by Jeremy Leaming
Quickly after President Obama announced his support of marriage equality, the president’s knee-jerk detractors doused the moment with cynicism. The president, they said backed into the announcement or they snidely asked what’s the difference between a flip-flop and evolving.
The response from the far right – Obama is a scourge, a menace to society, God is surely irked now – was overwrought and hardly surprising. The cynicism, however, was offensive for its insensitivity and cluelessness. Did the dunderhead cro
wd listen to the president’s comments or was it expressing a latent distaste for gay Americans or ignorance of the challenges lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender Americans face in a society where many are still bent on oppressing and marginalizing them.
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, argues that listening to Obama’s comments is, surprising as it may seem, helpful, writing, “Whatever your view of President Obama’s motives, or the legal consequences of his statement …, it is not in dispute that the words he spoke gave many Americans – including gay children and teenagers – the message that he had heard them, and that their experiences mattered so much that he’d changed his views – personal, political and legal.”
Or as James Fallows, the longtime correspondent for the Atlantic, said:
I am aware that there are various slice-and-dice cynical assessments one could make of the president’s comments today. (Why did he take so long? Why did he back off the support he’d expressed in the 1990s? Might this be useful as a wedge issue in the election? It doesn’t have any immediate since it’s still up to the states. And so on.) But the fact remains that five minutes before his announcement, no one could be sure that he would take the step of staying that his personal views had changed. He did – and it was important, brave, potentially risky, and right. That should be noted It’s a significant day.
urney 
he Md. Senate passed the bill by a vote of 25 – 22. With the promise of O’Malley’s signature, likely to happen tomorrow, Maryland will become the eighth state to legalize same-sex marriage. The District of Columbia also recognizes same-sex marriage. Like marriage equality laws in 
On that score, Proposition 8 could not survive, for a very simple reason. The interests that were offered in support of denying marriage status to same-sex couples were not relevant to the actual inequality that Proposition 8 created. As the court recognized, Proposition 8 affected only the status of marriage, not the legal infrastructure supporting families headed by same-sex couples. The word “only” does not at all mean that the denial of this status is unimportant to either side of this debate. But it does confine the court’s equal protection inquiry to just those state interests that could be said to justify this denial of the title of marriage. The court rightly recognized that broad assertions of state interests that might arguably be served by restricting same-sex households and families were simply not germane to Proposition 8 itself, because that proposition did not have any effect on the surviving bundle of property, parenting, and companionship rights that support those households and families. The state was called upon to offer a non-hostility-based rationale for leaving same-sex households legally intact while denying them the status of marriage. The court found none.