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By Irin Carmon, Jul. 10, 2015, MSNBC
Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum told an anti-abortion convention that there is a straight line from Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that struck down abortion bans, to the ruling in June that declared same-sex marriage bans unconstitutional.
“We’ve seen some court decisions that I know have some people very upset about what the future of marriage and family and our culture are,” Santorum told those assembled at the National Right to Life Convention (NRLC) in New Orleans Friday. He called Roe “the cancer that is infecting the body of America.”
“When did it become the law of the land that the Supreme Court has the final say on everything?” Santorum demanded, in one of the biggest applause lines of his speech. He added that the people would have the final say.
Most historians trace the judicial review of democratically enacted laws to the 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison. Santorum was technically correct that a constitutional amendment could override a Supreme Court ruling — but that is not an easy lift.
More: www.msnbc.com
By Pete Kasperowics, Jun. 26, 2015, Washington Examiner
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts argued in his dissent in Friday's same-sex marriage case that by saying gay marriages are constitutional, the Court may be heading down the road toward legalizing polygamy.
Roberts was one of four dissenters in the case, and argued that the Court's majority opinion goes too far in prescribing law in an area that had been left to the states. He also said it raises significant questions, including whether states have a right to define marriage as being between two people.
"Although the majority randomly inserts the adjective 'two' in various places, it offers no reason at all why the two-person element of the core definition of marriage may be preserved while the man-woman element may not," Roberts wrote. "Indeed, from the standpoint of history and tradition, a leap from opposite-sex marriage to same-sex marriage is much greater than one from a two-person union to plural unions, which have deep roots in some cultures around the world."
"If the majority is willing to take the big leap, it is hard to see how it can say no to the shorter one," he wrote.
More: www.washingtonexaminer.com
By Fox News, Jun. 26, 2015
The Supreme Court ruled Friday that same-sex couples have a right to marry nationwide, in a historic decision that invalidates gay marriage bans in more than a dozen states.
Gay and lesbian couples already can marry in 36 states and the District of Columbia. But in a 5-4 ruling, the court held that the 14th Amendment requires states to issue marriage licenses for same-sex couples and to recognize such marriages performed in other states.
The ruling means the remaining 14 states that did not allow such unions, in the South and Midwest, will have to stop enforcing their bans.
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, just as he did in the court's previous three major gay rights cases dating back to 1996.
"No union is more profound than marriage," Kennedy wrote, joined by the court's four more liberal justices. He continued: "Under the Constitution, same-sex couples seek in marriage the same legal treatment as opposite-sex couples, and it would disparage their choices and diminish their personhood to deny them this right."
More: www.foxnews.com
By Campbell Robertson, May 21, 2015, Boston Globe
NEW ORLEANS — Hours after a committee in the Louisiana Legislature effectively voted down a bill that would explicitly protect people and businesses that do not want to participate in same-sex marriage, Governor Bobby Jindal issued an executive order Tuesday to accomplish much of what the bill had set out to do.
“We don’t support discrimination in Louisiana and we do support religious liberty,” the governor said in a statement. “These two values can be upheld at the same time.”
Critics, including liberals and even some conservatives, as well influential business leaders, were sharply critical of the governor’s position, dismissing it as an attempt to court conservatives nationally in advance of his probable presidential run.
“It’s a cynical attempt to deflect from the failures of what should be the top legislative priority, what we’re dealing with every day, which is a broken state budget,” state Senator Karen Carter Peterson, a Democrat, said in a speech on the floor Tuesday. She noted that Jindal has been appearing in an ad in Iowa in which he discusses his views on religious liberty.
The governor announced the formation of an exploratory committee for a 2016 presidential run earlier in the week.
