Ted Olson’s Best Quotes From Prop 8’s Closing Arguments
Like so many of us, I spent much of the latter part of this week focused on the closing arguments of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the federal trial that will determine the constitutionality of Prop 8. I read the questions asked by, then the answers submitted to, Judge Walker. Then, Wednesday, the actual final day of the trial, I followed intently every word from both sides, and had this overwhelming desire to tweet so many of the statements, but it was hard enough to stay on top of the almost real-time transcript provided courtesy of The American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER,) who also provided the official transcript which I have gone through several times now, and pulled what I think are some of the best parts of the closing arguments for you to savor. I’ve added my personal thoughts after a few, in italics.
As you know, Ted Olson is the lead counsel for the plaintiffs, the pro-marriage equality side. Everyone, including Maggie Gallagher, the founder of the National Organization for Marriage, feels Olson’s work, along with David Boies, his co-counsel, was so expert we have a strong chance of winning. In fact, Maggie, already shilling for your money, said, “I expect Judge Walker will overrule Prop 8.â€
With that, I give you some of Ted Olson’s best statements during Wednesday’s closing arguments. If you want to know what the other side said, read my piece at Change.org: “Gay People Cannot Be Allowed To Marry Because Straight People Cannot Be Trusted?”
And we’re off!
Olson speaking to the judge:
For example, you asked, “How does permitting same-sex couples to marry in any way diminish the procreative aspect or function of marriage, or denigrate the institution of marriage for heterosexuals?”
Lead counsel responded: “Your Honor, because it will change the institution. If the institution is deinstitutionalized,” he said, “Mr. Blankenhorn will testify that will likely lead to very real social harms, such as lower marriage rates and high rates of divorce and nonmarital cohabitation, with more children raised outside the marriage and separated from at least one of their parents.”
Then, this important tidbit, which proves animus –“hostility or ill feeling,” which, if proved was the reason for the voters’ prop 8 decision, would require the judge to overturn Prop 8.
“It is revealing, it seems to me, that the deinstitutionalization message is quite different from the thrust of the proponents’ Yes on 8 election campaign. That, in the words they put into the hands of all California voters, focused heavily on: Protect our children from somehow learning that gay marriage is okay. Protect our children from learning that gay marriage is okay.
Those are the words that the proponents put in the ballot — in the voter information guide that was given to every voter.”
Certainly, many of us saw those ads on TV: Save our children! Horrors!
“The Supreme Court has said that: Marriage is the most important relation in life. Now that’s being withheld from the plaintiffs. It is the foundation of society. It is essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness. It’s a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights and older than our political parties. One of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause. A right of intimacy to the degree of being sacred. And a liberty right equally available to a person in a homosexual relationship as to heterosexual persons.”
Regardless of the outcome of this case, or even when — because it is when, not if — it goes to the Supreme Court, we must always remember what the Supreme Court has said about marriage. And every time someone from Maggie Gallagher’s NOM says that “gay marriage” is not a civil right, we can retort, “Neither is ‘straight marriage.’ But ‘marriage’ is.”
“[Marriage] is a right belonging to Californians, to persons. It is not a right belonging to the State of California.”
“No one aspires as a child to grow up and enter into a domestic partnership. But they do aspire as children to grow up and be married.”
“Proposition 8 discriminates on the basis of sex in the same way that the Virginia law struck down in Loving discriminated on the basis of race. They could marry whoever they want, unless that person was the wrong race.”
“So how does preventing same-sex couples from getting married advance the interest or protect the interest of procreation? They are not a threat to us.
What one single bit of evidence that they are a threat to the channeling function? If you accept that California has the right to do that in the first place. And I do not.
This is an individual constitutional right. And every Supreme Court decision says that it’s a right of persons. Not the right of California to channel those of us who live in California into certain activities or in a certain way.”
“[W]e had expert witnesses that talked about the history of marriage going far back. Not 30 years, but far back into history what marriage has always been. The Supreme Court said older than the Bill of Rights, older than our political parties. That’s not something new. It’s marriage. It’s not single-sex marriage or interracial marriage or anything like that.
Mr. Cooper says you have to accept the fact that — “First of all, you have to accept my definition. It has to be between a man and a woman. Then, if you have a marriage between a man and a man or a woman and a woman, it will change the marriage.”
Well, of course it will, because you started by defining the term that you wanted to define.”
“What we’re talking about here is allowing individuals who have the same impulses, the same drives, the same desires as all of the rest of us, to have a relationship in harmony, stability, and to form a family and a neighborhood, all of those things that the Supreme Court talked about.
And, now, tell me how it helps the rest of the citizens of California to keep them out of the club. It doesn’t.”
Indeed. It does not.
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Reacting to a report that Donald Trump has been quizzing his attorneys about what type of prison he likely will be sent to, former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner stated that is not only an indication that he knows he’s going to be convicted but also an admission of guilt.
Speaking with MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart, the attorney was asked about a recent Rolling Stone report about Trump’s prison panic.
As Rolling Stone reported, Trump asked if he’s “be sent to a ‘club fed’ style prison — a place that’s relatively comfortable, as far these things go — or a ‘bad’ prison? Would he serve out a sentence in a plush home confinement? Would government officials try to strip him of his lifetime Secret Service protections? What would they make him wear, if his enemies actually did ever get him in a cell — an unprecedented set of consequences for a former leader of the free world.”
POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?
According to the attorney, Trump is revealing himself by asking for so many details.
“What does this tell you about Trump’s mindset?” host Capehart asked.
“It tells me he is scared to death” Kirschner quickly answered. “It tells me he has overwhelming consciousness of guilt because he knows what he did wrong and he knows he is about to be held accountable for his crimes. So it is not surprising that he is obsessing.”
“If he was confident that he would be completely exonerated, would he have to obsess about what his future time in prison might look like?” he suggested. “I think the last refuge for Donald Trump can be seen in a recent post where he urged the Republicans to defund essentially the prosecutions against him. which, to this prosecutor, Jonathan, smells a lot like an attempt to obstruct justice.”
Watch below or at the link.
Image via Shutterstock
A federal judge in Texas known for a ruling that attempted to ban a widely-used abortion drug is citing an extremist anti-LGBTQ group in his ruling allowing a ban on drag shows to stay in place.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a former attorney for an anti-LGBTQ conservative Christian legal organization, and a member of the Federalist Society, in his 26-page ruling dated Thursday cited the “About” page of Gays Against Groomers to claim, “it’s unclear how drag shows unmistakably communicate advocacy for LGBT rights.”
Judge Kacsmaryk, appointed by Donald Trump twice before finally assuming office in 2019, suggests the First Amendment does not provide for freedom of expression for drag shows, calls drag “sexualized conduct,” and says it is “more regulable” because “children are in the audience.”
Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern adds, “Kacsmaryk’s conclusion that drag is probably NOT protected by the First Amendment conflicts with decisions from Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Montana which held that drag is constitutionally protected expression. It also bristles with undisguised hostility toward LGBTQ people.”
Calling the judge “a proud Christian nationalist who flatly refuses to apply binding Supreme Court precedent when it conflicts with his extremist far-right beliefs,” Stern at Slate writes that Kacsmaryk ruled drag “may be outlawed to protect ‘the sexual exploitation and abuse of children.’ In short, he concluded that drag fails to convey a message, while explaining all the reasons why he’s offended by the message it conveys.”
Stern does not let Kacsmaryk off the hook there.
“From almost any other judge, the ruling in Spectrum WT v. Wendler would be a shocking rejection of basic free speech principles; from Kacsmaryk, it’s par for the course. This is, after all, the judge who sought to ban medication abortion nationwide, restricted minors’ access to birth control, seize control over border policy to exclude asylum-seekers, and flouted recent precedent protecting LGBTQ+ equality,” Stern says.
“He is also poised to bankrupt Planned Parenthood by compelling them to pay a $1.8 billion penalty on truly ludicrous grounds. And he is not the only Trump-appointed judge substituting his reactionary beliefs for legal analysis. We have reached a point where these lawless decisions are not only predictable but inevitable, and they show no sign of stopping: Their authors are still just settling into a decadeslong service in the federal judiciary.”
West Texas A&M University President Walter V. Wendler penned the letter that sparked the lawsuit.
Titled, “A Harmless Drag Show? No Such Thing,” Wendler wrote: “I believe every human being is created in the image of God and, therefore, a person of dignity. Being created in God’s image is the basis of Natural Law. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, prisoners of the culture of their time as are we, declared the Creator’s origin as the foundational fiber in the fabric of our nation as they breathed life into it. Does a drag show preserve a single thread of human dignity? I think not.”
Journalist Chris Geidner concludes, “It’s an extremely biased ruling by a judge who has established that he does not care about being overturned — even by the most conservative appeals court in the nation.”
U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL). largely seen as pushing Speaker Kevin McCarthy‘s Republican-majority House of Representatives toward shutting down the federal government, is praising and promoting remarks made by a freshman GOP lawmaker that appear to suggest the use of violence. U.S. Rep. Eli Crane‘s comments, posted Friday (below), call for change “through force,” remarks echoing Congressman Gaetz’s recent comments which were denounced by an expert on authoritarianism as fascistic.
“The only way we’re going to see meaningful change in this town is through force,” wrote Congressman Crane, Republican of Arizona atop a three-minute video in which he frames what is now an almost guaranteed government shutdown as a “spending fight.” In his video he says, “the only way you’re gonna get any change in this town is through force.” Gaetz in August had said, “we know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C.”
Congressman Crane is a former Navy SEAL. He has promoted the false “Big Lie” conspiracy theory that there was massive fraud in the election President Joe Biden won, and called “on the state legislature to decertify the 2020 election.” He is one of six House Republicans who voted against McCarthy’s speakership all 15 times in January.
“Congressman Eli Crane is a fountainhead of political courage,” said Rep. Gaetz Friday afternoon. “He holds the line.”
Crane recently came under fire for calling Black people “colored,” during debate on his legislation that would force the U.S. Armed Forces to not use any diversity requirements in its hiring practices.
Just days before he won his House seat last year, The Washington Post reported Crane had urged an “audience to look up an antisemitic sermon at a recent campaign stop.”
“Crane said that he was motivated to run because of ‘radical ideologies that are destroying this country’ and that he was most concerned about ‘Cultural Marxism,’ which the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as an antisemitic baseless claim gaining traction on the American right.”
“He encouraged the audience to watch a speech by a right-wing pastor who blamed cultural change on a group of German Jewish philosophers and condemned Barack Obama for having a ‘homosexual agenda.'”
“If we don’t wake up,” Crane said, according to the Post, “if we don’t study what they’re doing, and if we don’t put people in influential positions that understand what this war is all about, what they’re trying to do and have and have the courage to call it out, we’re going to lose this country.”
In August, while standing next to Donald Trump at a campaign rally, Congressman Gaetz said, “Mr. President, I cannot stand these people that are destroying our country. They are opening our borders. They are weaponizing our federal law enforcement against patriotic Americans who love this nation as we should.”
“But we know that only through force do we make any change in a corrupt town like Washington, D.C. And so to all my friends here in Iowa, when you see them come for this man, know that they are coming for our movement and they are coming for all of us.”
At the time, Raw Story reported, “historian and author Ruth Ben-Ghiat called Gaetz comments alarming.”
READ MORE: Pete Buttigieg Just Testified Before Congress. It Did Not Go Well for Republicans.
“What he is saying is that they are not going to have change through elections or through legislation or through reform. They are going to have change through violence,” she warned.
“And that’s how fascists talk,” Ben-Ghiat added. “So, even if Trump is out of the picture, these are people who have adopted methods very familiar to me as a historian of fascism, that violence and corruption and lying that’s what the party is today.”
Image via Shutterstock
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