The debate over same-sex marriage has cooled in many parts of the country. People have turned their attention to the healthcare bill and the new possibility of being blown up by guys with explosives strapped to their underpants.

In reality, however, the same-sex marriage fight is now being joined in earnest. Opponents of California’s Proposition 8, which provides that only a marriage between a man and a woman would be recognized in California, have sued in federal court. The plaintiffs—Kristin Perry, Sandra Stier, Paul Katami, and Jeffrey Zarillo—allege that defining marriage as a monogamous union of opposite-sex couples violates the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the 14^th Amendment.

The case is currently at trial in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, but it is likely to end up in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court’s decision regarding Prop. 8’s constitutionality likely will, for all intents and purposes, permanently determine whether states can limit marriage to its traditional meaning. Of course, it is theoretically possible to amend the constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage in the U.S., but practically speaking it’s almost impossible. (more…)

Thursday, in his resounding defense of the First Amendment in the Citizens United decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority:

…[w]hen Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.

“Censorship” is a dirty word in America, and that is why the restrictions at issue in our case were cloaked in the guise of “campaign finance reform.”  But the fact remains that any restrictions on political speech, especially those that criminalize such speech, send us down a very slippery and very dangerous slope.

Last March, our government argued in court that it has the Constitutional authority to ban books that mention a candidate for federal office.  The government later retracted that statement, but is there any doubt that such a statement never would have been made if there had not been 100 years of progressively more intrusive restrictions on political speech preceding it?    Had the Court not acted, what was to prevent the government from asserting that authority over the internet, which does not have the benefit of two centuries of tradition and jurisprudence protecting it?

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For long-suffering conservatives, Christmas arrived about a month late this year.  But considering all the presents we got this week, it was like coming downstairs and finding the Budweiser Clydesdales under the tree, instead of that crummy used Radio Flyer your dad managed to find on eBay for twenty bucks.

First, on Tuesday, there was the Massachusetts Miracle, in which an obscure state senator named Scott Brown came out of nowhere — okay, Wrentham — to defeat a lackluster and morally dubious Democrat machine party hack who had expected to slow-walk herself, with David Gergen’s blessing, into “Teddy Kennedy’s seat.”  But the Bay State voters had other ideas for the “Massachusette” –

Brown ran hard on the selling point that he would be the 41st vote in the Senate against Harry Reid’s and Nancy Pelosi’s screwball tax-and-wreck “health care” plan, a Rube Goldbergian contraption that would have made Elbridge Gerry weep with envy at all its cut-outs, set-asides, bribes and special-interest stroking.  He also campaigned on the notion that taxpayer dollars would be better spent fighting terrorists instead of paying for lawyers for them.  So, naturally, the first questions he got yesterday from the press corps in Washington were all along the lines of: “You’re not really a Republican, are you?”

To which the Democrats, caught flat-footed as usual, basically reacted like this: (more…)