NST Online Top Stories - Google News
NST Online Top Stories - Google News |
| Supreme Court Rulings Boost Gay Marriage - Wall Street Journal Posted: 26 Jun 2013 09:43 AM PDT WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court delivered the history-making ruling sought by gay-marriage supporters, striking down a 1996 federal law that denied benefits to same-sex couples. The court was more cautious in a second case involving California's ban on gay marriage, Proposition 8, saying it lacked jurisdiction to hear the case. But the result was likely again to benefit same-sex couples because it meant that a federal district court's ruling striking down Proposition 8 stands, clearing the way for gay marriage to resume in the nation's most-populous state. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the 5-4 majority opinion nullifying the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and described the federal law as an assault on fundamental human rights. More Live CoverageFollow the latest reactions and real-time video, read the highlights from the Supreme Court decisions and get analysis from @WSJ reporters in Washington, California and beyond. He said "no legitimate purpose" could justify the effect of the law, which he said was "to disparage and to injure those whom the state, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity." The opinion capped Justice Kennedy's record as the high court's greatest champion of gay rights, coming after his 2003 ruling striking down state sodomy laws. It means that federal tax and other benefits accorded to married couples will now be extended to gay couples who are legally married in their state. Justice Antonin Scalia, who read parts of his dissent from the bench, said the court shouldn't have ruled on the Defense of Marriage Act at all, and he also said the court was wrong on the merits. In his bench statement, Justice Scalia heaped scorn on the majority for what he said was "self-aggrandizement" in their opinion. His written opinion described the ruling as "a lecture on how superior the majority's moral judgment in favor of same-sex marriage is." Justice Scalia said the court should have deferred to Congress's wishes. "We might have covered ourselves with honor today, by promising all sides of this debate that it was theirs to settle," he wrote. "We might have let the people decide. But that the majority will not do." Gay-marriage supporters were jubilant. "Today we can go back to California and say to our own children, all four of our boys, 'Your family is just as good as everybody else's family,' " said Kristin Perry, who brought the California case seeking to get married in the state to her same-sex partner. Defense of Marriage RulingProposition 8 RulingPresident Barack Obama, who said last year for the first time that he personally supported the right to gay marriage, applauded the court's ruling, which upheld the legal view his administration had taken before the court. The federal law "treated loving, committed gay and lesbian couples as a separate and lesser class of people," Mr. Obama said in a statement released by the White House. He said the Supreme Court has "righted that wrong, and our country is better off for it." The president said he has told his administration to ensure federal benefits received by married couples are extended to same-sex couples "swiftly and smoothly." Opponents of gay marriage said they would continue to fight the practice. "Despite the Supreme Court's decision, the debate over marriage has only just begun. The court's decision does not silence the voices of Americans," said Austin R. Nimocks, of the Alliance Defending Freedom. ProtectMarriage.com, the group that defended Proposition 8 at the Supreme Court and put it on the California ballot, said it would keep fighting in the courts to enforce the gay-marriage ban "until such time as there is a binding statewide order that renders Prop 8 unenforceable." The sides in California debated whether the district-court ruling by Judge Vaughn Walker, which found a fundamental constitutional right to gay marriage, applied only in certain parts of the state or statewide. San Francisco city attorney Dennis Herrera said he believed the ruling meant that marriage rights for same-sex couples would be "fully restored throughout California." Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, said on Twitter Wednesday that he instructed California's Department of Public Health to advise counties to issue marriage licenses to gay couples as soon as the federal appeals court stay is lifted. In the Defense of Marriage Act case, Justice Kennedy was joined by the four members of the court's liberal wing—Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan--while Chief Justice John Roberts dissented, joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Justice Kennedy said the Defense of Marriage Act "violates basic due process and equal protection principles applicable to the Federal Government." The court's four dissenters offered three different written dissents, by Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Scalia and Justice Alito. Chief Justice Roberts said the ruling still leaves the path open for states to "continue to utilize the traditional definition of marriage." He said Congress might have had good reasons to enact the law, adding, "I would not tar the political branches with the brush of bigotry." The ruling on Proposition 8 was also 5-4, with Chief Justice Roberts writing the majority opinion. Chief Justice Roberts said Proposition 8's backers didn't have legal standing to challenge the law. The case wasn't decided on the usual ideological lines, as Chief Justice Roberts was joined by Justices Scalia, Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan. Justice Kennedy dissented, joined by Justices Thomas, Alito and Sotomayor. Both opinions on Proposition 8 focused on the court's jurisdiction to hear the case. The state of California declined to defend the proposition in court, forcing its proponents to take up the legal fight. "We have never before upheld the standing of a private party to defend the constitutionality of a state statute when state officials have chosen not to. We decline to do so for the first time here," Chef Justice Roberts said. Justice Kennedy's dissent didn't debate the merits of the state initiative, but he said he believed the Supreme Court did have jurisdiction to hear the case. He said proponents of a ballot initiative ought to be able to defend it in court when the state doesn't. The rulings came amid quickly shifting public opinion on gay rights and gay marriage. This past April, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found 53% of respondents favored same-sex marriage with 42% opposed. Ten years earlier, only 32% were in favor and 51% were opposed. When Proposition 8 passed in 2008 with 52% of the vote, only two other states permitted gay marriage. Today, 12 states plus the District of Columbia do so. Moreover, many elected officials and public figures who had previously been noncommittal have thrown their support behind gay marriage. Former President Bill Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act, now says the measure is a mistake. —Geoffrey A. Fowler, Tamara Audi, Laura Saunders, Evan Perez and Jared A. Favole contributed to this article.Write to Brent Kendall at brent.kendall@dowjones.com and Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@wsj.com |
| In Texas, a Senator's Stand Catches the Spotlight - New York Times Posted: 26 Jun 2013 09:38 AM PDT By MANNY FERNANDEZ and ERIK ECKHOLMPublished: June 26, 2013AUSTIN, Tex. — A Fort Worth Democrat, Senator Wendy Davis, 50, stood in her running shoes on the green carpeted floor of the Senate chamber and spoke about a bill with some of the toughest abortion restrictions in the country from 11:18 a.m. until about 10 p.m. She abided for most of that time by filibuster rules that prohibited her from leaning on her desk, sitting on her chair or straying off topic. Her feat of stamina and conviction — designed by Democrats to block passage of a bill supported by some of the state's top Republicans — made her an instant celebrity across the country, a hero to some, a villain to others. Republicans monitored virtually her every move and word, waiting to catch her violating the rules, and at one point objecting when a fellow Democrat tried to help put a back-brace around Ms. Davis, who at that point had been standing for about seven hours straight. Ms. Davis gained thousands of Twitter followers in a matter of hours. Close-up pictures of her pink sneakers zoomed across computer and television screens. Hundreds of men, women and children waited for hours in line at the Capitol to sit in an upstairs gallery and watch her in action, standing in lines that snaked around the rotunda and down staircases. "I'm tired, but really happy," Ms. Davis told reporters in the Senate chamber at 3:20 a.m. Wednesday as she finally made her way out of the building. "I'm pleased to know that a spotlight is shining on Texas, a spotlight is shining on the failure of our current leadership." Hours after claiming that they successfully passed the bill, Republican lawmakers reversed course on Wednesday and said a disputed late-night vote on the bill did not follow legislative procedures, rendering the vote moot and giving Democrats a bitterly fought if probably short-lived victory. The reversal capped a remarkable day in the Texas Legislature here. As Ms. Davis staged her filibuster marathon, abortion rights activists succeeded in disrupting Republican senators, and the fate of the bill, which Gov. Rick Perry had made a priority, devolved into a legislative mess so thick that even senators who had voted on the bill could not say for certain whether they had indeed voted on the bill. The State Senate's vote came right at a midnight Tuesday deadline, amid widespread confusion and the noise of a chanting crowd of the bill's opponents in an upstairs gallery. Senate Democrats said the vote took place past the deadline at 12:02 a.m. or 12:03 a.m., while Republicans disputed those claims, saying the vote was legitimate. But at 3 a.m., Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the presiding officer of the Senate and a Republican supporter of the bill, told lawmakers and reporters that although the bill passed on a 19-to-10 vote, the bill could not be signed in the presence of the Senate and was therefore dead, blaming "an unruly mob using Occupy Wall Street tactics" as the primary cause. "With all the ruckus and noise going on," Mr. Dewhurst said, he could not complete administrative duties to make the vote official and sign the bill. Senate Democrats and women's right's advocates said the real reason the vote could not be made official was a time stamp on official documents that showed the bill passed after midnight. The Legislature's official Web site first posted that the Senate's vote occurred on Wednesday, after the midnight deadline, but the date was later changed to Tuesday for unknown reasons. The reversal served as an embarrassing episode for Mr. Dewhurst and Republican senators on a divisive bill that was closely watched around the nation by anti-abortion activists and supporters of abortion rights. "The G.O.P. Senate leadership comes out of this whole process looking somewhat disingenuous, deceptive and disorganized," said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston. The bill sought to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, require abortion clinics to meet the same standards as hospital-style surgical centers and mandate that a doctor who performs abortions have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. Supporters of the bill, including Mr. Perry and other top Republicans, said the measures would protect women's health and hold clinics to safe standards, but women's right's advocates said the legislation amounted to an unconstitutional, politically motivated effort to shut legal abortion clinics. The bill's opponents said it will likely cause all but five of the 42 abortion clinics in the state to close, because the building renovations and equipment upgrades necessary to meet the surgical-center standards would be too costly. Republicans, who control the State Senate and House, will likely have a second chance at the bill. The governor, who called the special session and put the bill on the agenda, may now call a second special session and once again tell lawmakers to consider the bill, known as Senate Bill 5. Political analysts said the bill would likely pass if a second special session was called. The bill sought to make Texas the 12th state to bar most abortions at 20 weeks after fertilization and later — a step that has been blocked in three states so far as unconstitutional. The more pressing concern for clinic managers and advocates for women's rights was the requirement that all 42 abortion clinics in the state be licensed as ambulatory surgery centers. Five clinics performing late-term abortions already meet that standard. But for most of the remaining 37, the new restriction would require costly renovations or relocation to meet architectural and equipment requirements. The five clinics are in large cities — Austin, San Antonio and Dallas each have one, and Houston has two. The burden on those five clinics to provide women's health services will be extreme, and women in rural areas and small towns far from those cities will be underserved, advocates for abortion rights said. Two clinics in McAllen and Harlingen in South Texas — the only abortion providers in the area — would close if the bill had passed, they said, forcing women seeking abortions to travel a few miles across the border into Mexico rather than drive four hours to San Antonio, both for surgical procedures and abortion-inducing drugs. "We know that it would shut down dozens of clinics in the state of Texas, a state of 26 million people, and there will be women who cannot reach a health care provider to get reproductive health care for hundreds of miles," said Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and a daughter of Ann W. Richards, the former Texas governor. "This is the thing that's frightening. Women will do whatever they have to do to take care of themselves." Ms. Davis, herself, has known long odds, and, for Democrats, was the perfect symbol in a fight over women's rights of what a woman can do. She was a teenager when her first daughter was born but managed to pull herself from a trailer park to Harvard Law School to a hard-fought seat in the Texas Senate, a rare liberal representing conservative Tarrant County. "She's carrying every woman in the state of Texas, if you will, on her shoulders," Ms. Richards said. "If there's anybody who can do it, it's her. She's a marathoner. She's not a sprinter." Ms. Davis is something of a filibuster star among Texas Democrats. At the end of the legislative term in 2011, she forced Mr. Perry to call a special session after her filibuster ran the clock out on a budget bill that included cuts in public education. But at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, 11 hours after she first stood up, Mr. Dewhurst sustained a violation against her for straying off the topic. It was her third violation. As the senators debated the next steps, Ms. Davis remained standing, because it was uncertain whether the filibuster had officially ended. Democrats accused Mr. Dewhurst of going back on his earlier statements that he would bring the end of the filibuster to a vote if Ms. Davis had three violations. As the clock neared midnight and the crowd erupted, several Democratic senators said they believed they were voting on a procedural matter when the vote for the abortion bill was taken. "I don't mind losing fair and square, but this has been a total sham and mockery of the rules," said State Senator Leticia Van de Putte, a San Antonio Democrat. Amy Hagstrom Miller, the president of Whole Woman's Health, which operates abortion and women's health clinics in Texas and two other states, said the bill would force her to shut down the group's five clinics in Texas. The group also owns a sixth Texas facility in San Antonio that complies with ambulatory surgical requirements, but Ms. Hagstrom Miller said it had operated at an annual loss of $400,000 since opening two years ago." Ms. Hagstrom Miller said opening clinics that met the new requirements would be financially untenable. "I believe in providing really compassionate, medically acceptable care, but why would I do it in Texas? I will surely look elsewhere," she said. Another of the group's clinics is the one in McAllen, close to the Mexican border. It was quiet outside the McAllen clinic on Tuesday afternoon, but the area is heavily Catholic, and there is strong opposition to abortion. Signs protesting the clinic are posted on the building next door. Already a large number of women cross the border to obtain abortion-inducing drugs in Mexico, Ms. Hagstrom Miller said, and she expects the number to rise if the clinic closes. "We've already seen women taking matters into their own hands," she said, because of an existing state requirement of a 24-hour waiting period for abortions, which forces women to go to the clinic twice. Many women seeking abortions, she said, are already mothers and do not have the time or money to travel long distances for the procedure. "I've seen women who asked their partners to punch them in the stomach repeatedly," Ms. Hagstrom Miller said, adding that she believed the law and widespread closings of clinics would force more women to try "self-induced abortions." 
|
| You are subscribed to email updates from Top Stories - Google News To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is accused in the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. history. His court-martial is set to begin Monday, June 3, at Fort Meade, Maryland. He has pleaded guilty to 10 of 22 charges against him and faces up to two decades in jail. He has not pleaded guilty to the most serious charge -- that of aiding U.S. enemies, which carries the potential for a life sentence. At a February proceeding, Manning read a statement detailing why and how he sent classified material to WikiLeaks, a group that facilitates the anonymous leaking of secret information through its website. 