Tag Archives: same-sex marriage

The Only Protected Class — White Evangelicals

For the past several decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has been on a crusade to end the “special status” of minority groups.  While it is abundantly clear that the purpose of the Civil War Amendments and the various Civil Rights Acts were to help, first African-Americans, and then women, achieve equality, the current majority of the U.S. Supreme Court want to act as if the law requires a “color-blind” (and implicitly a “gender-blind”) approach in which any effort by the government (or private institutions) in taking steps to assure that minority and women have a chance at success will be struck down.   Simply put, African-Americans, Hispanics, and women are no longer going to benefit from a “most-favored nation” status in civil rights laws.  On the other hand, the favored group of the Republican Party (White evangelicals) are entitled to such status.

This week saw the new legal order exemplified in three opinions.

First, and most obvious, was the decision in Students” for “Fair” Admissions, Inc, vs. President and Fellows of Harvard College.  While the outcome of the case is not surprising as an exercise in raw power by the six Republicans on the Supreme Court, the bottom line is the equal protection clause and Title VI ban any attempt to help African-Americans overcome centruries of discrimination by giving them a “plus” in consideration for spots at “selective” universities and professional schools.  The opinion does leave a limited exception in recognizing that these universities use essays as part of the admissions process and, of course, free speech would bar the government from implementing a ban on references to the racial background of the applicant in these essays.  The Supreme Court directs, however, that in considering these essays, admissions offices should solely consider how these essays reflect barriers that the applicant has overcome or other aspects of the applicant’s character.  Of course, nothing in the majority opinion bans giving a plus to “legacy” candidates even if legacy candidates will be primarily composed of wealthy whites.  The one positive aspect of these opinions is that, like with last year’s abortion decision, this decision costs Republicans their wedge issue.  For the past fifty years, affirmative action has placed minorities against those with lower levels of white privilege for the last spots in government program and kept both groups from focusing on the slots that were reserved for those with Privilege.  Whether, with affirmative action no longer around, the powers that be in the Republican Party can keep folks from taking a look at the preferences given to the children of alumni and wealth donors that take aways spots from both middle class whites and minorities who actually earned a slot at the top colleges will be a big question going forward. Continue Reading...

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Supreme Court — October 2022 Term — First Look at the Remaining Cases

It’s the first full week of June.  And that means that the clock is rapidly ticking to the end of this year’s Supreme Court term.  By custom, the Supreme Court tries to issue all of the opinions from the term before the Fourth of July holiday.  (It then spends the last three months of the term handling emergency motions and preparing for the next term.)

As we look ahead, some basics about how the Supreme Court operates.  During the argument portion of the term, the Supreme Court holds seven “monthly” — October through April — argument sessions (not quite as sessions often occur partly in two months but that is the convention used to describe the sessions).  In each session, the court hears arguments on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday (with some days skipped for federal and religious holidays).  Then on Friday, they discuss that week’s cases (along with applications for review) and take a tentative vote on each case.  After the vote, the “senior justice in the majority” (either the Chief Justice or the longest serving Associate Justice in the majority if the Chief Justice is the minority) chooses which justice gets to write the first draft of the opinion.  Typically, the justices assigning the opinions try to assure a balanced assignment of cases within the session (i.e., if there were nine cases, each justice would get one opinion to write) and across the term as a whole.   When we reach this point of the term, we have enough opinions from individual argument sessions to try to guess who will have the opinion.

Starting with October, we are down to one outstanding case — the Alabama voting rights case.    The bad news is that there are only two justices without an opinion from October — the Chief Justice and Justice Thomas.  It is slightly more likely that the Chief Justice has the case   He tends to like writing election cases.  While both are very likely to write an opinion that would undermine the Voting Rights Act, Justice Thomas is more likely to want to write an opinion that reverses the decision entirely (with no further proceedings) and the Chief Justice is more likely to send it back to the trial court for further consideration (in light of a standard which allows Alabama to dilute minority votes) so there is a slim chance that the Chief Justice ended up on the wrong side of a 5-4 split.  But my hunch is a 6-3 opinion that ignores the plain language of the Voting Rights Act. Continue Reading...

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The Supreme Court — Faux Originalism and the Reactionary Ascendency

This is a hard week to post about.  There were three opinion days this week.  And each one featured a new decision that ripped at the fabric of modern society and featured a rewriting of history in the service of originalism to allow the reactionary members of the court to push through an agenda that lacks electoral support based on a misreading of the Constitution.

Tuesday started off the week with Carson vs. Makinthe Maine school voucher case.   Traditionally, there have been two prongs to the Free Exercise Clause — one prong involves the power to follow one’s religious beliefs without penalty and the other prong involves discrimination based on religion.  Posed against the Free Exercise Clause is the Establishment Clause which forbids the government from establishing an official religion or religions.  Traditionally, the big fights have been in the “no penalty” prong.

On the penalizing religion prong, the battle has always been the reasonableness of the proposed accommodations measured against the significance of the government interest.  And in the late 1980s, after one of the low points of religious freedom in which Justice Scalia basically limited this prong to the right to have beliefs without penalty for those beliefs (but no right to act on those beliefs), Congress overreacted by enacting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act which went to the other extreme.  The RFRA and the Free Exercise Clause are on the verge of being interpreted as allowing people to claim religious exemptions from civil rights laws.  And we are likely to see another case in this prong later this week allowing a coach at a public school to pray publicly while on the job at a school function. Continue Reading...

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Sound and Fury Signifying (Almost) Nothing — Masterpiece Cakeshop

I knew when I posted a summary of what cases were left for the term, that there were good chances that the Supreme Court would issue a “stop the presses” opinion today that would be difficult to explain, given how many major cases were left and that several of them had some weird procedural issues.  Well today, we got one of those opinions that everybody was waiting for, and it turned out to be a big dud that ultimately decided nothing other than the individual case.

Masterpiece Cake was one of those cases that seemed to be major.  Earlier this decade, as states began to recognize the right to same-sex marriage and to expand civil rights laws to cover sexual orientation, fundamentalist public interest groups have been seeking to push cases to allow true believers to exempt themselves from generally applicable laws, primarily related to same sex marriage but also to contraception and “morning after” pills.  And eventually, they managed to get the United Supreme Court to accept Masterpiece Cake as the test case for this issue.   The basic issue as presented by the parties was whether the Free Exercise Clause or the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment allows a seller of expressive products to refuse — based on their religious or political beliefs that homosexuality is morally wrong — to provide a product to a same sex couple.  In this case, the product was a cake for a reception celebrating a same sex marriage.  While there was nothing on the cake that expressly endorsed same-sex marriage, the claim was that merely providing the product effectively signaled an endorsement of the marriage.

A problem, however, developed during oral argument.  In Colorado, the initial stage of a civil rights case is a hearing before an administrative body — the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.  During that hearing, one of the members of the Commission committed a gaffe.  In addressing the assertion that the baker should be allowed to discriminate based on a sincere religious belief, one of the commissioners noted that religion had been used to support slavery and the Holocaust.  This statement met all of the classical definitions of a gaffe:  it revealed what the speaker truly thought; as a factual assertion, it was technically defensible (as religion has  been used, and conservative are willing to admit is still true in the case of some Muslims, to support horrendously evil acts); and it is not something that is acceptable to say.    In terms of this case, however, it supported the proposition that the baker did not receive a fair hearing on the issue of whether he should receive some type of exemption from civil rights law based on his religious belief because, at least one member of the Commission, believed that religious beliefs are entitled to no wait whatsoever. Continue Reading...

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To Bake or Not to Bake

This week, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments in Masterpiece Cakeshop vs. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.  The case involves Colorado’s civil rights statutes which prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation.  The petitioner — a baker — claims that he should be exempt from that requirement because he believes that gay marriage is morally wrong and, by making him sell a wedding cake to the happy couple, the Colorado law is compelling him to endorse the wedding.

In many ways, this case is similar to the Hobby Lobby case from several years ago, but, in some key ways, it is different.  The main difference requires going back thirty years to a rather infamous free exercise decision, Employment Division of Oregon vs. Smith.  In Smith, Justice Scalia all but wrote the Free Exercise Clause out of the Constitution — holding that it created no exemption based on religious belief from a generally applicable law.  In response, Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act which was intended to restore the pre-Smith interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause.  There are, however, two problems with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.  First, as shown by Hobby Lobby, it actually created more protections than the pre-Smith decisions.  Second, the United States Supreme Court has held that it only creates a rule for interpreting federal statutes and that Congress does not have the power to impose a similar rule on the states.  Because this case involves a state law, the RFRA does not apply.  While the baker attempts to raise a free exercise claim, that claim is unlikely to succeed under Smith as the ban on discriminating against homosexuals is a law of general application.  That does, however, leave the free speech claim.

The free speech claim brings us back into the Hobby Lobby universe where the question is whose perception controls.  Besides actual speech, free speech protection extends to expressive conduct.  Furthermore, as a general matter, the government may not compel speech.  The question is thus who is speaking in this case — a question that could blow a significant whole in civil rights law. Continue Reading...

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Marriage is a Fundamental Right

Most people would not debate that statement.   And the Supreme Court has previously recognized that basic principle.  Some, however, believe that their definition of marriage is the only definition of marriage that has ever been recognized in this country.  Today, in a 5-4 decision by Justice Kennedy, the majority of the Supreme Court thoroughly set forth the historical facts showing that the definition of marriage and what it means to be married has been ever-changing throughout history.  In light of the ever-changing nature of marriage, laws banning gays and lesbians from marrying their preferred partners simply represented discrimination against gays and lesbians, violating the equal protection clause.

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Supreme Court Decisions: The Final Week

Today, the Supreme Court issued four opinions, leaving seven cases still pending from this year.  They also announced that they will be issuing opinions on Thursday and Friday.  With two more opinion days this week, there is a significant chance that the last of the opinions will be issued on Friday, but it is slightly more likely that the last one or two will come on Monday (with a slim chance of a second opinion day next week).  Additionally, with today’s opinions, it is possible to make a good guess on who has which case.

From January, it is all but certain that Justice Kennedy has the Fair Housing case.  That is not necessarily good for civil rights activists, but there were worse possibilities.

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The Supreme Court and Same-Sex Marriage

This upcoming week is the last week of arguments for the current Supreme Court Term.  The highlight of this week’s arguments is Tuesday’s arguments in the same-sex marriage cases.  Ahead of the argument, a brief preview in the form of frequently asked questions.

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