This morning I went down to the U.S. Supreme Court in Brooklyn to watch a remote feed of the Perry v. Schwarzenegger challenge to California’s Prop 8. Anti-gay marriage activists had been hard at work over the weekend to block the historic filming, YouTube broadcasting, and remote feeds to four federal courthouses across the country.
At 11:30 AM a court officer came into the court and told all six of us (yes, only six people – including two court illustrators) that the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order prohibiting the “remote viewing” of the live feed in federal courthouses, as well as posting of any YouTube videos until at least Wednesday at 4:00 PM EST.
Reports have come that the court, before deciding to allow cameras, received 138,542 comments in favor of cameras, and only 32 comments opposed.
But the real issue is that anti-gay marriage activists are now claiming they are afraid for their safety from marriage equality advocates. Seriously.
And who is the one leading the charge? As I wrote Saturday, it’s folks like Hak-Shing William Tam, an attorney who spent a year working to effect passage of Prop 8, and “urged†the judge to be an official litigant.
After news broke of a letter he had written to his church, he petitioned the court to be removed from the case. What did the letter say? Who is the type of person who is succeeding in blocking millions of Americans seeing how their judicial system works, what people are saying – pro and con – about marriage equality? As I wrote earlier, here’s part of his letter:
‘‘One by one, other states would fall into Satan’s hands,†he wrote. â€Every child, when growing up, would fantasize marrying someone of the same sex. More children would become homosexuals.â€
This, my friends, is the ignorance, hated, and religious bigotry that Justice Anthony Kennedy has allowed to sway his decison to disallow transparency in the courts. I cannot think of a more important, or better test case than Perry v. Schwarzenegger.
In the dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote, in part,
“In my view, the court’s standard for granting a stay is not met. […] In particular, the papers filed, in my view, do not show a likelihood of ‘irreparable harm.'”
Indeed, those benefits of allowing the world to see why gay marriage is so “wrong” and why Prop 8 is constitutional (of course it is not) far outweigh the imaginings of a man whose only opposition to public viewing of this historic trial, is his fear of Satan.
http://www.hulu.com/embed/qUMPBY789bPYQeurSgvajg