Colorado District Court Judge Scott Crabtree has become the latest black-robed skeptic of arguments leveled in court against gay marriage. The state judge hearing arguments in Brighton on Monday echoed federal judges making arguments in courts around the country this year as bans on same-sex marriage ruled unconstitutional have fallen like dominos. A lawyer arguing on behalf of Colorado’s 2006 gay-marriage ban said the ban protects marriage as a special relationship meant to produce children. Crabtree wasn’t buying. He openly balked at the suggestion, referring to his own friends planning to marry this summer who are both in their 60s. “Their marriage is not about having any more kids,” he said, according to the Aurora Daily Sentinel. There are two lawsuits currently challenging the state marriage ban. Whichever way they are decided at the district level, the decisions will be appealed to the state Supreme Court, which will likely take them up in the fall.
Local Cantor fallout: Republican Congressman Doug Lamborn debated Republican primary opponent General Bentley Rayburn in a Colorado Springs slugfest Monday night. It was the “career politician” against the would-be “big shot.” Via the Gazette.
The New York Times on the state of the many-front legal war being waged over recently passed voting restrictions as the midterm elections approach.
On June 26, 1987, the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment or Punishment took effect. June has since been declared “torture awareness month.” Ariel Dorfman: “What a way to celebrate! According to an Amnesty International Poll released in May, 45 percent of Americans believe that torture is ‘sometimes necessary and acceptable’ in order to ‘gain information that may protect the public.'”
In case you missed it: At the New Yorker, the best short piece on American dad Bob Bergdahl, father of Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. soldier captured in Afghanistan and returned in a prisoner exchange by the Taliban this month. It’s a piece about the nature of U.S. freedom our soldiers are supposed to be fighting to preserve.
The U.S. Supreme Court says anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List has the right to sue Ohio for the right to create false political advertisements. Sally Kohn at the Daily Beast on one of the many interesting aspects of the case: “To even file this lawsuit in the first place, Susan B. Anthony List had to admit it lied. The lying wasn’t an accident or even a momentary lapse in good judgment. It was conscious and deliberate.”
Why do the Japanese live longer than the rest of us? Global Post raises the question, again, because the answers currently on offer don’t seem satisfying.
[ Photo Hannaaneh710. ]
