Supreme Court Questioning Threatens 650,000 Same-Sex Couples And Their 250,000 Children
America’s top justices appear poised to threaten 650,000 same-sex couples, many of whom are raising 250,000 children today. The Court must answer five moral questions before they can decide the top two civil rights cases of this generation.
Five moral matters are about to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, in two of the many civil marriage disputes that have been percolating for 22 years in agencies, legislatures, and courtrooms across the nation.
The Court, yesterday and today, will hear oral arguments challenging two same-gender marriage bans. California’s Proposition 8 bans civil marriage for same-gender couples and families, and forces them into second-class domestic partnership. The federal Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) ignores civilly married couples and families whenever spouses are of the same gender, and denies them access to 1,138 federal programs, including most military pay and benefits. These are the first two marriage equality cases to get Supreme Court reviews since 1967, when all laws banning interracial couples from civil marriage were declared unconstitutional.
In these and many similar lawsuits now underway, looming over the cases, the judges, and America are five moral questions. In order to recognize the moral questions, one must first understand the disputes, and then hear the arguments.
Four core facts are undisputed.  (1) Families — headed by both same-gender couples and mixed-gender couples — often raise children from prior marriage, fertilization, surrogacy, foster care, and/or adoption. (2) Regardless of pregnancy type or family structure, all children have the same constitutional rights. (3) In 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau counted 646,464 same-gender couples nationwide, and 20% of those couples (129,293 families) are raising nearly 250,000 children. (4) Of those 646,464 couples, 22% live in states where they now can marry, but 78% live in states where they still cannot marry.
Given these facts, the two lawsuits arise from two practical questions. Should states ban marriage for same-gender couples? Should governments treat such couples and their children as inferior to other families? More than anything else, the outcomes will be driven by the ultimate morality query for Americans: Do we treat others the same way that we ourselves want to be treated? The opponents of equality say, “No, we do not, and we should not.â€
Those opponents of equality are the Mormon and Roman Catholic church officials who funded the campaign and legal defense for California Proposition 8, and the Republican Party officials who are funding the legal defense for DOMA.
In their latest briefs filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, Mormon- and Catholic-funded leaders (here and here) and Republican Party leaders (here and here) now argue: that true gays and lesbians don’t even exist, that all of humanity is heterosexual, that people who claim to be gays or lesbians are just heterosexuals who “choose to misbehave,†that they’re mentally ill, and they’re curable, but they refuse to be cured, so that’s why they should be denied equality under the law.  [No peer-accepted, scientific evidence supports such ideas, and all major professional organizations reject these claims.]
These opponents insist that mixed-gender couples are superior to same-gender couples, that government should promote “natural†procreation (no contraception, no fertilization, no surrogacy), and should ban same-gender marriage to promote mixed-gender marriage.  They argue that because mixed-gender couples produce unplanned, unwanted offspring and same-gender couples do not, that’s why society should ban marriage for same-gender couples.
These opponents claim that mixed-gender parents are ideal and superior to same-gender parents [even though peer-accepted, scientific studies disprove that claim.] Â These opponents admit that most children of mixed-gender parents are unplanned and unwanted, and then argue that government should promote mixed-gender parents and their children by penalizing same-gender parents and their children.
These opponents claim that same-gender couples don’t procreate, they rarely raise children, they cut marriage/birth rates and raise promiscuity rates among mixed-gender couples, they kill civilizations, and they’ll make humanity extinct. [That’s untrue. Same-gender couples do procreate (via fertilization and/or surrogacy); they do have children (from prior partners, foster care, and adoption); and they often raise children (most of whom are abandoned by mixed-gender couples). Despite 22 years of campaigns and courtroom trials, marriage equality opponents never once showed how banning marriage for same-gender couples would raise marriage rates, boost birth rates, or cut promiscuity among mixed-gender couples. And there’s no scientific evidence suggesting that same-gender marriage kills civilizations, or could end the human race.]
These opponents imagine that same-gender marriage might have an unknown flaw today that could be catastrophic tomorrow, and that this is why the justice system should do nothing.
These opponents of equality argue that same-gender couples should stop asking courts to overturn unjust laws, and should instead take the long, unaffordable route of obtaining fairer laws through 43 legislatures (41 states, the Puerto Rico territory, and Congress). They say that since same-gender couples are gaining political power, they might eventually get to marry after all, and so past and present discrimination should count for nothing. They say that national divisiveness is beneficial, and a court ruling would end that benefit, so the current divisiveness should continue.
In particular, the Republican Party defenders claim that although DOMA does hurt couples and families, that was just an accident, so it should continue. Â They claim DOMA saves money, i.e., mixed-gender couples get more benefits when same-gender couples get nothing. Â [DOMA never saved money. That was proven nine years ago by the Congressional Budget Office.]
Facing all these claims made by the opponents of equality, America’s nine top justices can decide these cases only after they answer — for themselves — five morality questions:
• Will society admit that gays and lesbians actually exist, as real people?
• Will society allow couples seeking civil marriage to privately choose their own beliefs?
• Will society recognize that all legally married couples and families have the same constitutional rights, regardless of the number of children or their source (prior marriage, fertilization, surrogacy, foster care, adoption)?
• Will society treat every civilly married couple equally, regardless of their breeding ability, pregnancy method, desire for offspring, or intent to procreate?
• Will society treat every couple equally to every other couple, every spouse equally to every other spouse, and every child equally to every other child?
If the justices answer “yes†to all five morality questions, then their decisions will honor the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.†But if they answer “no†to even one of these five morality questions, then the U.S. Constitution will cease to be inclusive, and American democracy will lose its moral authority.
If the Mormon, Catholic, and Republican opponents of equality win at the U.S. Supreme Court, then the federal government will continue its current unfairness, in which mixed-gender couples are still treated as if they all have children (even when they don’t, won’t, or can’t), and same-gender couples are still treated as merely unmarried friends, with children who are inferior.
Image, top, by The New Civil Rights Movement’s Tanya Domi, taken at the Supreme court yesterday
Ned Flaherty is an LGBT activist currently focused on civil marriage equality, and previously on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal. He writes from Boston, Massachusetts, where America’s first same-gender civil marriages began in 2004. He suffered a childhood exposure to Roman Catholic pomp and circumstance, but the spell never took, and he recovered.
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Republican Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a top potential Trump vice presidential running mate pick, revealed in a forthcoming book she “hated” her 14-month old puppy and shot it to death. Massive online outrage ensued, including accusations of “animal cruelty” and “cold-blooded murder,” but the pro-life former member of Congress is defending her actions and bragging she had the media “gasping.”
“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” Noem writes in her soon-to-be released book, according to The Guardian which reports “the dog, a female, had an ‘aggressive personality’ and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.”
“By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going ‘out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life’.”
“Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, ‘grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another’.”
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“Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like ‘a trained assassin’.”
Except Cricket wasn’t trained. Online several people with experience training dogs have said Noem did everything wrong.
“I hated that dog,” Noem wrote, calling the young girl pup “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with,” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog.”
“At that moment,” Noem wrote, “I realized I had to put her down.”
“It was not a pleasant job,” she added, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
The Guardian reports Noem went on that day to slaughter a goat that “smelled ‘disgusting, musky, rancid’ and ‘loved to chase’ Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes.”
She dragged both animals separately into a gravel pit and shot them one at a time. The puppy died after one shell, but the goat took two.
On social media Noem expressed no regret, no sadness, no empathy for the animals others say did not need to die, and certainly did not need to die so cruelly.
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But she did use the opportunity to promote her book.
We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm. Sadly, we just had to put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years.
If you want more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping,… pic.twitter.com/bKhpUkchHV
— Kristi Noem (@KristiNoem) April 26, 2024
Attorney and legal analyst Jeffrey Evan Gold says Governor Noem’s actions might have violated state law.
“You slaughtered a 14-month-old puppy because it wasn’t good at the ‘job’ you chose for it?” he asked. “SD § 40-1-2.3. ‘No person owning or responsible for the care of an animal may neglect, abandon, or mistreat the animal.'”
The Democratic National Committee released a statement saying, “Kristi Noem’s extreme record goes beyond bizarre rants about killing her pets – she also previously said a 10-year-old rape victim should be forced to carry out her pregnancy, does not support exceptions for rape or incest, and has threatened to throw pharmacists in jail for providing medication abortions.”
Former Trump White House Director of Strategic Communications Alyssa Farah Griffin, now a co-host on “The View” wrote, “There are countless organizations that re-home dogs from owners who are incapable of properly training and caring for them.”
The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson blasted the South Dakota governor.
“Kristi Noem is trash,” he began. “Decades with hunting- and bird-dogs, and the number I’ve killed because they were chicken-sharp or had too much prey drive is ZERO. Puppies need slow exposure to birds, and bird-scent.”
“She killed a puppy because she was lazy at training bird dogs, not because it was a bad dog,” he added. “Not every dog is for the field, but 99.9% of them are trainable or re-homeable. We have one now who was never going in the field, but I didn’t kill her. She’s sleeping on the couch. You down old dogs, hurt dogs, and sick dogs humanely, not by shooting them and tossing them in a gravel pit. Unsporting and deliberately cruel…but she wrote this to prove the cruelty is the point.”
Melissa Jo Peltier, a writer and producer of the “Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan” series, also heaped strong criticism on Noem.
“After 10+ years working with Cesar Millan & other highly specialized trainers, I believe NO dog should be put down just because they can’t or won’t do what we decide WE want them to,” Peltier said in a lengthy statement. “Dogs MUST be who they are. Sadly, that’s often who WE teach them to be. And our species is a hot mess. I would have happily taken Kristi Noem’s puppy & rehomed it. What she did is animal cruelty & cold blooded murder in my book.”
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President Joe Biden gave an nearly-unannounced, last-minute, live exclusive interview Friday morning to Howard Stern, the SiriusXM radio host who for decades, from the mid-1990s to about 2015, was a top Trump friend, fan, and aficionado. But the impetus behind the President’s move appears to be a rare and unsigned statement from the The New York Times Company, defending the “paper of record” after months of anger from the public over what some say is its biased negative coverage of the Biden presidency and, especially, a Thursday report by Politico claiming Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger is furious the President has refused to give the “Grey Lady” an in-person interview.
“The Times’ desire for a sit-down interview with Biden by the newspaper’s White House team is no secret around the West Wing or within the D.C. bureau,” Politico reported. “Getting the president on the record with the paper of record is a top priority for publisher A.G. Sulzberger. So much so that last May, when Vice President Kamala Harris arrived at the newspaper’s midtown headquarters for an off-the-record meeting with around 40 Times journalists, Sulzberger devoted several minutes to asking her why Biden was still refusing to grant the paper — or any major newspaper — an interview.”
“In Sulzberger’s view,” Politico explained, “only an interview with a paper like the Times can verify that the 81-year-old Biden is still fit to hold the presidency.”
But it was this statement that made Politico’s scoop go viral.
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“’All these Biden people think that the problem is Peter Baker or whatever reporter they’re mad at that day,’ one Times journalist said. ‘It’s A.G. He’s the one who is pissed [that] Biden hasn’t done any interviews and quietly encourages all the tough reporting on his age.'”
Popular Information founder Judd Legum in March documented The New York Times’ (and other top papers’) obsession with Biden’s age after the Hur Report.
1. The media turned Robert Hur’s amateur assessment of Biden’s memory into a political crisis.
Collectively, the @washingtonpost, @nytimes, and @WSJ have run 66 articles quoting Hur: a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”
But when the transcript of the Biden interview… pic.twitter.com/cExzjuKeYz
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) March 14, 2024
Thursday evening the Times put out a “scorching” statement, as Politico later reported, not on the newspaper’s website but on the company’s corporate website, not addressing the Politico piece directly but calling it “troubling” that President Biden “has so actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists during his term.”
Media watchers and critics pushed back on the Times’ statement.
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“NYT issues an unprecedented statement slamming Biden for ‘actively and effectively avoid[ing] questions from independent journalists during his term’ and claiming it’s their ‘independence’ that Biden dislikes, when it’s actually that they’re dying to trip him up,” wrote media critic Dan Froomkin, editor of Press Watch.
Froomkin also pointed to a 2017 report from Poynter, a top journalism site published by The Poynter Institute, that pointed out the poor job the Times did of interviewing then-President Trump.
Incidentally, when the NYT got a chance to interview Trump, they went belly up. https://t.co/fW5kx5868d pic.twitter.com/LbrhfYMtqf
— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) April 25, 2024
Others, including former Biden Deputy Secretary of State Brian McKeon, debunked the Times’ claim President Biden hasn’t given interviews to independent journalists by pointing to Biden’s interviews with CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and a 20-minute sit-down interview with veteran journalist John Harwood for ProPublica.
Former Chicago Sun-Times editor Mark Jacob, now a media critic who publishes Stop the Presses, offered a more colorful take of Biden’s decision to go on Howard Stern.
This is the equivalent of putting a bag of dog poop on the New York Times’ doorstep and setting it on fire. https://t.co/RhGbHH9pU2
— Mark Jacob (@MarkJacob16) April 26, 2024
The Times itself just last month reported on a “wide-ranging interview” President Biden gave to The New Yorker.
Watch the video and read the social media posts above or at this link.
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Donald Trump’s Friday morning claim Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building is “heavily guarded” so his supporters cannot attend his trial was torched by a top CNN anchor. The ex-president, facing 34 felony charges in New York, had been urging his followers to show up and protest on the courthouse steps, but few have.
“I’m at the heavily guarded Courthouse. Security is that of Fort Knox, all so that MAGA will not be able to attend this trial, presided over by a highly conflicted pawn of the Democrat Party. It is a sight to behold! Getting ready to do my Courthouse presser. Two minutes!” Trump wrote Friday morning on his Truth Social account.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins supplied a different view.
“Again, the courthouse is open the public. The park outside, where a handful of his supporters have gathered on trials days, is easily accessible,” she wrote minutes after his post.
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Trump has tried to rile up his followers to come out and make a strong showing.
On Monday Trump urged his supporters to “rally behind MAGA” and “go out and peacefully protest” at courthouses across the country, while complaining that “people who truly LOVE our Country, and want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, are not allowed to ‘Peacefully Protest,’ and are rudely and systematically shut down and ushered off to far away ‘holding areas,’ essentially denying them their Constitutional Rights.”
On Wednesday Trump claimed, “The Courthouse area in Lower Manhattan is in a COMPLETE LOCKDOWN mode, not for reasons of safety, but because they don’t want any of the thousands of MAGA supporters to be present. If they did the same thing at Columbia, and other locations, there would be no problem with the protesters!”
After detailing several of his false claims about security measures prohibiting his followers from being able to show their support and protest, CNN published a fact-check on Wednesday:
“Trump’s claims are all false. The police have not turned away ‘thousands of people’ from the courthouse during his trial; only a handful of Trump supporters have shown up to demonstrate near the building,” CNN reported.
“And while there are various security measures in place in the area, including some street closures enforced by police officers and barricades, it’s not true that ‘for blocks you can’t get near this courthouse.’ In reality, the designated protest zone for the trial is at a park directly across the street from the courthouse – and, in addition, people are permitted to drive right up to the front of the courthouse and walk into the building, which remains open to the public. If people show up early enough in the morning, they can even get into the trial courtroom itself or the overflow room that shows near-live video of the proceedings.”
READ MORE: Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’
Noem Defends Shooting Her 14-Month Old Puppy to Death, Brags She Has Media ‘Gasping’
President Hands Howard Stern Live Interview After NY Times Melts Down Over Biden Brush-Off
CNN Smacks Down Trump Rant Courthouse So ‘Heavily Guarded’ MAGA Cannot Attend His Trial
‘Assassination of Political Rivals as an Official Act’: AOC Warns Take Trump ‘Seriously’
Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’
OPINION3 days agoPresident Hands Howard Stern Live Interview After NY Times Melts Down Over Biden Brush-Off
OPINION2 days agoNoem Defends Shooting Her 14-Month Old Puppy to Death, Brags She Has Media ‘Gasping’
News3 days agoCNN Smacks Down Trump Rant Courthouse So ‘Heavily Guarded’ MAGA Cannot Attend His Trial