Tuesday, January 12

Leveling the playing field.

Pushing for equality:

[O]ne of the arguments that the anti-gay-marriage side has increasingly turned to outside the courtroom is that allowing same-sex marriage would hurt heterosexual marriage. At the pretrial hearing, Judge Walker kept asking Charles Cooper, the lawyer defending Proposition 8, how exactly it did so. “I’m asking you to tell me,” he said at last, “how it would harm opposite-sex marriages.”

“All right,” Cooper said.

“All right,” Walker said. “Let’s play on the same playing field for once.”

There was a pause—it seemed like a long one to people in the courtroom, though it was probably only a few seconds. And Cooper said, “Your Honor, my answer is: I don’t know. I don’t know.”
...

Olson is undaunted. “I have spent a fair amount of time reading Dr. King’s response to people who said, ‘People aren’t ready for this,’ ” he said. “His ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ one of the more moving documents in history, addresses this. If people are suffering and being hurt by discrimination, and their children and their families are . . . then who are we as lawyers to say, ‘Wait ten years’?


Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I'm dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.

Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.

I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you.

~Langston Hughes

Meanwhile, Orin Kerr over at Volokh joins the "Just Don't Get It" club. (But can we all have a silly laugh together about how trivial out little differences are? Sure, you keep laughing professor, and some will keep working for justice for all. Our convictions don't affect your paycheck either way right, so no harm no foul?)
Why is the other side of the debates I’m on always so hypocritical? They always jump on what my side says, and yet they willfully ignore all the faults on their own side. Let’s be honest about the double standard: The other side gets away with stuff that my side would never get away with. It’s just like the other side to be so deceitful: They’re always looking to score any advantage they can. People like that drive me crazy, and it seems like most of the people on the other side are just like that.

To quote the great Han Solo: "Laugh it up, scuzz fuzzball."