Thursday, March 30, 2006

SJC Says Go Ahead and Discriminate!

Fingernail clicks to Hoss at Blue Mass Group for posting that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court supports the notorious 1913 anti-miscegenation law that Mitt Romney and Tom Reilly decalcified to prevent out-of-state gays from marrying here.

Shame on Mitt. Shame on Tom. Now shame on a hypocritical bench.

Today's ruling in PDF is here.

Very oddly, the decision applies to couples from some states and not others. The SJC reported that it was unsure whether New York and Rhode Island law forbids same-sex marriage. It was sure about Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont law though. The SJC sent the New York and Rhode Island back down to Superior Court for an expedited finding on whether those states' laws prohibit the couples from marrying here.

Of course one irony is forbidding marriage to civil-union states Connecticut and Vermont. More important, this follows the Bill Clinton DoMA decision on a federal level and continues to support SSM as an exception to the otherwise widely accepted full-faith-and-credit clause.

In effect, our governor, attorney general and top court say that they accept enshrined discrimination locally on the chance that it might cause a court battle in other states. Despite adamant righty denials that this law is unlike and unrelated to Black civil-rights struggles, the parallels with Jim Crow laws as well as anti-miscegenation are too obvious.

GLAD which represented the SS couples, put as positive as possible spin on this. For GLAD, Carissa Cunningham said, "We see it as a mixed decision. They’re leaving the door open" on a couple of states.

Today's decision does not mandate enforcing this odious law. It says the commonwealth can. So, it looks like a governor and attorney general with courage and a sense of honor could order it not enforced and ask the General Court to get this abomination off the books.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Justice Ireland was the only one who got it right. His dissent is right on the money.