20130627

DOMA delenda est

I'm not a terribly close watcher of the Supreme Court (the current court composition, especially Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas, tends to piss me off), but I was encouraged by what I heard yesterday.

They struck down DOMA, which was great, and halted implementation of Prop 8 in California. The latter was good, as far as it went, although I was a bit disappointed (not surprised, mind) that they didn't decide in a way that would keep other states from doing the same.

Essentially, they said that the defendants (various anti-gay bigotry groups) had no standing to defend the state's decision, if the state itself wouldn't defend it.

So a tiny bit of disappointment there, but mostly I'm pleased with the decisions.

Two minor bits of amusement, related. When talking about it, just before the announcement, I was stuck watching CNN, and they decided to show a graphic highlighting which states have approved same-sex marriage and such. What I found so amusing was that the states that allow same-sex marriage were colored RED. Very ironic decision, there. (The states that don't allow it were uncolored.)

The other funny bit came this morning on the radio, when they interviewed a woman who wasn't so pleased with the decision. She said that she was against it because she didn't think gays should be allowed to marry (unsurprising, a bigot), and, more amusingly, that the Bible said that marriage should be between a man and a woman, and that shouldn't change. I wonder how much of the Bible she's actually read. The only passages I'm aware of that specifically talk about marriage (beyond stuff like, "Jesus went to a wedding") talk about it as between a man and many women (stuff like, "If your brother dies, you must marry his wife", and the many early men mentioned as having two or more wives (Lamech and Abraham, for instance)).

Anyway, Yay, progress.

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