From the NYT obituary.
ADDED: In 2013, I blogged about the great New Yorker article, "How Edith Windsor fell in love, got married, and won a landmark case for gay marriage."
It begins:
"Fuck the Supreme Court!” Edith Windsor said, one hideously hot morning in June, when she’d had just about enough. Then she sighed and mumbled, “Oh, I don’t mean that.” What she really meant was that she was hot, she was tired of waiting, and, most of all, she was tired of being told what to do. “I’m feeling very manhandled!” she said.There's some excellent material about lawyering, including getting the right plaintiff as the face of the issue. One "experienced movement attorney" explains that "Women are better than men" and "post-sexual is better than young." Windsor was not just female and presumably "aged out of carnality," but, we're told, didn't "look gay."
It was Windsor’s eighty-fourth birthday, and she was spending it staring at a laptop screen as information from scotusblog.com flashed by in a typeface too small for her to read comfortably. Four years earlier, Windsor’s partner of more than forty years, Thea Spyer, died, leaving Windsor her sole heir. The two were legally married in Canada, in 2007, but, because of the Defense of Marriage Act, Windsor was not eligible for the exemption on estate tax that applies to husbands and wives. She had to pay $363,053 in taxes to the federal government, and $275,528 to New York State, and she did not think that was fair.
Her pink lipstick and pearls would make it easier, [her lawyer Roberta] Kaplan knew, for people across the country to feel that they understood her, that she embodied values they could relate to.Some movement lawyer types thought Windsor was the wrong plaintiff because she was too rich, and her legal problem was a problem of a rich person. Who owes $600,000 in taxes? What kind of civil rights movement forefronts suffering of that kind?
"There were these calls," Kaplan said. "These people from Lambda were like, 'We really think that bankruptcy is the perfect venue to challenge DOMA,' because they had a bankruptcy case they wanted to bring. Finally, I couldn't stand it. I said, 'Really? I don't want to be disrespectful or classist, but do you really think that people who couldn't pay their personal debts are the best people to bring the claim?"...
Kaplan was convinced that Americans dislike taxes even more than they dislike the rich...
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46 comments:
Second most important? It was first. The NYT has gotten somewhat parsimonious in the obituary department. Let's carve, "once considered itself the newspaper of record" on its tombstone.
I still dont understand the homosexual discrimination on the benefits available to married couples. Those sharing of benefits where put in place because the mothers ability to pay into SS, and amass a fortune where limited due to rearing children and running the household. Hard work, but no contributions into SS. Homosexual couples do not live under like circumstances. I think they would feel it their patriotic duty to hand over the government what they owe the government at the end of their life.
As to the first-most-important: "But in a more expansive ruling in 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges and three related cases, the Supreme Court held that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry anywhere in the nation, with all the protections and privileges of heterosexual couples."
State civil union laws can't give the spousal exemption from federal estate taxes, can they?
most Americans don't dislike the rich. They want to be the rich.
in Obergefell v. Hodges and three related cases, the Supreme Court held that same-sex couples had a constitutional right to marry anywhere in the nation, with all the protections and privileges of heterosexual couples."
...because a bunch of White guys created that right in 1868. We were just too dumb to realize it until 2015.
"...because a bunch of White guys created that right in 1868."
This just brings out the pedantic side in me.
The right was created not by guys but by our Creator, Nature's God.
But if you want to say a bunch of guys secured those rights by instituting a Government among Men who derived their just powers from the consent of the governed, I'll salute that, no problem.
Nature's God created no such right. Not, of course, that it matters here.
Still don't buy the Supreme Court reasoning. In California, we voted on legalizing same sex marriage (twice) and both times it lost. Suing your way to same-sex marriage is much less impressive than voting your way to same-sex marriage.
There is nothing in the Constitution that requires same-sex marriage. However, as a societal matter, it's time may have come, so I'm not losing sleep on it. Good for the gays.
There was a long time in my life where I could have looked upon these sort of judgements & thought "Bully for them. It's their life, let them live it.".
But, then, I discovered that the gay rights movement has become the biggest bunch of "sore winners" I have ever witnessed in my life time. They clearly have no intention of letting anyone else live their lives undisturbed. They're just one more lefty group who wants to stomp on basically everything I hold dear.
This isn't Edith Windsor or her partner's fault, so may they both rest in peace. But, forgive me if I see this decision as just one more step on the road to perdition.
The right was created not by guys but by our Creator, Nature's God.
So what you are saying is that "same-sex marriage" is an establishment of religion.
Actually, while what God has revealed might provide some added enlightenment on the matter, it is nature itself that answers the question of marriage. Or more specifically, the nature of the human person made male and female, as revealed in their bodies which are complementary of each other in such a way that permits bodily/sexual joinder which itself has the potential for procreation. And whatever you might call a same-sex union, it is inherently different in this respect.
Political congruence (PC) was conceived with the resumption of abortion rites, it progressed under State-established institutional and progressive class diversity, and may have reached its denouement with the dictatorial override of the Democratic will. Progressive liberals had a chance at equality, and instead elected another Pro-Choice solution.
This is bullshit. My favorite author (one of them, anyway) was Mary Renault (Eileen Mary Challans) was gay and lived her life with her partner, Julie Mullard, who she met as a student nurse before the War until she died.
Many of her novels had gay themes.
The whole gay "marriage" thing is a fad brought on by the AIDS crisis.
Civil Unions would have accomplished all that was needed legally but the thing has become a club to beat Christians and churches by gay activists who are not content with tolerance but require enthusiastic support.
I think they are going to get slapped down on this Christian baker case by the USSC.
I just want to se them invade mosques and Muslim bakers and wedding photographers.
Like BLM they are stretching white, straight tolerance to the breaking point,
Give a whole new meaning to the "Merry Wives of Windsor"
"I think they are going to get slapped down on this Christian baker case by the USSC."
That will depend on what Justice Kennedy thinks that day. A weak reed IMO.
Meade:
What you said. My biggest irritation with the pro-SSM movement was the argument that SS couples needed that bureaucratic process and marriage certificate so their relationships could have "the dignity" that hetero marriages had. Ugh! Dignity is **inherent** to loving, committed relationships. Its a terribly servile attitude, IMHO, to feel "undignified" in a relationship until a county worker issues you that magic piece of paper.
I do wonder how counties in the US store that dignity. Is it a liquid, solid or a gas? Does it need to be refrigerated/frozen, or does it have a shelf life?
"Nature's God created no such right."
Well he endowed us with it, right? The right to pursue happiness and about $640,000 in escrowed taxes? Due process. Liberty.
ALP: the dignity of being treated by your government as a person with rights equal to those rights of every other citizen.
@ALP,
I'm okay with using the phrase "dignity" to cover not having to go through legal contortions to get around a very sizable inheritance tax penalty that straight couples avoid by marriage.
Then again, tax law is just that -- statutory law. And, like all laws, the state gets to pick its winners & losers under those laws. For example, be a devoted niece & take care of a rich aunt in her declining years? Well, the law doesn't care. "Devoted niece" isn't a spouse or a child, so at auntie's death the the Taxman cometh, good deeds or none.
The law always creates unfair winners & losers. Which side gay couples belong on has just been changed by that same statutory law, is all.
"The principle of equality before the law is incompatible and ceases to exist with legal systems such as slavery, servitude, colonialism, monarchy, theocracy, quotaism or any kind of affirmative action." Wikipedia
American Americans are fine with the rich; it's anti-American Americans who have a problem with them.
It isn't marriage.
Gosh, it fills me fury to think of the legal deceptions that Kennedy wrought in the trio of cases, Lawrence v Texas, Windsor v U.S. and Obergefell v Hodges.
In Lawrence, Kennedy intoned that while the court was holding that the Texas law against homosexual sodomy was unconstitutional (reversing Bowers v Hardwick of just 17 years earlier), everybody could just take it easy because the court wasn't making any ruling about same-sex marriage. It wasn't any big Fourteenth Amendment question, Kennedy assured the nation, it was just a matter of privacy.
"Don't believe it," Scalia wrote at the time. Scalia was right. In the Windsor case, Scalia wrote in dissent:
The penultimate sentence of the majority’s opinion is a naked declaration that “[t]his opinion and its holding are confined” to those couples “joined in same-sex marriages made lawful by the State.” Ante, at 26, 25. I have heard such “bald, unreasoned disclaimer[s]” before. Lawrence, 539 U. S., at 604. When the Court declared a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy, we were assured that the case had nothing, nothing at all to do with “whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter.” Id., at 578. Now we are told that DOMA is invalid because it “demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects,” ante, at 23—with an accompanying citation of Lawrence. It takes real cheek for today’s majority to assure us, as it is going out the door, that a constitutional requirement to give formal recognition to same-sex marriage is not at issue here—when what has preceded that assurance is a lecture on how superior the majority’s moral judgment in favor of same-sex marriage is to the Congress’s hateful moral judgment against it. I promise you this: The only thing that will “confine” the Court’s holding is its sense of what it can get away with.
I do not mean to suggest disagreement with The Chief Justice’s view, ante, p. 2–4 (dissenting opinion), that lower federal courts and state courts can distinguish today’s case when the issue before them is state denialof marital status to same-sex couples—or even that this Court could theoretically do so. Lord, an opinion with such scatter-shot rationales as this one (federalism noises among them) can be distinguished in many ways. And deserves to be. State and lower federal courts should take the Court at its word and distinguish away.
In my opinion, however, the view that this Court will take of state prohibition of same-sex marriage is indicated beyond mistaking by today’s opinion. As I have said, the real rationale of today’s opinion, whatever disappearing trail of its legalistic argle-bargle one chooses to follow, is that DOMA is motivated by “ ‘bare . . . desire to harm’ ” couples in same-sex marriages. Supra, at 18. How easy it is, indeed how inevitable, to reach the same conclusion with regard to state laws denying same-sex couples marital status.
Scalia's Windsor dissent was ten years after Lawrence, and then just two years later Kennedy proved Scalia right all along in Obergefell.
But if you want to say a bunch of guys secured those rights by instituting a Government among Men who derived their just powers from the consent of the governed, I'll salute that, no problem.
How about five Supreme Court Justices created the right by perverting the meaning of a completely unrelated Amendment and a previous right created by five justices from an abstraction originating from the outer regions of a shadow?
If the right to gay marriage had been obtained from the consent of the governed, there would have been no need for the Supreme Court to act. In fact the "right" to gay marriage was created against the expressed will of the governed, not their consent. The same with the "right" to abortion.
I am OK with Gay Marriage because it has cut down on the number of Gay Men that tell me they want to suck my cock.
Now it is usually just the Gay Married Men that want to suck my cock.
I am Laslo.
Trolling for homophobic rants, check.
Some Gay Men -- when asking to suck your cock -- do so in such a subtle manner that you probably don't even notice.
But then there are the Gay Men who just say "I want to suck your cock."
I'm straight, so I would only have a Gay Man suck my cock if we were married.
I am Laslo.
It is one thing to be straight and have your cock sucked by a Gay Man, it is another when the Gay Man sucking your cock is married.
Because Adultery.
I am Laslo.
After Lawrence, in which Justice O'Connor (technically senior to Justice Kennedy) got a concurrence in alongside Kennedy, the two other gay rights cases (Windsor and Obergefell) were singular products of Justice Kennedy. As the senior Associate Justice in both majorities, Kennedy could assign the opinion to himself and he did. And in fact, as the fifth and deciding justice for the majority in those cases, Kennedy may have said that he'd vote for the majority (siding with the Dem-nominated liberals) as long as his would be the only opinion for the majority. There were no majority concurrences in Windsor, and none in Obergefell.
It is very hard to imagine that in cases of such magnitude, Kennedy didn't seek to carve out a very special place for himself as the swing vote and the author of the majority opinion.
Civil Unions would have accomplished all that was needed legally but the thing has become a club to beat
Civil unions would have accommodated transgendered couplets and other group formations. Instead, progressive liberals elected another pro-choice solution that established arbitrary political congruences to select favored and exclude other groups at their pleasure. It's a notion of progress that can only be qualified as positive at the twilight fringe.
Why do we continue to accept the fact that single Amerikans are treated as second-class citizens when it comes to taxes and myriad other state and federal benefits married Amerikans enjoy?
@jimbino,
You mean like the marriage penalty, jimbino? That advantage?
Aside from estate & inheritance taxes, I can't think of a single tax deduction that applies to married vs single. If you're single & have kids, in or out of wedlock, they're deductions. Interest on the mortgage (the most common deduction married couples make use of)? Available to singles. Personal business deductions? The same.
So, watcha complainin' about?
@YoungHegelian
The answer to my question is apparently that Amerikans like you are ignorant of the more than 1000 special benefits accorded married folks, whether gay or straight, by our laws.
Here's a start for your research: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/living-single/201006/can-you-name-the-1138-federal-hat-tips-marriage-guest-post-onely
@jimbino,
Do you just this stuff without reading it?
The examples given are basically estate taxes (which I conceded), or just bizarre stuff. Linking to the DOMA text for the 1138 places it mentions spouses? So, we're supposed to check through each reference in the DOMA & see if the authors are full of shit or not? The examples given are full of shit, so I can imagine what they're referring to in the DOMA is likely the same.
And, here's a free tip for ya: if you want to impress people about the present state of the tax code, how about referring to articles in accounting, tax law, or financial planning sites rather than Psychology Today? Or, do you read The Review of Metaphysics for tips on estate planning, too?
Why do we continue to accept the fact that single Amerikans are treated as second-class citizens when it comes to taxes and myriad other state and federal benefits married Amerikans enjoy?
"Accept" it? We favor marriage because nothing else comes close in shaping the future of our children, and our children shape the future of our nation. Surely I'm not the first person to explain that to you.
I am glad Congress found time to deal with Sleeping Bear Dunes as a National Seashore instead of, oh, maybe, the ever growing debt. But jimbino is correct: legislators should have dealt with all possible family extensions to avoid hurting anyone's feelings or pocketbook. That is their job, isn't it?
SSM marriage is an artificial construct with only a superficial similarity to actual marriage. The fact that our Supreme Court created it out of nothing just shows the Republic is barely breathing.
The trouble with being an atheist is that I cannot imagine Edith Windsor burning down in Hell.
Our country has come down so far that I actually wondered whether my comment above is sufficient to get me on a Google list for wrongthink.
sparrow said...
Our country has come down so far that I actually wondered whether my comment above is sufficient to get me on a Google list for wrongthink.
If there were three of you, it would probably be enough to get you on a Southern Poverty Law Center list of "Hate Groups."
If she wanted to avoid the inheritance taxes, why didn't her and her partner set up a trust? Especially in a state like NY, it is very important. My in-laws have one, it is very common. Wanting a lower tax bill is not a reason to get married.
"Wanting a lower tax bill is not a reason to get married."
Why not? People have all sorts of various reasons for getting married. For thousands of years, gaining and keeping property has been one of the major reasons for arraigning marriages.
You know what's a poor reason to get married? Love. As important as it is, it's just not enough.
It is, if you're already married, an excellent reason to work out your conflicts, be a good wife or husband, and stay married.
Arranging.
But you could be arraigned on charges... of attempted 1st degree marriage. If marriage becomes illegal.
In theory, if everybody married their roommate, college students could save SOOO much money!
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