Here’s what I came up with earlier today. The faint-of-heart (and of patience) can skip past the standing issue and start about halfway through the long post, where the court and the ligitants get into the substance of the debate about same-sex marriage and Prop 8.
On Monday (Dec. 6), the Ninth Circuit (federal appellate court) will be hearing arguments in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the case challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 8. I will be live-blogging the argument, beginning at 1 pm EST, over at 365gay.com. (I will link back to it from here when it’s done, but if you want the blow-by-blow, go there — not here.)
The first hour will address the standing issue; the second, the substance of the constitutional arguments. While standing arguments are usually a MEGO1, in this case it’s worth listening closely — there’s more than a minimal chance that the court will toss the Prop 8 defenders out on the ground that intervening parties don’t have standing to appeal.
The title of the post is the sort of thing you get when you ban cameras from the courtroom, but allow reporters and others to attend and to relay what they’ve seen and heard.
A group called the American Foundation for Equal Rights is live-blogging today’s closing arguments in the Prop 8 case from California,. Obviously, they’re using some kind of voice-activated transcription service, which is how you get {HET} row sex walls for (I’m assuming) “heterosexuals.”
(But is labeling people “heterosexual” or “homosexual” not placing us on opposite sides of “sex walls”? Discuss.)
Judge Walker could have allowed cameras in the courtroom for the closing arguments, but I was hardly surprised that he didn’t. After all, the U.S. Supreme Court had stuck its unwanted neck into the earlier request for broadcast, siding with the Prop 8 proponents’ ludicrous “witness intimidation” argument (in a tediously predictable 5-4 ruling). Why set himself up for another slapdown, and one that could have further delayed the closing arguments during the pendency of the appeal?
As I wrote in a post shortly before the ruling was handed down:
Surely public access to a trial, where people sitting in their living rooms can make their own judgments about the evidence, should be — from the vox populi standpoint, anyway — better than having such proceedings filtered through the media lens; and a small number of media outlets, at that. Let’s see whether this sentiment even surfaces in a case where Scalia might believe that honoring it would do harm to a case in which his belief, from available evidence, is quite strong.
It didn’t, and now the filtering madness continues. I’m trying to get a handle on what’s going on — and I’m grateful to those making the effort to disseminate the information — but this is frustrating, and anti-democratic.
For this Supreme Court, the First Amendment protects animal crush videos and unlimited corporate spending on campaigns, but not the right of the people to learn about one of the most pressing social and political issues of the day. Nice job.
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