by Dwight Cathcart | May 5, 2015 | Fighting Back, Marriage, Marriage cases
Five days have passed since the Court hearing on Obergefell v. Hodges. Things got off to the wrong foot when Justice Kennedy, to whom most people are looking to make the majority, expressed how disturbed he is by the proposal to change an institution that has been...
by Dwight Cathcart | Apr 28, 2015 | Marriage cases, SCOTUS
First, the name of the case is Obergefell v. Hodges. The link to one of the online pronunciation sites is here. Lyle Denniston, of SCOTUSblog, has put up a post “Same-Sex Marriage: The Decisive Questions.” This is fairly technical, but, like anything from Denniston on...
by Dwight Cathcart | Apr 20, 2015 | Marriage cases, SCOTUS
I was in the Institute for Contemporary Art yesterday, at an exhibition entitled When Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South. I left South Carolina temporarily in 1957 and permanently in 1963. While I’ve not always been interested in what was going on...
by Dwight Cathcart | Apr 17, 2015 | 10th Circuit, Marriage cases, SCOTUS
SCOTUSBLOG.COM has introduced a seriously good series by Michael Klarman. They say, “As part of our expanded coverage of this month’s oral arguments in the challenges to state bans on same-sex marriage, we are pleased to present this post by Michael Klarman on the...
by Dwight Cathcart | Apr 15, 2015 | 10th Circuit, Marriage cases, SCOTUS
Dahlia Lithwick of Slate proposes that the gay marriage cases will be the most important gay rights cases ever. I think everybody agrees. These cases will be argued on April 28, 2015, in two weeks, with a decision in late June. Between now and then, it behooves us to...
by Dwight Cathcart | Mar 26, 2015 | Fighting Back, SCOTUS
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a badass. Dahlia Lithwick, in Slate, tells us how she got that way and whether she’s happy being called that, and whether it’s OK for people who support the ascendency of women to use terms like that to describe a longtime feminist. It’s a great...
by Dwight Cathcart | Mar 16, 2015 | Celebration, Coming to terms with the past, Fighting Back, Freedom, The future
“A new survey out this week shows that support for marriage equality is at 59% with just 33% opposed. This means that marriage equality is slightly more popular than the Pope.” Matt Baume, American Foundation for Equal Rights. The link is to a video, with Matt Baume...
by Dwight Cathcart | Jan 22, 2015 | Fighting Back, Teenage Suicides
The president was in Boise, Idaho, on Tuesday, which is, as Rachel Maddow said, the reddest of red states, and the crowd around him was mesmerized, cheering him on. He spoke, briefly, of what has been accomplished in Washington. He touched lightly on his achievements,...
by Dwight Cathcart | Jan 16, 2015 | Marriage cases, SCOTUS
So, they took ‘em! This puts us in a different place entirely. Now the Supreme Court has granted the petitions from Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Having accepted that a split in the Circuit Courts is a bad thing, they pretty much had to, to resolve the...
by Dwight Cathcart | Jan 6, 2015 | Fighting Back
Before the recent series of Supreme Court cases—Romer v. Evans (1996), Lawrence v. Texas (2003), and United States v. Windsor (2013)—, gay people had no constitutional rights in the United States. It was only after these court cases that gay people were recognized as...
by Dwight Cathcart | Nov 25, 2014 | Being gay, Federal Court Cases, Fighting Back
On November 18, 2003 the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts released its decision in the case Goodridge v Department of Public Health, which brought marriage equality to the United States. Mary Bonauto had assembled this case and argued it...
by Dwight Cathcart | Sep 15, 2014 | Being gay, Fighting Back
While something like half of the commentariat is predicting that the Supreme Court will choose, in its late September 2014 conference, to take marriage equality cases in some form or other, and will give marriage equality in its June 2015 decision to every mother’s...
by Dwight Cathcart | May 27, 2014 | Larry Kramer
Before I arrived in Boston in 1984, I didn’t know anything about AIDS, or, as it was called, Gay Cancer, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), before AIDS was settled on in 1985. Nobody else did either. We knew that it was fatal. And we knew that they didn’t know...
by Dwight Cathcart | May 25, 2014 | Larry Kramer
Tomorrow night, at nine, HBO will carry The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s play about the first years of the AIDS epidemic, from 1981 to 1984. It was originally produced in New York by Joseph Papp. Kramer’s play is about one of those times in the lives of men when there...
by Dwight Cathcart | May 19, 2014 | Anger
I said, “Of course I’m angry. My generation of gay men tends to be angry. We experienced abuse, and we were treated like shit for much of our lives—by the government, by the churches, the State Department, the military, the courts, by our families and by the people we...
by Dwight Cathcart | Oct 19, 2013 | Fighting Back, Walking wounded
Many people—both gay and straight people—think because gay people can be married in thirteen states that we have solved that problem, and, at least in those thirteen states, we can move on to other issues. That’s only partly true. Think of the long fight for...
