GOP Urges D.C. To Ignore Its Own Laws
Almost one month ago, the Washington D.C. city council overwhelmingly voted to legalize same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia. The vote contradicted the claim by the Religious Right that the cause of marriage equality has been defeated. The Religious Right doesn’t deal well with its claims being contradicted, and so its organizations have been lobbying politicians to join efforts to overturn the marriage equality approval.
One of the ways that the vote could be overruled is through legislation, passed by Congress some time with the next week. Anti-gay activists know that they don’t have enough votes in Congress to accomplish that. So, they’re turning to the courts in an attempt to overturn the D.C. legislation.
You may be thinking, “Don’t right wing activists say that the courts shouldn’t interfere with legislation? Don’t they call that ‘legislating from the bench’?” The truth is a bit more subtle than that. Right wing activists do complain about judges overturning laws when the result is that citizens gain more liberty, but those same right wing activists embrace activist courts when the courts are in the position to quash equality and constitutional rights.
The same inconsistency is there when it comes to the relative power between federal and local governments. Right wing activists say that local governments should have power above the federal government’s power, when local governments want to deny people rights. When local governments seek to protect constitutional rights, however, the same right wing activists show no respect for local decisions.
It is in this spirit that yesterday, the 39 Republican members of Congress listed below signed their name to a legal brief urging a court to block D.C.’s legalization of same-sex marriage. Their legal brief seeks not just to overturn the one legislative act of the marriage legalization, but to negate D.C. law that bans the city from holding any referendum that would deny legal rights to residents.
Senators:
U.S. Representatives:
