Asterisk

By the time I post this (I’m so lazy) most people will have heard about last week’s Prop 8 ruling. It’s a stunning ruling in both its language and its conclusion.

The ruling contains 80 findings of fact and a conclusion of law which finds that Prop 8 violates both the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment.

Like most people on both sides of the issue, I expected Judge Vaughn Walker to rule in our favor. There was, after all, a veritable mountain of evidence from the plaintiffs and a striking lack of credible evidence from the defendants. He surprised me, though, by ruling that Prop 8 is unconstitutional because of due process and equal protection. I expected one or the other, but never both. (Truth be told, I audibly gasped when I saw that.)

Rachel Maddow spent three segments on Thursday night discussing Judge Walker’s decision, and one the following night marveling at the decided lack of reaction from the Religious Right. I’ve embedded all four below.

David Boies, one of the attorneys leading the case against Prop 8, spoke at the Commonwealth Club in San Fransisco Thursday night. In this clip he discusses the history of state-sanctioned, codified anti-gay discrimination and the outlook of this case.

Then there were the Sunday talk shows. David Boies faced off against Family Research Council‘s Tony Perkins on Face the Nation. (You may recall last year when Mr. Perkins wanted the US to side with GWB’s “Axis of Evil” against gays.) Boies took Tony to the woodshed on this one by doing what most TV pundits are trained not to do: He called Tony a liar and then proved it.

Meanwhile, former Solicitor General Ted Olson, the other lead attorney on the case, had a must-see interview on FOX with Chris Wallace. Olson bluntly challenged Chris on his rhetoric and righted the discussion to the true issue at hand.

(Side note: Kudos to MSNBC on their video embedding. CBS and FOX are leagues behind them with the absolute worst embedding capabilities I’ve seen.)

Finally, Jon Stewart talked about the media reaction to Judge Walker’s ruling on the best newscast around, The Daily Show.

So yeah. It was an important week. We have a long way to go, and it’ll extend at least into 2011, but this will go down as a historic decision for the cause of civil rights.

Oh, beauty pageant contestants. When will you learn?

Last year it was Carrie Prejean, and it looks like Miss Beverly Hills Lauren Ashley is this year’s model.

They photoshopped the shit out of her face

From FOX’s Pop Tarts:

“The Bible says that marriage is between a man and a woman. In Leviticus it says, ‘If man lies with mankind as he would lie with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death and their blood shall be upon them.’ The Bible is pretty black and white,” Ashley told Pop Tarts.

“I feel like God himself created mankind and he loves everyone, and he has the best for everyone. If he says that having sex with someone of your same gender is going to bring death upon you, that’s a pretty stern warning, and he knows more than we do about life.”

In the 2007 documentary For The Bible Tells Me So, Rev. Dr. Laurence C. Keene (Disciples of Christ) says, “There’s nothing wrong with a fifth-grade understanding of God — as long as you’re in the fifth grade.”

I don’t want to be mean, but has anybody checked Ms. Ashley’s school records?

Today saw the first hearings on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) in over a decade. It was a fun-filled day that I’ll probably talk about in some depth later in the week, but this video needed to be posted immediately.

Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council (a sister company to Focus on the Family) was on Hardball with Chris Matthews tonight alongside SLDN‘s Aubrey Sarvis to talk about DADT. This video should be set to the last thirty seconds of the segment when Sprigg let the cat out of the bag. See transcript below.

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Matthews: Do you think we should outlaw gay behavior?

Sprigg: Well, I think certainly it’s defensible.

Matthews: No, I’m just asking you, should we outlaw gay behavior?

Sprigg: I think that the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v Texas, which overturned the sodomy laws in this country, was wrongly decided. I think there would be a place for criminal sanctions against homosexual behavior.

Matthews: So we should outlaw gay behavior.

Sprigg: Yes. [laughs]

Keep in mind that a year ago, Peter Sprigg said that gays should face more taxes than straight people, and a year before that he went on television to suggest that gays be rounded up and “exported”.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6JuKnXJGTc[/youtube]

Make no mistake: Peter Sprigg is one of the few anti-gay leaders who actually speaks his mind, and the rest of them are thinking exactly what he says. I shudder to think what he keeps to himself.

Incidentally, I hope someone thinks to enter this video into evidence in Perry v Schwarzenegger, the Prop 8 trial. If ever we had evidence of anti-gay animus being whipped up, this is it.

(Hat tip to Alvin McEwen.)

Producers John Ireland and John Ainsworth have released the first part of their Prop 8 Trial Reenactment, and what I’ve seen so far is well done!

This is our first chance to see what happened inside the courtroom, using the court’s official trial transcript with help from spectators in the court during the proceedings.

See the official Marriage Trial website for a rundown of the parts and players, plus extra commentary from legal experts.

Stay tuned to Marriage Trial’s youtube channel for future episodes, scheduled for release every few days!

William Tam, the Prop 8 author who attempted to withdraw from the Prop 8 trial last week, was soundly eviscerated Thursday by plaintiff’s attorney David Boies.

It was rewarding to watch so many trucks driven through Tam’s (and by extension, other anti-gay leaders) arguments, but there was a nugget of information buried in his testimony that I think most people missed. In fact, I doubt that Tam himself caught the problem.

Here’s the complete transcript (pdf) from January 21, 2009, but I pulled out the two brief quotes, both from pages 1939-1940 (198-199 of the pdf).

Q. (David Boies) And do you believe that the NARTH website is a source of objective scientific information?

A. (William Tam) Well, I believe in what they say.

Q. (David Boies) You thought it was better to get your scientific information about this issue from the NARTH website as opposed to the American Psychological Association. Is that your testimony?

A. (William Tam) Uhm, yeah, I believe in what NARTH says.

Notice that both times, William Tam answered a question of fact with a statement of faith. He knew NARTH was an unreliable source, but he wasn’t looking for reliability. Science and truth were irrelevant, cast aside in favor of someone who would pat him on the back and tell him that pursuing his prejudices was good enough.

He’s not alone in this. By design, campaigns of prejudice are based on the gamble that most people will stop looking for facts if someone backs up their prejudice. That’s why anti-gay industry leaders like NARTH (and in turn, William Tam) rely singularly on extreme statements of emotion and fear.