Complaint here. [pdf] Various plain­tiffs married to or formerly married to and now widowed by persons of the same sex under Massachusetts law after Goodridge filed suit in the United States District Court for District of Massachusetts yesterday (case no. 1:2009cv10309) directly chal­lenging the consti­tu­tion­ality of § 3 of the Federal Defense of Marriage Act, Pub L. No. 105–199, 110 Stat. 2419 (1996) (codified at 1 U.S.C. § 7) under implied equal protection afforded by the 5th Amendment’s Due Process Clause. (For those who aren’t aware, the “Equal Protection Clause” under which equal protection chal­lenges are most often raised is part of [ . . . ]

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California Everybody’s got their knickers in a twist over the California Supreme Court’s recent ruling that Prop 22 (a popular initiative to enact a statutory ban on same-​​​​sex marriages) was uncon­sti­tu­tional under the California State Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. The court declined to recon­sider, and also declined to issue a stay of its order directing state officials to stop denying marriage licenses to otherwise eligible same-​​​​sex couples. Apparently, same-​​​​sex couples started getting married a few days ago. My position on gay marriage is that equal protection does not, in this case, justify expanding the welfare state, because all (or very nearly all, more on [ . . . ]

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The President of the United States is not a man, but an office occupied by a man. And the office carries only those powers enumerated in Article II of the Constitution of the United States. §1 The Executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. . . . §2 The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive [ . . . ]

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It is difficult for me to express exactly how much this man scares me. Not just from a political stand­point, but as a person. Even the look of him portends terrible things. Perhaps he smells of doom. It isn’t even the possi­bility, however remote, that he might be elected that scares me. A theocrat at 1600 Pennsylvania couldn’t do so much damage as, say, a theocrat at One First Street. It would still be awful, but if putting up a theo­cratic government is your goal, the Oval Office isn’t the most effective route. What is really fright­ening about Mike Huckabee is that so many people — [ . . . ]

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