[Vision2020] Idaho makes case for same-sex marriage ban in court

[Moscow Cares]

Courtesy of today's (September 9, 2014) Spokesman-Review.

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Idaho makes case for same-sex marriage ban in court
Idaho’s arguments supporting its invalidated ban on gay marriage came in for tough and skeptical questioning Monday by a panel of judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals .

Monte Neil Stewart, a private attorney representing Idaho Gov. Butch Otter, said legalizing same-sex marriage would be more harmful to Idaho children than the expansion of divorce that followed no-fault divorce laws. “We think the effects will be much worse,” he told the court.

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia who’s been tracking same-sex marriage cases around the country, said, “That’s not a winning argument, I don’t think.”

“I’m glad I wasn’t trying to make those arguments. … I just don’t think that those judges were going to be persuaded, and I don’t think they were,” he said.

The state’s case focused on the idea that children are better off being raised by their two married, biological parents. The four same-sex Idaho couples who successfully sued to overturn the ban called that point irrelevant to the question of whether they also can marry and provide the benefits of marriage to their families and children.

Ninth Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon, one of three judges on the randomly selected panel that heard Idaho’s case in San Francisco, asked Stewart for the percentage of children who grow up in what he described as the ideal environment – being reared by their married, biological mother and father. Stewart said in Idaho, it’s 68 percent up until age 6, and 58 percent up to age 17. That’s among the highest rates in the country, he said.

“What strikes me is that this train has left the station,” Berzon said, “in the sense that the change has occurred in American marriages before all this.” Large numbers of children already are being raised by less traditional families, she noted.

“When women were not able to own property and had to do everything their husbands said and so on, you had a different institution, but that was the core of the heterosexual marriage tradition to begin with,” Berzon said. “Once all of that changed, yes, the number of people who had children in marriage went down considerably, and that may be a bad thing, but it did not have anything to do with this.”

Stewart told the court, “The only way a same-sex couple can be married … is for the state to withdraw its support for the man-woman marriage institution … and implement something new and different, and that is genderless marriage.”

Deborah Ferguson, a Boise attorney representing the four Idaho couples, said Idaho has “the most sweeping” such ban in the 9th Circuit, barring domestic partnerships and civil unions as well as same-sex marriages. “It bars the possibility of any form of relationship recognition for its same-sex couples, relegating them to a permanent second-class status,” Ferguson told the court.

Rejecting the state’s arguments that the ban is better for children, Ferguson – two of whose clients are raising young children together – said, “There is no logical nexus here. Allowing same-sex couples to marry will benefit them and those children.”

Stewart took umbrage when Berzon compared the Idaho case to the 1967 case that overturned Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage.

“The state never advanced a legitimate interest,” in that case, he said.

Berzon replied: “It’s one that doesn’t sound very legitimate to us now, but they thought there were legitimate interests.”

Ferguson said heterosexual couples are looking at gay couples for marital guidance.

“Saying that somehow if same-sex couples are allowed to celebrate and have those very personal bonds, that it’s going to serve as a disincentive for them to marry or to have children or to stay together with their children. … You’re imposing a very great harm, for no benefit.”

At the close of the arguments, the court took the case under advisement; there’s no deadline for its ruling.

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Amber Beierle, left, and her partner, Rachael Robertson, from Idaho, listen to arguments on gay marriage bans Monday at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. A federal appellate court heard arguments over same-sex marriage bans in Nevada, Idaho and Hawaii.



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Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .

"Moscow Cares"
http://www.MoscowCares.com
  
Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho
 
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