Supreme Court to Hear Case Against the Phelps Clan

In 2006 Fred Phelps and his band of wackos engaged in one of their protests at the funeral of a military serviceman. Albert Snyder, the father of the deceased marine, sued the Phelpses and was awarded millions in damages for the intentional inflection of emotional distress. The Snyder's victory was short-lived when the ruling was overturned on First Amendment grounds.


The Supreme Court starts its new session today with newly appointed Justice Elena Kagan. According to Advocate.com, the court has scheduled a preliminary hearing in the case of Snyder vs. Phelps for Wednesday. The court is expected to ultimately decide whether hate speech is protected under the U.S. Constitution.

 

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Elena Kagan: DADT is "Unwise and Unjust"

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan faced nine hours of questioning on Tuesday as she was hammered by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who are trying to get a sense of how Kagan might vote on some of the controversial issues she's likely to face as a justice on the nation's highest court.

The current Solicitor General and former dean of the Harvard University School of Law tried to stay neutral but defended her past statements and actions with regard to Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the Army ROTC's presence on the Harvard campus.

In response to a question from Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Commission about her past statements against DADT, “I have repeatedly said that the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy is unwise and unjust — I believed it then and I believe it now.”

The Advocate's Kerry Elveld reports:

Kagan stated several times that she was trying to balance two competing interests: compliance with the Solomon Amendment, a 1996 law that empowers the secretary of Defense to deny federal funding to colleges and universities that prohibit or prevent ROTC or military recruitment on campus; and an adherence to the school’s antidiscrimination policy, which said that no employer could use the office of career services if that employer would not sign a nondiscrimination pledge. The military could not sign the pledge based on its discriminatory DADT policy.

Although military recruiters were not allowed to use the law school’s office of career services during part of Kagan’s deanship, they were allowed to recruit on campus through the office of veteran services. But much of the disagreement between Kagan and Sessions centered on the events following a 2004 decision by the U.S. court of appeals for the third circuit that found the Solomon Amendment to be unconstitutional — a ruling that was subsequently overturned by a unanimous Supreme Court decision in 2006.

Sessions alleged that Kagan had purposely continued to block recruiter access to the school’s office of career services even after the Department of Defense explicitly requested full access and said it would appeal the 2004 decision.

But Kagan contended that she believed the school’s policy was “in compliance” with the Solomon Amendment and “for many, many years, the Department of Defense had agreed with us.”

“When DOD came to us and said it thought that that was insufficient,” Kagan said, “we went through a discussion over a couple of months and we made the decision to do exactly what DOD wanted.”

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Mainstream Media (and some gay bloggers) Take the Low Road on Elena Kagan Lesbian Rumors

I was checking my news feeds tonight and found 4 different mainstream news outlets and a prominent gay blog all posting the same Associated Press story: "Should we ask if Supreme Court nominee is gay?"  A further search on Google showed at least 2 dozen more sites carrying the same story.

 

The mainstream media (MSM) gives almost no coverage to ENDA, DADT or DOMA, but a butch looking, single woman gets nominated to be a Supreme Court justice and this becomes their token LGBT story. They'll all qualify their stories by saying "if doesn't matter if the nominee is gay, but..." What a bunch of weasels.

 

It all started last week when the Wall Street Journal did a story about Elena Kagan, the president's nominee to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, along with a very large photograph of Ms. Kagan playing softball, as if to imply that she must be a lesbian. The folks at WSJ insist this was not their intent, but the damage is done. 

 

For the last week, reporters and pundits have been demanding -- yes that's right demanding -- that Kagan confess her homosexuality. Brian Mann of North Country Public Radio wrote on his blog last week, "I want to officially join the phalanx of pundits on the right, the left and the middle who are demanding that Elena Kagan explain her private life to me in detail."

Has Senator Joseph McCarthy suddenly returned from the grave? 

 

Where are our national advocates and activists? GLAAD was glad to cover the announcement of Kagan's nomination, but where is our media watch dog when she's getting raked over the coals by the very media they monitor because of her perceived sexual orientation, based on nothing more than a stereotype of how feminine or masculine a woman should or shouldn't be? 

 

Hey, GLAAD! Isn't that your fucking job? 

 

It's bad enough when the MSM takes the low road, but 365gay.com should know better. Even they took the lazy way out and printed the entire AP story verbatim with no original slant or commentary. Personally, I'm offended when major news outlets do stories like this that exploit the LGBT community for sensationalism but fail to do any serious reporting on our issues unless we chain ourselves to something. But for a respected LGBT blog, like 365gay.com, to mindlessly reprint this trash without any original input or commentary that in any way condemns the story, I am thoroughly disgusted. They have even gone so far as to post a poll asking if Kagan's sexuality is relevant. They may say they're covering the Kagan story from an LGBT perspective, but they're being just as exploitative as the low-lifes at Fox News. 

 

Let the haters take the low road. We expect more from our own.

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Friends Deny Supreme Court Nominee Kagan is Gay

What's a frumpy, professional woman with no fashion sense to do when accusations of homosexuality get some traction in the main stream media? President Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan has decided to let her friends do the talking.

Politico.com has been reporting on the lesbian rumors that first started circulating when Kagan's name appeared on the short list of possible nominees to replace retiring justice John Paul Stevens. Politico's Ben Smith reports:

“I’ve known her for most of her adult life and I know she’s straight,” said Sarah Walzer, Kagan’s roommate in law school and a close friend since then. “She dated men when we were in law school, we talked about men — who in our class was cute, who she would like to date, all of those things. She definitely dated when she was in D.C. after law school, when she was in Chicago – and she just didn’t find the right person.”

These are the same rumors that surface any time a woman - especially a single woman - in politics achieves a higher level of power. It threatens to disrupt the male-dominated status quo. Hillary Clinton and former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno had to deal with the same issue.

It's bad enough when the blogs and on-line news fan the flames of gossip and innuendo, but this week the Wall Street Journal weighed in on the non-issue in its cover story and the accompanying photo of a younger Kagan playing softball.

Personally, I don't care if she's gay or straight. What concerns me and I think should concern all of us, is Kagan's lack of judicial experience. She's never even judged a pie eating (no pun intended) contest. There is no history of rulings to look at to get an idea of how she might rule on some of the issues she's likely to face on the the court, such as the constitutional challenge to California's Prop 8 or the just launched challenge to The Defense of Marriage Act.

But the most important question for me is, "What's up with the Marge Simpson beads?"

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