I don't think he hates gays.

He simply doesn't understand their issues, doesn't care for them and doesn't think they are important enough.

Whatever it may be, he knows one thing for sure - gay Americans are not voting Republican in large numbers. And won't in the near future.

He doesn't have to earn their votes.

As with some other domestic issues, Obama wants Congress to deal with the gays. He seems to think Congress is capable of lofty achievements, in areas like civil rights, health care reform, and global warming.

2 recs on a post worth discussing. Pathetic.

Oh for Christ's sake. If feel like I lost IQ points merely by the act of reading this purile rant.

It is the statutory and constitutional duty of the Justice Department to defend the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress if there is a good faith (legal term of art, not just two words that mean anything you want it them to mean) basis for doing so.

This is not a "new and dangerous" test. This is, in fact, how the rational basis test works, though rather more bluntly stated than you usually see. And it is also correct that the rational basis test is the test applied to determine whether a law affecting protected groups other than race or gender, is constitutional.

This thing that liberals do where they pluck a brief from among the tens of thousands of lawsuits against the government that the Justice Department is defending at any given time, pulling out a couple of paragraphs from a legal argument, rewriting the argument so that it's somehow even more offensive to the sensibilities of whatever grievance is being mongered by the author, and then acting like Obama himself sat up late at night writing the goddamned thing himself is absolutely ridiculous. You make yourselves look ridiculous when you do it.

And yeah, DOMA is an act of Congress signed into law by well-known gay-hater Bill Clinton. It is presumptively constitutional, i.e. it is entitled to a rebuttable presumption of constitutionality by virtue of having been passed by Congress. That presumption of constitutionality compels the Justice Department to defend it when it is challenged in court. It is compelled to do so by statute and pursuant to the president's constitutional duty to see that the laws are faithfully executed.

Lawyers, even--indeed, especially--Justice Department lawyers, have a legally enforceable duty to zealously advocate their client's position, even if the current administration doesn't particularly care for the law it is defending as a matter of policy. Both sides' lawyers get their say and the judge decides. When a lawyer fails to perform that that duty of zealous advocacy, he risks his law license, his job and and betrays the oaths she took when she was sworn in to the bar and, in the case of a DOJ attorney, again when he or she was employed by the government.

This is how the adversarial system of Justice works. Each side has a lawyer. Each lawyer argues the case as hard as he can and to the best of her abiity. Judges, and the entire system, depend upon each side's attorneys fully and faithfully performing their duty of zealous advocacy within the law, probing for and exposing weaknesses in the other side's arguments, presenting policy ramifications, defending their own position, to do their job. When one side holds back, the integrity of the final decision suffers, no matter which way it goes.

You may think that that's a bad system in principle. Or you may think that however noble it's ideals, it fails to deliver on its promise in practice and should be replaced with something else. Fine. Lobby to amend the Constitution. But like it or not, it's what we've got and that's how it works.

Getting a snit on because some Justice Department lawyer was doing what he or she was paid to do is childish and, yeah, an insult to my profession. But conflating that lawyer's work into an assertion that Obama hates gays is just so utterly purile and completely asinine that it's downright stupifying.

I read the HuffPo article and either, despite her law degree from a Canadian law school, she doesn't know what she's talking about, or she's being deliberately obtuse.

In a nutshell, she's advocating for judicial activism in its most radical form and dishonestly trying to portray the the guys on the other side of their case--in this case the Justice Department--as the radicals. She gives away her hand--and also identifies the problem with her own argument, with this red herring:

"Well, I'm sorry it's hard to change laws where there are state-wide differences. Turns out that taxation and employment law are also areas of disagreement between states, but the Federal government had no problem wading into those issues."

The problem is that it wasn't the federal courts or the executive doing the"wading into those issues," it was Congress!!! In both cases, federal courts upheld the power of Congress to do that because/and in both cases the Constitution very clearly gave Congress the power to do that.

In this case, lamentably and wrongly, but real nonetheless, Congress has specifically said it is the policy of the federal government to stay out of an issue that, in any case, is constitutionally assigned to the states.

So that's my substantive disagreement with the legal argument.

My policy disagreement is that there is wide consensus among all civil rights activists that the courts are generally the wrong branch of the government in which to try to achieve social change in the first instance. Prof. Obama at the University of Chicago was a well known as a proponent of this view but, by the early 90s, it was pretty much the mainstream view in liberal legal circles. Most efforts to litigate social change failed to achieve concrete results for anyone other than the specific parties to the litiation and always provoked resistance and backlash that, in the long run, was seen as counter productive.

The only group that seems to disagree with this consensus is a segment of the gay rights movement. Fine. But equating a serious but sincere disagreement over tactics with actively hating gays is wrong and stupid.