Author Archive | Dale Carpenter

There’s an interesting ongoing debate at The New Republic between Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Just over the litigation approach to getting gay marriage. Basically, Rosen dislikes the emphasis on litigation and Just thinks it has been valuable. Elsewhere, the ever-wise Jon Rauch has some thoughts on how the growing protests over Prop 8 may help […]

Leaders of the Mormon Church urged their followers to contribute to a constitutional ban on marriage for gay families, a call that apparently resulted in the bulk of the donations to that effort in California. Religious leaders and their adherents are of course free to oppose gay marriage. But when you enter the political fray, […]

The state constitutional challenge to Prop 8 turns out to be more interesting than I initially supposed. The California constitution recognizes two types of changes: “revisions” and “amendments.” The distinction, which is not elaborated in the constitutional text and barely explained in California state court decisions, matters a great deal because the state constitution places […]

Last night I stood in the heart of San Francisco

I disagree with him about quite a few things, but he’s now going to be my President. Another group of Americans has been brought closer to full equality and participation in the life and governance of the nation. I’m as proud of the country tonight as I’ve ever been, which is pretty damn proud.

Seen over the skies of Southern California this afternoon: – The campaign to end marriage for gay families in California has been deadly effective. Tomorrow we’ll find out just how effective.

I’ve been in rainy California volunteering against Proposition 8, which would ban gay couples from marrying in the state, and so just now read David’s post from yesterday critiquing Barack Obama’s views on gay marriage and Prop 8. I do see some (not insoluble) logical problems in Obama’s opposition to gay marriage and Prop 8, […]

Someone asked me about this story yesterday and I said, just wait a while and we’ll see. Now the McCain campaign worker who claimed to have had a backward B carved in her cheek by attackers has admitted it was a hoax. Law enforcement officials did their job here. To their credit, many bloggers reserved […]

Ann Rostow, one of the most gifted writers and trenchant analysts of gay politics anywhere, offers some thoughts on what now appears to be the losing campaign to save gay marriage in California: Winning the Prop 8 fight will now take a last minute turnaround, and our message in the next two weeks cannot be […]

The Connecticut Supreme Court has just ruled that the state must recognize gay marriages, making it the third state (all by court decision) to do so. The Connecticut legislature had already created civil unions for same-sex couples, so the question in the case was whether there was any basis in the state constitution to refuse […]

There certainly seems to have been a recent reversal of fortunes in the ballot fight over California’s Proposition 8, which would eliminate marriage for gay couples in the state if voters approve it on November 4. Supporters of Prop 8 are now more than $10 million ahead in fundraising. And where polling through September showed […]

As a reminder, the University of Minnesota Law School is hosting its first annual conservative/libertarian colloquium tomorrow from 1:30-3:30pm in Rm. 25 at the law school. It’s on the topic of the role of precedent in constitutional law. It features, among many outstanding speakers, the VC’s own Orin Kerr. All are invited to attend and […]

That’s the claim made today by Andrew Sullivan Jonathan Rauch David Blankenhorn in an op-ed in the L.A. Times. It’s not a new claim, of course. Same-sex marriage advocates have been making it for years. Nor should it be a controversial one since it’s very hard to see how gay marriage would have no effect […]

Over the past couple of weeks, a number of claims made for and against Sarah Palin have been debunked. One persistent charge made by her critics is that she tried to remove objectionable books from the public library in Wasilla, Alaska, where she was mayor. In a generally critical examination of Palin’s record in yesterday’s […]

While there’s no obvious connection to Sarah Palin, I thought I’d mention that the world may end tomorrow. Scientists in Europe are planning to fire up a particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider (once memorably misspelled by The New York Times), which has a 17-mile circumference. A few scientists think there is a […]