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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34968 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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But taking CNN's "just asking questions" article at face value, it makes me wonder where all the real gay people are, and why we can't seem to get a gay rights case in front of SCOTUS with parties who aren't being puppeted, Chicago-style.

The New Yorker article says why they had to go with Lawrence & Garner

Since Bowers, no other test case had emerged in which someone was actually arrested for violating a state sodomy law. National gay-rights groups had been challenging state sodomy laws based on supposed harms to gay citizens, who were, litigators claimed, made to look like presumptive criminals. That strategy wasn’t working. After the Supreme Court, in Romer v. Evans (1996), struck down a Colorado initiative excluding gays from anti-discrimination protection, the time felt ripe for another challenge to sodomy statutes. But the gay-civil-rights groups needed to find plaintiffs who would not suffer custody losses or other collateral harms from admitting that they had violated criminal sodomy laws, which tended to rule out gay couples in a committed family relationship. As Carpenter puts it, civil-rights attorneys knew that they needed plaintiffs “with little to lose.” Garner and Lawrence fit that bill.

As to why 303 Creative didn't have any real gay clients demanding wedding websites:

Puzzlingly, before she actually filed the first suit in 2016, Smith had apparently never designed a wedding website.

The New Yorker article says why they had to go with Lawrence & Garner

Except, of course, for the part where they did not "have to" go with anyone. The case need never have been filed; society would have continued to function, and likely legislation would have eventually been updated one way or another. Rather, they wanted a case--hence, plaintiff shopping.

Puzzlingly

I mean, given my point, it's not puzzling at all, is it? It's how activists function, by either finding or outright creating cases crafted to reach the legal result they're after.

Well, they needed a plaintiff if they wanted the policy change. The absence of live controversies doesn't necessarily indicate a lack of impact. The chilling effect of the threat of prosecution (and its downstream effect on other policy debates) is what they were trying to lift.

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