SCOTUS gives Edith Windsor a tax refund

By Dan Brooks in American History 3 Comments
Edith Windsor (left) and her wife, the late Thea Spyer

Edith Windsor (left) and her wife, the late Thea Spyer

Maybe you heard about this, but the Supreme Court has overturned the Defense of Marriage Act and, in the process, given Edith Windsor $350,000. Windsor filed suit against the federal government in 2010, arguing that DOMA unconstitutionally deprived her of a spousal exemption from the estate tax upon the death of her wife, Thea Spyer. This morning, the court ruled that DOMA “is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.” It also ruled that the plaintiffs in Hollingsworth v. Perry lacked standing, effectively driving a stake through the heart of California’s Proposition 8.

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Supreme Court to hear gay marriage case

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 2 Comments
A trenchant cartoon reminding us that Obama made gay people want to get married in order to distract us from the economy.

A trenchant political cartoon points out that Obama made states ban gay marriage in order to distract us from the economy.

Today is the day, or one of several days this week: the Supreme Court has begun hearing arguments on Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage. Probably this it the first you have heard about this issue. To recap: the California Supreme Court affirmed the right of gay couples to marry in 2008. In November of that year, voters approved a ballot measure amending the California constitution to limit marriages to opposite-sex couples. In 2009, Theodore Olson and David Boies filed Hollingsworth v. Perry, No. 12-144, in which they argued that Prop 8 violated the federal constitution by allowing California voters to override their state’s supreme court. Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco’s Federal District Court agreed, but his decision was stayed pending Supreme Court review. That started this morning.

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SCOTUS: Maybe we’ll talk about gay marriage Friday

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 6 Comments

Gay

You know it’s a surprise when the Reuters headline contains the phrase “takes no action”: the Supreme Court issed an orders list today that made no mention of the several pending appeals challenging the Defense of Marriage Act. Instead, the Supremes relisted those cases for further consideration on Friday. In the awkward Christmas dinner that is America’s highest court, gay marriage is your cousin who brought his “roommate” from New York. Sonia Sotomayor is your cool aunt, and the other eight members are your grandpa. They know what’s going on, probably, and their main priority is that no one talks about it.

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Oh thank Christ

By Dan Brooks in health care 3 Comments

The United States Supreme Court

I’m as surprised as you: the Supreme Court has ruled to uphold the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. The individual mandate is constitutional, albeit on the grounds that it is a tax and not a mandate. But no matter—minus some sticky stuff about federal coercion of the states to expand Medicare, health care reform stands, kit if not caboodle. “It is painful to recognize that the liberties which our forefathers fought a revolution to secure have been lost,” Karen Harned of the National Federation of Independent Businesses writes, “But it is clear that our original constitutional system has been thrown out, and we are left with only the democratic process to preserve our rights.” Let the hyperbole begin continue!

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Friday links! Varieties of human experience edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 2 Comments

"I actually find nothing strange about Antonin Scalia. Bafflingly, I regard Antonin Scalia as the default human condition. Now bring me Solo and the Wookie."

We at Combat! blog spend a lot of time considering the problem of others. Partly that’s because I work from home, where I live with several terrariums. When you live alone, have no coworkers and socialize with an insular peer group, it’s easy to start thinking that other people are basically the same as you. They are not. The human experience is characterized first by its stunning variety, and what one person considers the givens of existence are, to another, mere trifles. Take lying, for example. When I lie, I have to take care that what I’m saying sounds like the truth. Otherwise, people will start to think less of me, and because I see the same people over and over again—the colloquial term for this phenomenon is “friends”—my life will get worse. For other people, lying is a sort of formality, the way Japanese people say ittadakimasu before eating. They just have to make the gesture of a declarative statement, and even though nobody believes them, that gesture is enough. It’s probably because they have no friends and the truth means to them what Rembrandt’s Christ With Arms Folded means to a labrador, but who knows? This week’s link roundup is chock full of absurd behavior undertaken by weirdos, and it serves to remind us that other people are startlingly different. Won’t you shudder in disrecognition with me?

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