California Ninth Circuit Denies Request To Lift Stay On Same-Sex Marriage

As we all know, same-sex marriage is on hold in California until the case can be heard by the Ninth circuit and before we do that, we have to determine if there is anyone who can legally act to defend the law....the process will likely take us to the end of this year and probably far beyond. In the mean-time the legal duo of Ted Olsen and David Boies had submitted a request to lift the stay on performing further same-sex marriages, citing that permitting that allowing the stay to remain would do harm to gay couples...it does. Ted Olsen also commented that asking California's gay and lesbian couples to "wait it out" while the California Supreme Court addresses the question of standing in "unreasonable and unjust".

So what did the Ninth Circuit have to say today to such a reasoned and impassioned plea?.......In a move that surprised no one they elected to allow the stay to remain in place. The court justified its decision by claiming that the circumstances surrounding the case have not substantially changed enough to warrant lifting the stay. In other words..."We don't want to deal with the political fall out and general ruckus lifting the stay would create."

This may not have been the outcome that we were hoping for However, it also does not have any bearing on the final outcome of the case. It's just another sign along the way that the wait will be a long one. However, I don't think any of us expected it to be anything less.

Until next time dear readers....

The Supremes Take The Case

...The California Supreme Court that is..not the bouffant becoiffed divas of Motown....though it sure would make this trial alot more bearable.

When last we left Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the ninth circuit court of appeals could not..or would not...tackle the issue of whether the individuals at protectmarriage.com had legal standing to defend Prop 8 in court if the Governor and Attorney General would not. This leaves many of us wondering...where did our love go? Why could they not answer this themselves? Instead of coming to their own determination, they elected to send a certified question back to the California Supreme Court to get their official opinion on what state law says on the matter. Your may remember that they were same court who's tragic love child was upholding Prop 8 in the first place. My reaction to this was one of frustration and my reasoning for this is twofold:

Perry vs. Schwarzenegger..Ninth Circuit Appeal...Day one

Today is the day...In just a few short minutes C-SPAN will begin live coverage of the Ninth circuit appeal of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, challenging the constitution of California's Prop 8 state constiturional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

I haven't found any embeddable live feeds yet but C-SPAN does offer livestreaming on their website found..here.

The Courage Campaign is also running a live thread and chat on their Trial Tracker that can be found at prop8trialtracker.com.

Good luck everyone.

*(update)* livestream via goodasyou.org...much thanks to them for the feed.

Breaking News and Developing Situations

Too much is going on in  the world today that I has made it very difficult to pick a single issue to blog about. We've seen North Korea launch a missile attack against South Korea in what could potentially become a very messy situation not utterly complicated by the huge Wikileaks debacle that has done incalculable damage to diplomatic efforts around the world. I truly feels as if that old Chinese adage, "May you live in interesting times", applies directly to us.

so without further ado...lets get to the news...(updated 1:00 pm pst)