Not To Put Too Fine A Point On It

I heard an interesting thing this week in response to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in San Francisco striking down the California constitutional ban on gay marriage.

"The 9th Circuit decision yesterday said, if you believe in traditional marriage between a man and a woman and exclusively that, it's because you are a bigot. Your belief of marriage between a man and a woman is purely irrational based on hatred and bigotry. That's what they just wrote", said Rick Santorum to a crowd in Texas.

Wow! I thought. He hit that right on the nose. It's unheard-of for conservatives to admit to their own discriminatory sense of so-called morality so bluntly. Isn't that quite the wrong thing for a presidential candidate to do, though? I mean, these things do go out to the rest of the country.

Okay, it turns out that he was actually putting those words into the mouths of the Obama Administration. I'm not sure how anyone in the executive branch is supposed to come into an opinion written by the 9th Circuit, unless Santorum means to make an accusation of impropriety. It is a serious thing to question the impartiality of a sitting judge, and I certainly hope he does not mean that. He can't even mean the usual thing, since Judge Reinhardt, who wrote the opinion for the three-judge panel, was appointed by Jimmy Carter (Hawkins was appointed by Clinton, and N.R. Smith by Bush).

So, really, it looks like Santorum is accusing the Administration of being a bunch of haters in this particular case. They may be haters in general, and wont to celebrate victories of the progressive agenda over the conservative element, but I just don't get how bringing the Administration into a judicial opinion issued in California is anything but the whining of a partisan whose cause lost a fairly-fought battle.

As a sidenote, it turns out that the opinion merely points to the Fourteenth Amendment in this particular case, since marriage was a right that belonged to gays in California previous to 2008. The Amendment says that no state shall abridge the privileges of citizens. Using a simple Command-F search, I was able to determine that the word 'bigot' does not appear in the opinion as issued, so I'm not sure where Santorum gets that 'that's what they just wrote' crack. The only legal venue which remains for this appeal is the Supreme Court.

As a side-sidenote, there is a James R. Browning on the bench in the 9th Circuit who was appointed in 1961 by Kennedy. I make that fifty years he's been a judge. Adding twenty to twenty-five years for golden youth, and a bit of legal practice somehow before he donned the robe, that makes Judge Browning ...a vampire, surely! Someone from Santorum's campaign should really be looking into this...