H8* Amendment Declared Unconstitutional

Federal District Court Judge Vaughn Walker has ruled that California's anti-gay marriage initiative is unconstitutional:

A federal judge in San Francisco struck down California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage on Wednesday, handing a temporary victory to gay rights advocates in a legal battle that seems all but certain to be settled by the Supreme Court.

Wednesday’s decision is just the latest chapter of what is expected to be a long legal battle over the ban — Proposition 8, which was passed in 2008 with 52 percent of the vote -- and proponents were already promising to appeal, confidently predicting that higher courts would be less accommodating to the other side than Vaughn R. Walker, the judge who issued the ruling.

You can be sure of that last bit.

While I cannot speak to the proclivities of the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals, I know that they are a rather liberal circuit, but that is it, but I am aware of the proclivities of the Supreme Court, and I cannot see this ruling surviving there.

My assesment of the court:

• Scalia has publicly stated his position, even before hearing a case in numerous public speeches.
• Alito and Roberts chomping at the bit to throw red meat to the "cultural conservatives."
• Thomas wants to find an ethnic group to crap on.
• Kennedy being of an age where gay marriage squicks him out, notwithstanding his opinion striking down the criminalization of gay sex in Lawrence v. Texas.
• Between Sotamayor and (almost certainly on the court by the time that this is heard) Kagan, there is at least one vote, and probably 2 votes there for "Civil unions is good enough," which is, after all, Barack Obama's official position.

What worries me is that if Roberts has the votes, he will cast the broadest net possible, as he did in the Citizens United and Heller, and so do his level best reinstitute the criminalization of homosexuality, and probably take a big hack at Roe v. Wade.

It's a good decision, and I support it, but I think that the ratf%$#ers on the Supreme Court will do whatever they can to turn this to evil.

What needs to be done now is to put Scalia on his back heel. He has prejudged the case, and has admitted it in public, so he must recuse himself.

Of course, he won't, not unless the pressure placed on him forces him to.

We need to go after him the way Scientology went after judges they targeted, though obviously no one should drown his pet dog.

I am saying that it is clear that on numerous occasions, in numerous public events, Antonin Scalia has stated that his mind is made up on gay marriage.

As such any rudimentary understanding of legal ethics mandates that he recuse himself, and that Antonin Scalia does not posses even a rudimentary level of legal ethics, so unless there is a constant drum beat pointing out this fact, he will sit on the case with no intention of reviewing either the facts of the law fairly.

^*Proposition 8=H8=Hate, OK?