Supreme Court

by Jeremy Leaming

Over the weekend The New York Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg provided a relatively glowing profile of Brian Brown, the leader of the rabidly antigay group called the National Organization for Marriage.

Brown, Stolberg tells us, has “an open face and easy laugh that belie his status as a divisive figures in the culture wars” and a “keen sense of strategy and a polished speaking style, traits that unnerve his opponents.”

Beyond lavishing praise on Brown’s lobbying abilities, Stolberg had to provide us a bit of information about his arguments against same-sex marriage – and those arguments are hardly polished or keen. They’re Christian Right retreads. Legal recognition of same-sex marriage will threaten religious liberty and undermine the sacredness of marriage, the Christian Right argues.

For example, Brown said, “When you knock over a core pillar of society like marriage, and then try to redefine biblical views of marriage  as bigotry, there will be consequences.” He then asks will a push to “normalize pedophilia occur.”

Like other Christianists Brown also comes around to the topic of children – if lesbians and gay men can legally wed they’ll adopt even more children and according to Christian Right groups that’s really bad news for children.

These arguments regarding the ability of gay couples to raise children and the supposed threats to religious liberty are more than overwrought, they’re inaccurate. But peddling this nonsense has been a high priority for Brown and his allies in the Christian Right community for a long, long time.

Boston College law school professor Kent Greenfield in a piece for The American Prospect titled “Weird Friends of the Court,” highlights a few of the “friend-of-the-court briefs” lodged by religious groups in both cases – Hollingsworth v. Perry and U.S. v. Windsor – that the Court will hear oral argument in this week.

Greenfield notes upfront that controversial cases, such as the Perry and Windsor, “bring out the crazies, and crazies can hire lawyers to write a brief. And sometimes the crazies are the lawyers.”

And then Greenfield gives us some examples. The far-right Thomas More Society declares gay people can’t have sex. “A man and woman, and only a man and a woman, are capable of engaging in sexual intercourse.” Greenfield adds, “Now that’s going to come as a surprise to some people.” No kidding.

Fortunately there are likely many more serious, thoughtful briefs lodged before the Supreme Court. This blog has noted some of them here and here.

Georgetown Law Center Professor Nan Hunter and Columbia Law School Professor Suzanne Goldberg have lodged briefs in both cases. During a recent interview with ACSblog, Goldberg briefly described some arguments advanced in those briefs.  

by Jeremy Leaming

The U.S. Supreme Court may rule soon on the constitutionality of a race-conscious admissions policy employed by the University of Texas at Austin, but as the AP’s Mark Sherman reports that justices are ready to consider another case involving a race-conscious admissions – this time a state ban on the use of such policies.

The justices have already heard oral argument in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, regarding a white woman’s challenge to the university’s admissions policy, which takes an array of factors, including race, into account when building its student body. SCOTUSblog’s Lyle Denniston notes that while the justices in Fisher could potentially produce a broad ruling, they could as easily craft a narrow one that may “not go much beyond that plan.”

The Michigan case, Schuette v. Michigan Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, however could prove to be a platform for a more sweeping announcement on race-conscious admissions policies. Denniston writes that the Michigan case “involves a move by a state to deny its public colleges and universities any right to use race as a factor in choosing the incoming class of students. It thus has the potential to produce a far more sweeping decision.”

As Sherman notes, the Michigan movement to pass a law outlawing race-conscious admissions policy “has its roots” in the high court’s 2003 opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger. In Grutter, a majority of the Court led by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor upheld the University of Michigan law school’s race-conscious admissions policy. The majority concluded that the school’s use of race it its admission policy supported a compelling educational interest and did not violate the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

After the Grutter opinion, opponents of race-conscious admissions policies formed to advocate for a ballot initiative, Proposal 2, banning the state’s universities and colleges from using such policies. After voters approved the initiative, a group of civil liberties groups, including the NAACP LDF, formed to lodge a lawsuit against Proposal 2. Eventually the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled against Proposal 2, saying it subverted equal protection rights.

LDF’s President and Director-Counsel Sherrilyn Ifill said today that Michigan’s Proposal 2 “unconstitutionally gerrymanders Michigan’s political process and relegates the critical topics of racial diversity and access to educational opportunity to a separate, distant, and far more cumbersome playing field – one that is unplayable for all practicable purposes.”

LDF notes Proposal 2 has already led to a decline of minority enrollment, citing a University of Michigan study that shows African-American “undergraduate enrollment fell from 6.7 percent in 2006 to 4.5 percent in 2010.”

The justices heard oral argument in Fisher last fall.