pending marriage equality in New Jersey?
DefCon has news of the NJ Supreme Court decision to afford same-sex couples “on equal terms the same rights and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples under the civil marriage statutes.” All in all, it’s a sad commentary that even a move forward to some sort of civil unions—the most likely legislative remedy—still leaves same-sex couples in a back-of-the-bus second-class citizenship with respect to their intimate relationships.
Glenn Greenwald dashes the GOP’s hopes for the pro-marriage ruling to become an “October Surprise” in the upcoming election:
It's possible that Republicans will attempt to seize on this ruling and try to exploit it for political gain. Less than two weeks before an election in which every poll shows them trailing, Republicans are presumably eager to find an issue with which to change the subject from the debacle in Iraq and pervasive corruption within their party.
He then decries conservative commentators’ ignorance of constitutional law:
It should surprise nobody that armies of "conservatives" have become overnight experts in New Jersey Constitutional law… […] But in issuing these condemnations, none of them mentions a single provision of the New Jersey State Constitution or any precedent applying it that supports their righteous conviction that the decision was legally erroneous; they just know intuitively, deep in their soul, that it is.[…]
…it is always so ironic -- and more than a little contempt-inspiring -- when people who proclaim to oppose "judicial activism" condemn a judicial decision based not on what the relevant constitutional law requires, but instead based on their personal opinion of the policy outcomes (or based on some informal "belief" about what courts should and shouldn't be "involved in," independent of what the Constitution requires). Such individuals are engaged in the very crux of the crime of judicial activism which they claim to despise (that is, deciding legal questions based not on law and precedent but on their own personal preferences).