I must hasten to follow

The Calif. gay marriage trial may not be broadcast, but there are other ways to get the trial before the public. filmmaker John Ireland will spend the next several days very busy. He and his team are creating a script based on those blogging and tweeting inside the courtroom. They have already hired actors to portray the various participants and they have filmed a reenactment of the first day of the trial. That should be on YouTube by now. Additional days of the trial will be posted promptly thereafter. Alas, without an actual transcript it will be criticized by Fundies ("I didn't say that!").

The judge in this case has kept the cameras rolling even though the proceedings won't be broadcast. The judge says he wants to refer to them while he deliberates. The anti-gay side now says the tapes must be destroyed when the judge is done with them. Nothing but thorough. Charles Bouley of the Huffington Post works through the implications of that request for the defendant lawyers and the Supreme Court Justices who agreed the trial should not be televised.

* The right of witnesses not to be harassed are more important than the victims of discrimination and more important than the First Amendment while what they are protecting violates the Fourteenth Amendment and the Church/State separation.

* The defendants (the anti-gay side) must know how empty and bigoted their arguments are if they fear those arguments might be exposed.

* The Supremes banned TV from the lower court because they know how they are going to vote when the issue gets to them and they don't want their own bigoted empty reasons to be known. They have abandoned the document they are sworn to uphold.

* The job of the Supremes is to determine if the constitution has been violated. Nothing else. In this case it is obvious (even to school kids) that the 14th is being violated. If the Supremes don't rule in favor of gays it is a breach of ethics and justices can be impeached.

* Would impeachment of Supremes happen? Alas, no. We might impeach a president over sex, but there aren't enough people, certainly not enough politicians, who love the constitution. The politicians will abandon anything for a vote. Justice and equality must wait for a death or retirement.


Dahlia Lithwick in Newsweek points out a discrepancy in the anti-gay side hiding in a pivotal question. As Fundies put it, who is supposed to decide an issue this big? Judges shouldn't impose their values on the people, they claim. Lithwick responds if the voter is to decide it is absurd to ban the voter from seeing the proceedings. The ballot fight in 2008 cost both sides $74 million, most of that to buy TV time to educate the voters. It's too late to claim there is no place for the TV now. If they claim that a judge is too elitist they can't turn around and claim the voter is so thuggish he would terrorize the witnesses. Of course, we know the real reason is that before the judge they can't use the scare tactics that are so effective in swaying the voter, and the reasons they are left with don't hold much water.

One of the pro-gay lawyers in the Calif. marriage case denounced politicians, especially Obama, on gay issues in general. He says politicians say, "I must hasten to follow them, for I am their leader."