The Push for Legal Marijuana Spreads

While the Ohio initiative that would have legalized the possession of one ounce or less of marijuana for personal use went down to defeat on Tuesday and the likelihood of changes to Virginia's marijuana laws appears remote give the strangle hold the Virginia GOP - and by extension, its puppeteer The Family Foundation, a vicious and foul "family values" hate group based in Richmond - retains on the Virginia General Assembly, change is afoot elsewhere.  Just this week, the Supreme Court of Mexico handed down a ruling that may usher in major changes in that nations laws which have helped fuel drug cartels and the evils that go with them.  Change in the marijuana laws could also end the criminalization of those who have been caught up in ridiculously harsh drug laws.  The New York Times looks at the winds of change in a main editorial.  Here are highlights:

Support for making marijuana legal is increasing around the world, and that is a good thing. Earlier this week, the Mexican Supreme Court opened the door to legalizing the drug by giving four plaintiffs the right to grow cannabis for personal use.

In Canada, the newly sworn in prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has said he intends to change the law so people can use the drug recreationally; medicinal use is already legal in that country. And in the United States, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president, recently introduced a bill that would let states decide if they want to make the drug legal without worrying about violating federal law.

Laws banning the growing, distribution and possession of marijuana have caused tremendous damage to society, with billions spent on imprisoning people for violating pointlessly harsh laws. Yet research shows that marijuana is far less harmful than alcohol and tobacco, and can be used to treat medical conditions like chronic pain.

The Mexican Supreme Court’s ruling, which applies only to the four plaintiffs seeking a right to grow marijuana, does not strike down the country’s marijuana laws. But it will open the way to more legal challenges and put pressure on President Enrique Peña Nieto and the Mexican Congress to change the law, which has helped to fuel drug-related crime in the country.

Prohibition in Mexico and elsewhere in the Americas will also become harder to maintain if California voters legalize recreational use of marijuana. Activists there are seeking to put legalization initiatives on the 2016 ballot.  

What’s needed now is responsible leadership from President Obama and Congress. They ought to seriously consider the kind of legislation Mr. Sanders has proposed. His bill would remove marijuana, or “marihuana” as it is called in federal law, from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, which is meant for drugs that have a high potential for abuse and no medical use.

This change would allow states to decide if they want to make the drug legal and how to regulate it without being limited by federal law. 

If Congress is unwilling to act, Mr. Obama should move on his own by ordering the attorney general to request a study by the secretary of health and human services, which would be needed if the administration is to remove the drug from Schedule I on its own.

A growing group of activists, judges and lawmakers is showing the world a path to more sensible drug policies. Mr. Obama and Congress should join them.

While I do not handle criminal law matters, on occasion my corporate clients will receive a summons for a city code violation which is treated as a criminal offense and is heard before the criminal courts.  Each time I go to court to resolve one of these code violation cases, I usually have to sit through a parade individuals facing marijuana charges.  From what I have observed, the police seem to disproportionately target blacks, especially young black males, the majority of whom cannot afford legal counsel.  White defendants who appear with legal counsel typically get off with suspended sentences which are dismissed after a year of good conduct.  Black males without private counsel typically get convicted and thereafter have permanent criminal records which are impediments to many employment opportunities.  Meanwhile, conservatives and Virginia Republicans whine about the poor - read blacks - not being gainfully employed, yet Virginia's outdated marijuana laws help to insure these types of criminal convictions will bar gainful employment.

 

Mexico Supreme Court: Prohibitions on Same Sex Marriage are Unconstitutional in Every State

Mere weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court is to rule on the constitutionality of state bans on same sex marriage, Mexico Supreme Court for the first time has issued an opinion that states that laws prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying are unconstitutional in every state.  The opinion has yet to be released publicly, but the Clerk of the Mexico Supreme Court has written about the ruling in a blog post and indicates the broad application of the opinion.  Do Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia want to be more backward than Mexico (no slight intended to Mexico)?  A piece in BuzzFeed looks at this development south of the border which appears to be yet another major defeat for the Roman Catholic Church and its efforts to inflict 13th century knowledge and beliefs on all.  Here are highlights:

The Supreme Court and several lower courts have already ruled in almost every state that same-sex couples have the right to marry under the Mexican constitution. But because of the Mexican court system’s often confusing technicalities, none of those decisions have been binding in future cases. Theoretically, any court could rule against a couple who has sued for the right to marry even though there have been many cases decided in favor of others couples.

That is no longer true. On Wednesday, Mexico’s Supreme Court issued the first blanket statement that laws prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying are unconstitutional in every state — what is known as “generic jurisprudence.” The opinion is not yet public, but Supreme Court clerk Geraldina Gonzalez de la Vega — who worked on one of the early marriage equality suits before joining the court — wrote about the unpublished opinion in a blog post. (Decisions like these are ordinarily published within a week of when they are decided by the court.)

“The law of whatever federal entity that, on the one hand, considers the goal of marriage is procreation and/or defines marriage as celebrating the union of a man and a woman is unconstitutional,” held a Supreme Court panel in response to a suit out of the state of Colima, according to Gonzalez.

It will still take a lot more cases before same-sex couples can marry as easily as straight couples can in Mexico; federal judges must rule five times in each state to create precedent that would lead to full nullification of a local marriage code. And it’s not entirely clear how this process ends, Gonzalez told BuzzFeed News, because this marriage cases still making their way through the legal system are doing so under reforms enacted in 2011 that have never been fully tested.

“We’re playing in a new court,” Gonzalez said.

With South and Central America steadily moving towards marriage equality, the Catholic Church may find that its brand of ignorance and bigotry only has a market in Africa.

Formal Opinion of Mexican Supreme Court Rules Bans On Gay Marriage Are Unconstitutional

 

Back on December 5, 2012, the Mexican Supreme Court struck down a ban on same-sex marriages in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.  Today, the Court issued its full formal opinion which was sweeping in scope and what makes the ruling even more stunning, the Mexican Court cited past U.S. Supreme Court rulings such as Loving v. Virginia and Brown v. Board of Education to justify its sweeping ruling.  While in no way binding on the U.S. Supreme Court as it considers the DOMA and Proposition 8 appeals before it, the Mexican ruling certainly lays out a road map as to why the American tribunal should reach a similar conclusion and end the religious based discrimination against same sex couples nationwide.  BuzzFeed has details on the formal opinion released today.  Here are some excerpts:

Denying same-sex couples the right to marry is unconstitutionally discriminatory, Mexico's Supreme Court announced in a sweeping ruling made public Monday.

The ruling not only makes a strong statement about Mexican law's treatment of equal protection guarantees, it also relies heavily on civil rights rulings handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Although several justices of the American court take pride in not caring what foreign courts say, any who read the Mexican decision will find the court makes an impassioned case for the United States to follow its lead.

Writing for a unanimous tribunal, Minister Arturo Zaldívar Lelo de Larrea invoked the U.S. cases Loving v. Virginia and Brown v. Board of Education to argue for marriage equality in a way that American activists would be overjoyed to see from a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

On Loving v. Virginia, which struck down laws against interracial marriage in 1967, Zaldívar wrote (translated from its original Spanish):

The historical disadvantages that homosexuals have suffered have been well recognized and documented: public harassment, verbal abuse, discrimination in their employment and in access to certain services, in addition to their exclusion to some aspects of public life. In this sense … when they are denied access to marriage it creates an analogy with the discrimination that interracial couples suffered in another era. In the celebrated case Loving v. Virginia, the United States Supreme Court argued that "restricting marriage rights as belonging to one race or another is incompatible with the equal protection clause" under the US constitution. In connection with this analogy, it can be said that the normative power of marriage is worth little if it does grant the possibility to marry the person one chooses.

Zaldívar also wrote that it would also be contrary to the principles of the 1954 school desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education to restrict same-sex couples to civil unions or domestic partnerships while barring them from marriage.

It can be said that the [other] models for recognition of same-sex couples, even if the only difference with marriage be the name given to both types of institutions, are inherently discriminatory because the constitute a regime of "separate but equal." Like racial segregation, founded on the unacceptable idea of white supremacy, the exclusion of homosexual couples from marriage also is based on prejudice that historically has existed against homosexuals. Their exclusion from the institution of marriage perpetuates the notion that same-sex couples are less worthy of recognition than heterosexuals, offending their dignity as people.

The court broke important ground in the ruling by invoking another precedent from international law, a ruling handed down in 2012 by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Karen Atala Riffo y Niños v. Chile. Most Latin American countries recognize the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court, which is the legal arm of the Organization of American States. (The United States and Canada do not submit to the court's jurisdiction.)

The Mexican marriage case was the first test in any Latin American court of whether the decision in Atala's case can be applied to marriage rights. The court held that it could, writing that Atala requires the rejection of "a regime of separate-but-equal marriage."

Despite its breadth, this ruling will have only a small immediate impact in Mexico. Technicalities of the country's legal system mean that only the three couples who brought this case will be able to marry right away. Mexico City is still the only jurisdiction inside Mexico where marriage between same-sex couples is fully legal; several more lawsuits will have to be brought before that right is available nationwide.

As I have noted a number of times, who would have believed a decade ago that countries in South America and Mexico would be taking a stronger stand in rejecting discrimination and the concept of "separate but equal" than the United States of America.  It speaks volumes about what the Christofascists and undeserved deference to religion have done to this nation.  It is down right embarassing.

Mexican Supreme Court Strikes Down Gay Marriage Ban

While the United States Supreme Court apparently remains busy contemplating its collective navel on how to deal with the appeals before it involving California's Proposition 8 which has been struck down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the cases wherein DOMA has been struck down by among others the First and Second Courts of Appeals, the Supreme Court of Mexico in an unanimous ruling struck down a law of the southern state of Oaxaca which had banned same sex marriages.  Adding to the appearance that the United States is increasingly out of step with educated, non-Muslim portions of the world, both Uruguay and Colombia are both considering same sex marriage legislation as is France.  If nations formerly dominated by the Roman Catholic Church in South America can end the special rights given to far right Christianists, why can't the U. S. Supreme Court have the spine to do likewise?  Here are highlights on the ruling in Mexico:

The Supreme Court of Mexico issued a unanimous ruling Wednesday afternoon that paves the way to universal marriage rights in the country.

The actual ruling won’t be published for a little while, but the gay rights advocates who brought the case are proclaiming that today’s ruling “opens the door to equal marriage in the whole country.”

The court ruled on behalf of three same-sex couple seeking to marry in the southern state of Oaxaca. The court had already ruled in 2010 that gay marriages performed under a Mexico City ordinance had to be recognized nationwide. With this precedent, the remaining bans on gay marriage in most Mexican states could quickly fall.

This ruling does not immediately eliminate marriage statutes limiting unions to a man and a woman—the Mexican Supreme Court doesn’t have the power to strike down state laws like that en mass as the United States Supreme Court does. But the lawyer who brought the case, Alex Alí Méndez Díaz, said before the ruling that victory would mean the beginning of the end for bans on same-sex marriage.

The court’s ruling that the ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutionally discriminatory is partly based on a February ruling from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights that governments can’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, Karen Atala Riffo y Niñas v. Chile.

This case could have repercussions outside of Mexico—by expanding this precedent to include the right to marry, courts in other Latin American countries that recognize the Inter-American Accord on Human Rights could follow this precedent and determine that marriage rights are also protected in their countries. And the Inter-American Court itself could be more likely to recognize a right to marry—a case brought by three couples trying to strike down Chile’s ban on gay marriage has already begun making its way through the international judicial system. 

As I noted before, it is pretty sad when the nation that likes to promote itself as "the land of liberty" now lags behind nations that it once viewed as  two bit third world countries when it comes to affording full rights to LGBT Citizens.