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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Arthur Radley who wrote (497311)	11/23/2003 11:03:14 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 769670

At Harvard Law School, these two related concepts came together for Wolfson in a study of marriage law. Here, he concluded, was a clear case of American society limiting the lives of gay people by framing the law in a certain way. Earlier generations had used marriage laws to restrict other groups -- at various times whites could not marry blacks, married women could not enter contracts or own property, couples could not get divorced and so on. Those laws had changed. And so, he figured, could the restriction on same-sex couples. Initially, he ran into resistance from gay leaders. After becoming a full-time attorney at Lambda Legal, the principal gay-rights law firm in the United States, Wolfson urged his organization to take on a marriage rights lawsuit in Hawaii. He was turned down. So he offered behind-the-scenes help to a Hawaii attorney named Dan Foley -- and Foley won the case. In 1993, the Hawaii Supreme Court concluded that state marriage laws discriminated against same-sex couples. ... The arguments made in the Hawaii case were not much different from the arguments offered by Jack Baker two decades earlier -- or from the arguments made this year in Massachusetts. While each case was nuanced by state laws and legal traditions, all drew on two strands of U.S. Supreme Court doctrine. First, the court has defined a fundamental right of Americans to form families by marriage. In overturning a Nebraska law that forbade the teaching of foreign languages before ninth grade, the court wrote in 1923 that constitutional liberty "without doubt . . . denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also . . . to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience." In 1967, this right to marry was extended to interracial couples. "Under our Constitution," the court declared, "the freedom to marry, or not marry . . . resides with the individual." washingtonpost.com