On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 30, 2014 18:23 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by njs
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

Indeed, and it's evident that state marriage laws on the whole weren't really intended as any sort of system for encouraging good child-care or anything like that. One of the circuit court decisions does a nice job of skewering that assertion, which is often made by anti-gay-marriage people, I will see if I can find it (or perhaps someone else will post it first).

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On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 30, 2014 19:00 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (3 responses)

Here we go, Posner's decision against Indiana and Wisconsin, both of which tried to argue their marriage laws are about childcare even though they have a bunch of special cases in their marriage law for couples that can't conceive and are unlikely to adopt.

http://media.ca7.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/rssExec.pl?Submit=D...

I think this was the best judicial decision I read in October (it was written in September but didn't come to my attention until earlier this month). It's a sharp contrast to Windsor (I know gay marriage advocates were happy to take Windsor as a "win" but it's _terrible_ law). Let's hope that people citing judicial decisions on this topic in fifty years are quoting Posner and not Kennedy (I think we can safely assume they won't cite Scalia).

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 31, 2014 0:33 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

While I have great respect for Judge Posner, and think that he is doing great work on clarifying technology related issues. In this field I think he is wrong and was looking to justify a position he reached for other reasons.

Not all legal cases come out the way they should, even the Supreme Court makes some disastrously bad decisions at times (The Dread Scott decision is a good example), and the bad decisions are usually nto clear immediately (if they were very clear, the Judges wouldn't make them)

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 31, 2014 8:40 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

_Dred_ Scott http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford

On the sickness of our community

Posted Nov 1, 2014 2:12 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Now I have a bit more time to engage with the substance rather than the typo.

The nice thing that many people miss about judicial decisions is that the judge is expected not just to say "Bloggs wins" but how and why. So it's not really enough to just insist Posner was wrong, you'd have to tease out why exactly and I appreciate that LWN is really no place to do that.

I do invite you to attempt this somewhere else though.