Marriage Notes

South Carolina did it (I'm only surprised it took them so long). Andy Towle had a comment that struck me:

Not that they weren't ugly in the first place, but it's interesting how much uglier actions like this begin to look as other states, such as New Hampshire, start opening their doors to civil unions, as is happening more and more often.

It really is becoming a matter of proving how ugly you are.

And the problem I have with stuff like this is sort of summarized in this post by Andrew Koppelman at Balkinization:

The reality, owing to the vagaries of New York politics, is that a decision in favor of same-sex marriage is unlikely to be overturned by legislation. Governor Eliot Spitzer, who has a veto, is on record as favoring same-sex marriage. And it’s unlikely that the state legislature, a notoriously dysfunctional graveyard of legislation, would ever pass a law anyway.

The result would be that, although New York same-sex couples could not marry within the state, they would be able to make the relatively short trip north to Niagara Falls, get married there, and come right home again. New York would effectively join Massachusetts, which recognizes same-sex marriages for all purposes, and Vermont, Connecticut, California, and New Jersey, which recognize it in all but name (they call it “civil union” or “domestic partnership”), so that more than a quarter of the population of the United States would live in a jurisdiction that gives same-sex couples all the same rights as married heterosexuals. And all because of the intervention of the militantly antigay Alliance Defense Fund. Who says that left and right can’t work together?

When I read stuff like this, I wind up sitting here scratching my head and wondering how idiots like this wound up running the country for so long.

(And for a good commentary on Hernandez v. Robles, see the comments to Koppelman's article. When I commented on that decision, I remember not being able to decide whether to laugh because the decision was so strained and overtly political, or to scream for the same reasons. This is a nice dissection.)