Column: California takes the lead on hate. That’s a good thing. Someone has to be the leader of the pack, and so it is with the LGBT community. They have to take the lead in opposing hate, and that means taking the lead in spreading it.
When you look at how many states have passed laws against marriage equality, you realize there’s been a real push on. We’re no longer dealing with state-by-state legislation. All we’re doing now is going to the state level. It’s not about making a difference in a state or an election. All it’s going to do is make people look silly, and it’s going to prevent the issue from being settled.
On the other hand, it’s hard to get any bigger than this, and in spite of that, we’re still moving the needle.
In just the last six days, we’ve seen a major Supreme Court ruling that bans job discrimination, not just for LGBT people, but also for transgender people, and to make sure that doesn’t happen again, we’ve now won four major civil rights cases.
Two of those involved the government and the LGBT community, and these are the first two cases on the Supreme Court’s docket to involve them.
We know from other cases that the first order of business for the Supreme Court is to get their constitutional mandate, to get the court, in this case the United States, to step up and do something about it.
In their ruling, the court didn’t say that a law is unconstitutional. It simply said that it infringes on the constitutional rights of LGBT people.
And that’s all they’re doing if they’re going to recognize federal rights. They’re just going to have to acknowledge that the court has made a decision. They can’t undo it.
They’re going to have to go on with business as usual by ignoring what the court decided, and that’s what happened in those cases. Both those cases did involve the federal government—one in California and one in New York—and both those cases involved the
