sure, Romney is playing dirty with this law in a desperate attempt to distance himself from the forward-thinking decision the Massachusetts Court made to allow gay marriage. But that’s politics, folks, and should be a lesson: if you don’t like a law’s application, get the law changed. Representative government rules.
As for the out-of-state couples who obtained licenses before the law was enforced, the legality of their marriages will have to be determined in their home states on a case-by-case basis, state Attorney General Thomas Reilly said.
All you guys from red states are totally, totally screwed. Sorry.
One justice voted to strike down the 1913 law, saying it was “deeply rooted in discriminatory notions of marriage.” Gay rights advocates have argued that the law was aimed at interracial marriages.
The “resurrection of a moribund statute to deny nonresident same-sex couples access to marriage is not only troubling … but also fundamentally unfair,” Justice Roderick Ireland wrote. “This law has not been enforced for almost 100 years, and certainly never with the vitriol on display.”
The language of the law itself seems pretty unobjectionable. The fact that it’s being used to justify narrow-minded bigotry is disappointing, but that’s just the symptom of a larger problem.
[End of the article]
Summing up: this decision demonstrates not that the Massachusetts judiciary comprises a bunch of jerks who hate homosexuals, but rather that an honest court has no choice but to enforce bad laws. Had the court found a way to get around this law, it would have given opponents of gay marriage more ammunition–activist judges stomping all over the legislature’s bailiwick. If you don’t like this decision (and I hope you don’t), tell your representative. Don’t bother telling your president, though. At least not til 2008.
I just read a great New Yorker article–a profile of a tiny Greenwich Village restaurant, Shopsin’s, and its owner, who despises publicity and review-chasing customers. The lease is running out this year and the proprietor is moving on to a new location with cheaper rent (Brooklyn!), thus his finally giving the writer permission to publish the piece (after being a customer for decades).
“You’re really not allowed to be anonymous here,” Kenny has said. “You have to be willing to be who you really are. And that scares a lot of people.” One evening, when the place was nearly full, I saw a party of four come in the door; a couple of them may have been wearing neckties, which wouldn’t have been a plus in a restaurant whose waitress used to wear a T-shirt that said “Die Yuppie Scum.” Kenny took a quick glance from the kitchen and said, “No, we’re closed.” After a brief try at appealing the decision, the party left, and the waitress pulled the security gate partway down to discourage other latecomers.“It’s only eight o’clock,” I said to Kenny.
“They were nothing but strangers,” he said.
“I think those are usually called customers,” I said. “They come here, you give them food, they give you money. It’s known as the restaurant business.”
Kenny shrugged. “Fuck ‘em,” he said.
The restaurant, with 34 seats, has a menu of over 900 items.
To get an idea of Kenny’s methods, I once asked him how he made one of Eve’s favorites, Chicken Tortilla Avocado Soup, which he describes as a simple soup. “When someone orders that, I put a pan up with oil in it,” he said. “Not olive oil; I use, like, a Wesson oil. And I leave it. I’ve drilled out the holes in the burner so . . . it’s really fucking hot. . . . On the back burner, behind where that pan is, I have that grid. I just take a piece of chicken breast and throw it on. The grid is red hot, flames shooting up, and the chicken sears with black marks immediately and starts to cook. If there were grits or barley or something, I would nuke ‘em. . . . At that point in the cook, that’s what would happen if this were Chicken Tortilla Avocado with barley in it. For this dish—this is a fast dish—I shred cabbage with my knife. Green cabbage. . . . I cut off a chunk and I chop it really finely into long, thin shreds. I do the same with a piece of onion. Same with fresh cilantro. At this point, José has turned the chicken while my back is still to the pan. I throw the shit into the oil, and if you rhythm it properly, by the time you have the onions and everything cut, the oil is just below smoke. Smoke for that oil is about three-eighty-five. After three-eighty-five, you might as well throw it out. It won’t fry anymore; it’s dead. But I turn around just before smoke and I throw this shit in. And what happens is the cabbage hits it and almost deep-fries—it browns—and now we get a really nice cabbage, Russian-type flavor. The onions soften immediately, and I now turn back and I take one of any number of ingredients, depending on what they’ve ordered, and in this particular instance, for someone like you, I would add crushed-up marinated jalapeño peppers to about a five, which is about a half a tablespoon. They’re in a little cup in front of me. . . . In front of me, in, like, a desk in-out basket, I have two levels of vegetables that don’t need to be refrigerated and I have plastic cups full of garlic or whatever. So now the soup is cooking. So then I reach under the refrigerator. On the refrigerator floor there’s another thirty or forty ingredients, and I’ll take for this particular soup hominy—canned yellow hominy—and throw in a handful of that. Then I go to the steam table and take from the vegetarian black-bean soup—it has a slotted spoon in it—a half spoon of vegetarian cooked black beans. And then I switch to the right, because the spice rack is there, and I put in a little cumin. Then I take the whole thing and I pour chicken stock in it from the steam table. And at this point José has already taken the chicken off the flame. The chicken now is marked on the outside and the outside is white, but it’s not cooked. It’s pink in the center. He cuts it into strips, we throw it into the soup, a cover goes on the soup, it gets moved over to the left side of the stove on a lower light and in about three minutes José takes a bowl, puts some tortilla chips that I’ve fried the day before in the bowl with some sliced avocado and then pours the soup over it. And that’s Chicken Tortilla Avocado Soup.” There are about two hundred other soups.
The place sounds great, although of course it also seems like it would be antithetical to its essence to try to grab a meal there after reading the piece. I guess I’ll just have to keep an eye out for a similar idiosyncratic enterprise and, when I find it, to keep it to myself.
You can read the rest of the article here.
[kottke]
Things I’d rather watch than Mind of Mencia:
- Puppy Strangling Variety Hour
- Fear Factor: Leprosy Edition
- Septuagenarian Erotic Massage
- Road Kill Cooking
- Eastern European Infomercials
- Vomitorium 3: Pukopalypse Now
- The King of Queens
Hey look, in Texas they’re arresting people for public intoxication. No big deal, right? We don’t want people wandering the streets in a drunken stupor, exposing themselves and others to danger. Oh, wait a second. They’re arresting people while they’re in the bar? Well, that certainly puts an interesting spin on things.
And while we’re talking about bizarre alcohol-related arrests, check this one out. A 21-year-old and two friends hosted a party at their house and after the police busted the party the three were arrested. Only, um, he wasn’t even at the party. His friends were given fines, but because his name was on the lease he got to go to jail for a month! See? The system works. [discussion of this case can be found at plastic.com]
Anyway, I know that the idea is to crack down on these huge stupid college parties and prevent people from killing themselves and others, but let’s hold people responsible for their own actions–irresponsible drinking by partygoers is, first and foremost, their own fault. And, for that matter, (and this relates to the Texas story above) preemptively punishing people for legal drinking in a private establishment because they theoretically could do something bad is pretty ridiculous and an unwelcome imposition of the state into the private lives of its citizens.
Ooh, I’m perturbed about all this.
I finally posted the rest of my pictures from Austin. Here are a couple of selections, click that link for a lot more.
p + j
I had tacos
A nice sunset.
The UC-Berkeley Bears completely and hilariously punked USC a couple of weeks ago. On March 4, the two teams met in a must-win game for Cal, and they, well… just check it out for yourself.
In Victoria’s honor, I am picking UCLA to make the NCAA finals.
If you want to compete in my NCAA pool, you’ve got to put together a bracket here and then join the “calamityjake” group. It’s up to well over a dozen hardened competitors now.
And while we’re not on the subject, this Waiter Rant post shows exactly how annoying being a waiter can be.
If you want to be part of my spectacular NCAA pool, you need to fill out a bracket here and then join the “calamityjake” group. Although the official prize for winning is mere pride, I will buy the winner a beer at the bar near my house, where they serve dollar drafts.
And I don’t mean to tip my hand here, but I’m guaranteeing a pre-first round win for Monmouth.
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