Civil & Human Rights

The Christian Reconstructionists and Dominionists of the Center for Arizona Policy and its legal arm, the Alliance Defending Freedom, who supported Arizona’s SB 1062 — the right to discriminate against gays and anyone else I hate because “religious liberty!” — are borrowing a page from the Southern Segregationists following the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision in 1954.  They are following a plan of massive resistance to the federal courts for striking down same-sex marriage bans.

In fact, they are not even subtle about it. Pastor Scott Lively and Brian Camenker have long had an organization called MassResistance(.org) and MassResistance(.net), a Waltham, Massachusetts-based group that promotes socially conservative positions on issues relating to homosexuality, abortion, anti-bullying, gun control, the transgender community and same-sex marriage.

The Arizona Republic reports today that, despite the national furor over SB 1062 this past Spring, the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom is encouraging court clerks in Arizona and elsewhere to engage in mass resistance against marriage equality. Memo to clerks: You can object to gay marriage:

The conservative group that handled the legal defense of Arizona’s overturned gay-marriage ban is advising court clerks they don’t have to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples if the clerk has religious or moral objections.

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Matt Yglesias writing at Vox.com makes an argument that I have been making for years: Americans don’t have a constitutional right to vote — it’s time for that to change (excerpt);

When the Constitution was enacted, it did not include a right to vote for the simple reason that the Founders didn’t think most people should vote. Voting laws, at the time, mostly favored white, male property-holders, and the rules varied sharply from state to state. But in the first half of the nineteenth century, the idea of popular democracy took root across the land. Property qualifications were universally abolished and the franchise became the key marker of white male political equality. Subsequent activists sought to further expand the franchise by barring discrimination on the basis of race (the 15th Amendment) and gender (the 19th Amendment) — establishing the norm that all citizens should have the right to vote.

But this norm is just a norm. There is no actual constitutional provision stating that all citizens have the right to vote, only that voting rights cannot be dispensed on the basis of race or gender discrimination. A law requiring you to cut your hair short before voting, or to dye it blue, or to say “pretty please let me vote,” all might pass muster. And so might a voter ID requirement.

The legality of these kinds of laws hinge on whether they violate the Constitution’s protections against race and gender discrimination, not on whether they prevent citizens from voting. As Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier has written, this “leaves one of the fundamental elements of democratic citizenship tethered to the whims of local officials.”

The solution, both to America’s voting access problem and to alleviating public concerns about fraud, is to establish an affirmative right to vote.

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Now that Arizona’s statutory and constitutional provisions banning same-sex marriage have been struck down by the court as unconstitutional, there is much more work to be done.

The next step for the Arizona legislature will be to clean up a number of statutory provisions through “technical amendments” to make them gender neutral. This includes not just marriage, but for example, property rights; wills, trusts and estates; child rearing and custody rights; the right to adoption; medical power of attorney and directives, and hospital visitation; employee benefits, including health insurance; tax filing status; divorce, property settlement, spousal support and maintenance; and even the criminal code for such things as spousal abuse, abandonment, etc.

The Arizona Republic had a decent article on this on Sunday. Gay-marriage ruling brings new legal questions:

Same-sex couples in Arizona this weekend celebrated their newly won right to marry. But their fight for equality under the law isn’t over.

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[A] number of laws include wording that could allow the state to discriminate against same-sex couples, including a 2011 statute that explicitly gives a married man and woman preference in adoptions.

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