CA AG Brown: 'Proposition 8 violates the 14th Amendment'
CA AG Brown: 'Proposition 8 violates the 14th Amendment'
California Attorney General Jerry Brown tonight filed his answer (pdf) to Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the federal Defense of Marriage Act challenge brought by Ted Olson and David Boies. Brown takes a far different tack in this California DOMA challenge than did President Obama’s Justice Department in another California DOMA challenge, Smelt v. United States (discussed here).
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http://lawdork.net/2009/06/13/ca-ag-...4th-amendment/
The Fourteenth Amendment (Amendment XIV) to the United States Constitution, along with the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, was adopted after the Civil War as one of the Reconstruction Amendments. It was adopted on July 9, 1868.
The amendment provides a broad definition of citizenship, overruling the decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which had excluded slaves, and their descendants, from possessing Constitutional rights; this was used in the mid-20th century to dismantle racial segregation in the United States, as in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Its Due Process Clause has been used to apply most of the Bill of Rights to the states. This clause has also been used to recognize: (1) substantive due process rights, such as parental and marriage rights; and (2) procedural due process rights requiring that certain steps, such as a hearing, be followed before a person's "life, liberty, or property" can be taken away. The amendment's Equal Protection Clause requires states to provide equal protection under the law to all people within their jurisdictions. The amendment also includes a number of clauses dealing with the Confederate
It's a contractual issue...
I don't understand why anyone isn't taking the Federalist approach and saying that contracts valid in one state have to be recognized by all other states in the Union. People keep thinking marriage is a religious institution - it's not - weddings are religious, the marriage CONTRACT is completely civil. The funny part is that a federalist argument is one even Scalia would agree with and is at the very core of our Constitution. It's a strict constructionist way of thinking.
The other issue is we're talking about contracts written by states that were all part of the original 13 colonies. While Utah was forced to change their definition of marriage to join the Union, the original 13 colonies were never expected to change - they define what is fundamentally "American"... I think it's funny how people who live in 20 year old tract homes are trying to lecture people who live in 200 year old homes about what "traditional" means and why it's important.