Additional Lawyer Selected to Argue in Supreme Court DOMA Case

In a somewhat unusual move, the United States Supreme Court has selected an additional attorney to argue two procedural issues raised in the Edie Windsor DOMA case, namely that (1) that the Supreme Court does not have standing to review the U. S. Court Appeals for the Second Circuit ruling because Executive Branch has already conceded that DOMA is unconstitutional, and (2) the House of Representatives’ Republican leaders do not have a right to appear in the case under Article III of the Constitution which states the jurisdiction of the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, and the types of cases these courts can consider.  SCOTUS Blog looks at this development which suggest that in both the Prop 8 appeal and the DOMA appeal, the Supreme Court could using a decision of lack of standing to avoid rendering a substantive ruling.  The result would be that (a) the ruling striking down DOMA would stand and (b) the ruling striking down Prop 8 would stand and the impacts would be limited to the Second and arguably the First Circuits and, in the case of Prop 8, California, respectively.  Here are some article highlights:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday chose a Harvard professor of constitutional law, Vicki C. Jackson, to argue that the Court does not have the authority to rule on the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. She will file a brief and appear to argue the two procedural issues that the Court itself had raised in agreeing last Friday to consider DOMA’s validity.

Jackson, who joined the Harvard faculty last year after several years at the Georgetown University Law Center, will contend that the executive branch’s agreement with a lower court that DOMA is invalid takes away the Justices’ authority to rule on DOMA, and that the House of Representatives’ Republican leaders do not have a right to appear in the case under Article III of the Constitution. The professor will appear in the case as an amicus to make only those points, not to join in the debate over the constitutionality of DOMA, which the Court also will be considering.

When the Court accepted for review two cases on the same-sex marriage issue, it added questions to each on issues about its authority to rule. The second granted case involves the constitutionality of California’s “Proposition 8,” withdrawing the right of gays and lesbians to marry in that state. In that case, the Court also will be considering whether the proponents of “Proposition 8″ as a ballot measure have a right under Article III to appeal a lower court decision striking down that measure.

With the addition of Professor Jackson to the DOMA case, it appears likely that the Court will expand the argument time for that case beyond the usual one hour. It is unclear when the Court will announce an argument schedule for the new marriage cases.

The Court presumably reached beyond the two parties in the DOMA case for a lawyer to argue the procedural points, since the parties themselves disagree. The federal government has been willing to allow the House GOP leaders to be in court to defend DOMA’s constitutionality, since the government is no longer doing so, but has raised questions about whether the Republican leaders’ petition is the one the Court should consider on DOMA. In turn, the Republican leaders have contended that, since the government got its way in the Second Circuit Court, it is not a proper party to be appealing this case on DOMA. Professor Jackson, a neutral, will argue against both as the proper parties.

 

HRBOR December Second Thursday - 12-13-12

Sorry about the late reminder, but I hope local readers will make an effort to come celebrate the holidays with HRBOR at PNC Bank on Main Street in Downtown Norfolk for a night of business networking and good cheer. Please note that in December only, Third Thursday is moved to the Second Thursday so you can travel or spend more time with your family over the holidays. Again, I hope you are able to join HRBOR tomorrow on Thursday, December 13th, 2012!

 

What: HRBOR Third Thursday Business Networking Event

Event Host and Food & Beverage Sponsor:

PNC Bank/Kathleen Nicholas

Where: PNC Bank, 555 East Main St 1st Floor, Norfolk VA 23510 (757) 892-2400

When: Business Networking: Dec 13th, 6 - 8 pm

Parking: Free Parking in Garage but can not enter parking garage after 7:00 PM, must arrive and park before 7 PM or find alternate parking.

Featured Non-Profit: PFLAG (Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays http://www.facebook.com/pages/PFLAG-NorfolkSouth-Hampton-Roads/302569226426712

Third Thursday Cost: Free to Members, $15 Guest Fee for Guests and Prospective Members

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

The Far Right and GOP's Nervous Breakdown

Nothing is more disturbing to the far right and today's Republican Party than having to deal with objective reality.  For the Christofascists in the GOP base objective reality is something to be avoided at all cost as they cling to ignorance and Bible myths and fight a rear guard action against a changing world, discrediting Christianity in the process.  Since the 2012 election, the GOP and its legion of religious extremists, white supremacists and greedy plutocrats just cannot seem to come to grips with a changed nation that no longer wants their hate, bigotry and rob from the poor and give to the rich agenda. A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the nervous breakdown that has been triggered and some of the ensuing GOP civil war skirmishes.  Here are highlights:

It’s no surprise, after losing a second time to Barack Obama, that the right is engaged in a furious debate over the future of the Republican Party.  But it’s quickly degenerating into a mudfight.

“Conservatism is a racket for a lot of people to get very, very rich,” declares Joe Scarborough on MSNBC. “With no thought of winning elections.”

“It may be that major parts of American conservatism have become such a racket that a kind of refounding of the movement as a cause is necessary,” says William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard.

What’s going on here? Is this simply the venting of prominent media folks who are tired of seeing their side taken to the cleaners? Or have they concluded that the talk-show/fundraising culture that powers the GOP has become more interested in feathering its nest than electing Republicans?

[T]he reelected president, having vanquished Mitt Romney, is all but dictating terms on averting the fiscal cliff. No wonder the right seems to be undergoing a collective nervous breakdown.

Newt Gingrich sounded less than confident on Meet the Press when the talk turned to Hillary Clinton running for president in 2016. “The Republican Party today is incapable of competing at that level,” said the man who proved incapable of beating Romney.

The Journal says that House Republicans still have leverage, and that if we slide off the fiscal cliff and everyone’s taxes go up on Jan. 1, the GOP will still have the clout to negotiate a deal with Obama, who may fear that trench warfare will ruin his final term. Kristol responds with an obvious counter-argument: that if House Republicans block legislation to restore tax breaks to 98 percent of Americans in a last-ditch attempt to protect the richest 2 percent, “it will be they, and they alone, insisting on higher taxes.” Not a great position to be defending in 2014.

This growing divide extends to the Hill, where more GOP lawmakers—the latest being two senators, Bob Corker and Tom Coburn—are saying they are open to raising rates as part of a deal with the Democrats.

But that erosion among the Grover Norquist pledge-signers is generating significant pushback. Erick Erickson, the founder of RedState, says the Boehner wing of the party is convinced that the conservative movement has become a “paper tiger,” and that true believers have to “either start blowing things up or shut up.”

What should be the new and improved Republican flavor? The dilemma goes beyond taxes and spending to such issues as immigration, where the likes of Sean Hannity and Charles Krauthammer say the party should restore its standing with Hispanics by embracing amnesty or something close to it. Here too, Limbaugh and many others strongly disagree.

And what about gay marriage, now headed for the Supreme Court? The right has been awfully quiet about that, despite the dire predictions when Obama embraced the principle of same-sex marriage last spring. As conservative commentator George Will bluntly noted on This Week, “Quite literally, the opposition to gay marriage is dying. It’s old people.”

Romney’s retreat from the public stage, except for the occasional sighting at Disneyland or a Las Vegas prizefight, obviously created a GOP vacuum. One day, Paul Ryan or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush or Chris Christie may lead the party in a different direction. But with Obama not even having been sworn in for a second term, that day is far off. Instead, Republicans are groping for answers as the slow march toward the fiscal cliff leaves them ever more divided.

The Medieval Views of Antonin Scalia

In a post yesterday this blog noted Justice Antonin Scalia's latest episode of verbal diarrhea in which he engaged in yet another diatribe against LGBT Americans.  Increasingly, Scalia seems better suited to have sat on the Spanish Inquisition of old rather than the U. S. Supreme Court.  While he claims no ill will towards gays, he words and past opinions reveal a far different story.  His statements and writings about gays fairly drip with animus.  It is a wonder that his knuckles are bloodied from dragging along the floor and sidewalk.  As noted in yesterday's post his blatant bias should disqualify him from hearing either of the recently accepted gay marriage cases.  An op-ed in the Washington Post looks at Scalia and his Medieval view of gays and the world.  Here are excerpts:

The Supreme Court’s announcement Friday that it will take up gay marriage is more than a chance for the justices to recognize the emerging national consensus in support of gay rights.  It is a chance for them to overrule the medieval views of Antonin Scalia.

 
As if in response to the court’s announcement, the acid-tongued justice visited Princeton University late Monday and reiterated his opinion, expressed in a 2003 dissent, that a law banning sodomy is on par with laws forbidding bestiality or murder.

The court’s decision to take up a pair of gay-marriage cases is almost certainly good news for gay rights and almost certainly bad news for Scalia’s defense of discrimination. Chief Justice John Roberts didn’t let his court stand in the way of immigration and Obamacare, and he surely doesn’t want to be responsible for a modern-day Plessy v. Ferguson that stands against the fast-emerging majority in support of gay rights. 

A Post-ABC News poll last month found that while a slim overall majority favors legalizing gay marriage, those younger than 30 support it by 66 percent to 33 percent. Nine states and the District have now legalized gay marriage.

If Scalia is to honor his own principle, he’ll vote to strike down DOMA and give his blessing to those states that wish to legalize gay marriage. But don’t count on it.  In writings and oral arguments of late, Scalia has sounded more like a conservative pundit than a jurist, railing against Obamacare and in support of immigration restrictions. He used his immigration dissent to criticize President Obama over a policy that didn’t figure in the case.

His 2003 dissent in the sodomy case was typical of his extra-legal logic. He accused his colleagues of signing on to “the so-called homosexual agenda” and taking “sides in the culture war” with a “massive disruption of the current social order.” .  .  .  .  A decade later, Scalia’s parade of horribles still hasn’t mustered, and support for gay marriage has spread by the very means — democratic change — that Scalia praised. If he weren’t so opposed to international experience, he’d know that gay marriage hasn’t been a major factor in places that legalized it earliest.

Scalia finds himself with a growing list of foes: public opinion, empirical evidence, his own writings and an increasing number of conservative legal thinkers. Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, a Republican appointee and a conservative, wrote in an opinion striking down DOMA that “the Constitution delegated no authority to the government of the United States on the subject of marriage.”

 Scalia is a Neanderthal and bigot who needs to be removed from the U. S. Supreme Court.

A New Scientific Theory On Why Some People Are Gay

While the hate merchants of the Christian Right and the snake oil merchants of the reparative therapy crowd continue to fraudulently claim that homosexuality is a "choice" and that sexual orientation can be "changed," a new scientific study further supports the biological basis for homosexuality.  The gay haters can claim whatever they want to further their political agenda and/or line their own pockets by fleecing the gullible, but this scientific study further indicates that their mantra is nothing more than delusional religious based bullshit.  An article in U. S. News looks at the findings.  Here are some excerpts (some of the comments to the article underscore the rank ignorance and hate filled nature of many self-anointed "godly Christians"):

A group of scientists suggested Tuesday that homosexuals get that trait from their opposite-sex parents: A lesbian will almost always get the trait from her father, while a gay man will get the trait from his mother

The hereditary link of homosexuality has long been established, but scientists knew it was not a strictly genetic link, because there are many pairs of identical twins who have differing sexualities. Scientists from the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis say homosexuality seems to have an epigenetic, not a genetic link.

Long thought to have some sort of hereditary link, a group of scientists suggested Tuesday that homosexuality is linked to epi-marks — extra layers of information that control how certain genes are expressed. These epi-marks are usually, but not always, "erased" between generations. In homosexuals, these epi-marks aren't erased — they're passed from father-to-daughter or mother-to-son, explains William Rice, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California Santa Barbara and lead author of the study.

Rice and his team created a mathematical model that explains why homosexuality is passed through epi-marks, not genetics. Evolutionarily speaking, if homosexuality was solely a genetic trait, scientists would expect the trait to eventually disappear because homosexuals wouldn't be expected to reproduce. But because these epi-marks provide an evolutionary advantage for the parents of homosexuals: They protect fathers of homosexuals from underexposure to testosterone and mothers of homosexuals from overexposure to testosterone while they are in gestation.

"These epi-marks protect fathers and mothers from excess or underexposure to testosterone — when they carry over to opposite-sex offspring, it can cause the masculinization of females or the feminization of males," Rice says, which can lead to a child becoming gay. Rice notes that these markers are "highly variable" and that only strong epi-marks will result in a homosexual offspring.

"Most mainstream biologists have shied away from studying it because of the social stigma," he says. "It's been swept under the rug, people are still stuck on this idea that it's unnatural. Well there are many examples of homosexuality in nature, it's very common." Homosexual behavior has been observed in black swans, penguins, sheep, and other animals, he says.

The bottom line is that the knuckle draggers need to face the fact that God/nature makes some of us gay despite the ignorant writings of Neolithic nomads who were utterly ignorant of science and biology.   Clinging to Bible inerrancy is like shouting from the roof top that one is either a cretin or suffers from severe psychological disorder. 

More Tuesday Male Beauty

Supreme Court Justice Scalia Equates Homosexuality with Murder and Bestiality

Federal judges are supposed to be impartial when presiding over hearings and cases and are supposed to limit their considerations to the facts presented and the applicable case law and legal precedents.  If judges cannot remain unbiased and conform to the forgoing requirements, they are supposed to recuse them self from the case - i.e., not hear the matter and abstain from the matter.  And in the grand scheme of things, the U.S. Supreme Court is supposed to be the epitome of proper judicial conduct.  Enter Justice Antonin Scalia who while speaking at Princeton University equated homosexuality with murder and bestiality.  Does anyone think this arrogant, pompous blowhard can conform to proper judicial conduct in the upcoming Prop 8 and DOMA cases?  Scalia should be required to recuse himself and abstain from participating in these cases.  He has already shown his extreme bias and bigotry and how he will rule even before briefs are filed and oral arguments presented.  He is an embarrassment to the judiciary.  Here is a summary of Scalia's batshitery and bigotry via Politico:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Monday found himself defending his legal writings that some find offensive and anti-gay.

Speaking at Princeton University in his native New Jersey, Scalia was asked by a gay student why he equates laws banning sodomy with those barring bestiality and murder.

“I don’t think it’s necessary, but I think it’s effective,” Scalia said, adding that legislative bodies can ban what they believe to be immoral.

Scalia has been giving speeches around the country to promote his new book, “Reading Law,” and his lecture at Princeton came just days after the court agreed to take on two cases that challenge the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

Some in the audience who had come to hear Scalia speak about his book applauded but more of those who attended the lecture clapped at Hosie’s question.

“It’s a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the `reduction to the absurd,’” Scalia told freshman Duncan Hosie of San Francisco during the question-and-answer period.

“If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?”

Scalia said he is not equating sodomy with murder but drawing a parallel between the bans on both.

Then he deadpanned: “I’m surprised you aren’t persuaded.”

Hosie said afterward that he was not persuaded by Scalia’s answer. He said he believes Scalia’s writings tend to “dehumanize” gays.

I'll say it again.  Scalia is an arrogant, bigoted ass and his conduct puts the judicial system and the Supreme Court in ill repute.  The man truly needs to resign or be removed from the Supreme Court.  As for where Scalia's anti-gay animus comes from, take a guess.  The Bible, of course, much of which as the last post indicates is comprised of myths and propaganda. 

What Do We Actually Know About Jesus' Birth? Not Much

I by no means want to be the Grinch at the holiday season, but as one who values true and accurate history, much of what we hear this time of year from both pulpits and the media about the Christmas story is nothing more than fabrications and embellishment of the two contradictory nativity accounts in the New Testament - nativity accounts that themselves are subject to question from a purely historical perspective.  Professor Bart D. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and  a leading authority on the Bible and the life of Jesus, has a piece in Newsweek that underscores the dubious nature of much of what is taken as fact by the public and Bible thumping Christianists.  Here are some excerpts about both the flaws in the Gospel accounts and other aspects of the Christmas story that were fabricated out of thin air over the centuries:

[T]here are Gospels about Jesus that have come down to us from the ancient world, which present information at odds with widely held views.

As Christians around the world now prepare to celebrate Jesus’ birth, it is worth considering that much of the “common knowledge” about the babe in Bethlehem cannot be found in any scriptural authority, but is either a modern myth or based on Gospel accounts from outside the sacred bounds of Christian Scripture. Some obvious examples: nowhere does the Bible indicate what year Jesus came into the world, or that he was born on Dec. 25; it does not place an ox and an ass in his manger; it does not say that it was 3 (as opposed to 7 or 12) wise men who visited him.

For many centuries, most Christians garnered their information about the birth of Jesus not from the New Testament but from popular writings that were not officially considered Scripture. One of the best known of these books is called the “Proto-Gospel of James,” composed probably in the late second century, a century after the canonical Gospels, and accordingly, far less likely that they contain anything like historically accurate information. But Christians throughout the Middle Ages were rarely interested in historical accuracy; they loved stories and reveled in their meaning, especially stories having anything to do with the appearance of the Son of God in the world.

This past November, Pope Benedict XVI published his third book on the life of Jesus, this one focusing on the New Testament accounts of his birth, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives.  .  .   .  .  it will be widely welcomed—not only among Catholics but also, one might suspect, among conservative Christians of whatever stripe, for its affirmation of the Gospel accounts not only as theologically valuable but also as historically accurate.

The book will not be as well cherished, however, among those who are less interested in affirming the narratives of Scripture than in knowing what actually happened in the past. And there is indeed a very wide swath of scholars—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, agnostic, and others—who have a very different view of the accounts of Jesus’ birth in the New Testament and who realize that there are problems with the traditional stories as they are recounted for us in Matthew and Luke, the only two Gospels that contain infancy narratives.

For centuries scholars have recognized that the birth narratives of the New Testament are historically problematic. For one thing, the two accounts—the first two chapters of Matthew and the first two chapters of Luke—are strikingly different from one another, in ways that appear irreconcilable. To start with, they both give genealogies of Jesus’ father, Joseph (it’s an interesting question why they do so, since in neither account is Jesus a blood relative of Joseph), but they are different genealogies: he is said to have a different father, and grandfather, and great-grandfather, and so on.

[T]hey are doing so [providing a genealogy] because they both want to relate Jesus to the ancestral line of the Jewish patriarchs, but neither of them has access to the kind of reliable data they need for the task. So they have provided genealogies that have been invented for the purpose and that, as a result, are necessarily at odds with each other. And that is just the opening gambit. The discrepancies occur repeatedly throughout the chapters.

Moreover, both accounts contain contradictions with the known facts of history. Just take Luke as an example. Only in this Gospel do Joseph and Mary make a trip from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem in order to register for a census when “the whole world” had to be enrolled under Caesar Augustus. The whole world? Luke must mean “the whole Roman Empire.” But even that cannot be right, historically. We have good documentation about the reign of Caesar Augustus, and there never was a census of his entire empire. Let alone one in which people had to register in their ancestral home. In this account Joseph and Mary need to register in Bethlehem (which is why Jesus is born there) because Joseph is descended from King David, who came from Bethlehem. But David lived a thousand years earlier. Is everyone in the entire Roman Empire returning to their ancestral home from a thousand years earlier?

This is not a story based on historical fact. It is a narrative designed to show how Jesus could have been born in Bethlehem—whence the Messiah was to come—when everyone knew in fact that he came from Nazareth.

There are other kinds of implausibility in the accounts—leaving aside the much-debated question of the virgin birth itself. In Matthew, for example, the wise men follow the star to Bethlehem, where it stops over the house where Jesus is (why, by the way, is Jesus’ family living in a house, if they just came to register for a census?). How is it that a star—or any celestial body—can lead anyone to a particular town? And how can it then stop over a particular house?

[T]hese Gospel sources, whatever else they are, are not historically reliable descriptions of what really happened when Jesus was born. 

These are books that meant to declare religious truths, not historical facts. For believers who think that truth must, necessarily, be based on history, that probably will not be good news at all.

In sum, we know little or nothing about the real fact of Jesus' birth - assuming he even existed.  Yet the Christianists demand that all of us take the Bible as the literal truth, ignoring the major historical problems that plague the Gospel accounts.  Equally bad is that they similarly demand that the writings of ignorant nomads who possessed less knowledge about the earth, solar system, and universe, not to mention medicine and biology and physiology, than most America eighth graders be regarded as the inerrant truth.   Believing that the Bible is the inerrant truth and that it must be taken literally is, in my opinion, tantamount to confessing that one is an idiot as the chart below illustrates.

Click image to enlarge

I believe that there is a creator or some sort.  I simply no longer believe that the Bible tells us the truth about that creator.  Most of the New Testament was written as a propaganda piece to further the fledgling Christian religion.  As is still the case with the Vatican today, the accurate historical truth is never allowed to get in the way of the agenda for power, control and earthly wealth.

Tuesday Male Beauty