The Tide Has Turned!

Or so Tony Perkins and Brian Brown would have you believe. On the day before the 7th Circuit handed down its devastating decision on the Wisconsin and Indiana marriage bans, a federal District Court judge in Louisiana handed down this travesty. From Slate:

In a startling reversal of a nationwide trend, U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman upheld Louisiana’s gay marriage ban Wednesday, holding that it furthered the “central state interest” of “linking children to an intact family formed by their biological parents.” Feldman, a Reagan appointee, is not the first judge since 2013’s United States v. Windsor to uphold a gay marriage ban. He is, however, the first federal judge, a key distinction that gives his ruling significant clout.

What's more striking is the complete ignorance of the law revealed by Feldman:

The thrust of Feldman’s ruling rests on a misinterpretation of the so-called animus doctrine. According to the Supreme Court, laws motivated exclusively by anti-gay animus toward gay people violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. After the court struck down a federal gay marriage ban in Windsor, the vast majority of judges have concluded that all gay marriage bans are presumptively motivated by animus. That’s a logical conclusion, given the Windsor court’s assertion that the federal ban’s “principal purpose and necessary effect” was to “demean” and “degrade” gay people.

It's even worse than that. Feldman doesn't seem to know the standards of scrutiny, and ascribes to the Fourteenth Amendment a meaning that is nowhere in the language of the Amendment itself:

Heightened scrutiny was warranted in Loving because the Fourteenth Amendment expressly condemns racial discrimination as a constitutional evil; in short, the Constitution specifically bans differentiation based on race.

Except that it doesn't. The Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Sections 2, 3, 4 and 5 are irrelevant in this case, since they deal with apportionment of representatives to Congress, limits on who may hold federal office, the public debt, and implementation. Nowhere does the Amendment mention race.

A number of people have made much of the fact that Feldman is a Reagan appointee, which doesn't hold much water with me: a number of judges that have declared state marriage bans unconstitutional are Republican appointees, and Richard Posner, who authored the 7th Circuit's opinion, was also appointed by Reagan.

I think it's much more noteworthy that Feldman doesn't know or understand the law.

Of course, this wayward decision, which is far outside the mainstream of judicial thought on all counts, is being hailed as the one to derail the inevitability of same-sex marriage. That's called "grasping at straws."

Read the ruling, and remember -- it's not Doctor Seuss.