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News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyNovember 18th, 2015
TODAY’S AGENDA:
Events This Weekend: Side-By-Side LGBT Film Festival, St. Petersburg, Russia; Arctic Pride Tromsø, Norway.
TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:
From Wilde Side, September 1, 1976, page 22.
Sporter’s was a friendly leather/levi/dive bar in Boston’s Beacon Hill. It’s not clear when Sporter’s opened, but I did find a reference in 1972 describing the establishment as a gay bar “of long standing.” The building now houses a restaurant/pub.
Julie and Hillary Goodridge
TODAY IN HISTORY:
► Massachusetts Supreme Court Rules In Favor of Marriage Equality: 2003. It’s over a decade since the Bay State became the first in the nation to provide marriage equality for same-sex couples, and the sky still hasn’t fallen. Massachusetts still has the lowest divorce rate in the nation, and school children are still not being subjected to live gay sex demonstrations as part of their state-mandated curriculum. But gay couples can marry, and that was due to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision in 2003.
In Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the court ruled 4-3 that the state could not “deny the protections, benefits and obligations conferred by civil marriage to two individuals of the same sex who wish to marry.” The court gave the state legislature 180 days to “take any such action as it may deem appropriate” to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Liberty Counsel tried to get the Federal Courts involved, but those efforts failed when the judge denied their request, the First Circuit Court of Appeals backed him up, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. After a long drawn-out battle in which the Massachusetts high court ruled in response to a question from the state Senate that civil unions would not satisfy the court’s ruling, the legislature ended up taking no action, neither blocking nor implementing the Goodridge decision. The state began marrying same-sex couples on May 17, 2004.
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eddie
November 18th, 2015
Is this correct? I thought that the supreme court just recently made gay marriage, law of the land in all 50 states.
Eric Payne
November 18th, 2015
eddie,
Jim was recounting on this day in HISTORY. On this date, 12 years ago, the state of Massachusetts became the second state in the United States to have its state Supreme Court determine homosexuals had the right to marry, and became the first state to implement such marriages (the first, Hawaii, changed its constitution to limit marriage to one man/one woman before any marriages were officiated).
12 years later, June 26, 2015, the United States Supreme Court ruled gay couples were entitled to marry, in all 50 states, expanding marriage law to include gay persons via the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees full access of the Constitution to everyone living under the restrictions and guarantees of the Constitution.
So when Mike Huckabee says something like — “The Supreme Court can’t write a law. What law says gay people can get married? Where is that law written?” — he knows, since he knows how our constitutional system works, there’s no new writing that has to be done. It’s the marriage laws that are already on the books — but with the phrases limiting access to the law to “one man/one woman” crossed out.
Action Kate
November 18th, 2015
What eddie is referring to is the copy/paste at the end, which says “64% of Americans live in a state with marriage equality.” In other words, this is a pickup from last year, and the post hasn’t been updated to reflect Obergefell.
Nathaniel
November 18th, 2015
Salt Lake City, Utah, has finalized their mayoral election results. An LGBT ally lost to an out lesbian.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/salt-lake-city-elects-first-openly-gay-mayor-amid-setbacks/ar-BBn8luB?li=AA54ur
Jim Burroway
November 18th, 2015
I’ve updated the post to remove the last paragraph. Sorry about that.
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