It’s the time of the year when many cities hold their Pride parade and festivals, and Seattle’s honorary Pride parade is going on this Sunday. In honor of it the Seattle Mariners are going to raise the Pride Flag. They’ll be the first-ever baseball team to do so at a game. From Seattle Out & Proud:
This comes on the same day when, in case you hadn’t noticed, the Supreme Court issued a couple of big decisions today about gay marriage, so there is double the reason to celebrate.
If you care, my legal take on the opinions: the Defense of Marriage Act case seemed like a no-brainer Equal Protection case which the majority got right, even if it did shy away from the formalized strict-scrutiny analysis we have come to expect in Equal Protection cases. The law’s stated basis was essentially that homosexuality is wrong and icky and those people shouldn’t be able to do what other people can do. You have to make a much greater showing than that to treat one group of people differently than others under the law, and obviously no one ever bothered with that with DOMA.
The Prop 8 case from California had way weirder legal reasoning. Reasoning to do with standing that I think was erroneous and was picked up by the Court in an effort to skirt the issue of making a sweeping federal ruling about gay marriage. I feel like if they said there was standing and took it on that the Defense of Marriage Act majority may well have come to a pro-gay marriage ruling there too, but it didn’t happen. This means a good outcome but for odd legal reasons, which always makes me uncomfortable.
But yes: good outcomes. What my ex-wife and I did to marriage was way worse than anything gay people will do to it, and if they let us get married everyone should be allowed to.
But in all seriousness: People should be able to marry who they love. And I’m happy that today that is attainable for many more people than it was yesterday.
