Posted on 01/06/2016 5:28:23 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Defying history, the law, and common sense, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore has issued an order prohibiting Alabama probate judges from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Those judges now face a choice between disobeying the law of the land and disobeying their boss. Moore issued his law not as chief justice, but in his administrative role as head of the Alabama court system.
This is not Justice Moore's first Hail Mary in the lost cause against gay marriage -- and he's not alone. All over the country, activists and law professors are wasting paper on fatuous proclamations that Obergefell v. Hodges is not really the law of the land, or is illegitimate because it's so horrible, or is somehow, some way not as binding as the Supreme Court said it was.
Roy Moore is just the only one who's a state supreme court justice.
As with Moore's past efforts to delay the inevitable, today's order was a melange of the sensible and the risible.
On the sensible side, Justice Moore does have some law on his side -- in fact, three extremely narrow, technical threads on which he hangs his order.
First, technically speaking, Obergefell only bound the five states that were a party to it. Since Alabama was not one of those states, technically its law is caught in limbo. Second, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld its same-sex marriage ban on March 3, 2015.
And third, injunctions stemming from two federal cases challenging the ban are, as Moore opined last February, only binding on the executive branch, not the judicial branch -- which includes probate judges. This appears to have been an oversight, the result of a pleading error by one of the parties. But rather than extend them in a common-sense way, Moore chose to restrict them
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
Rump Ranger Jay Michaelson has no doubt screwed (or more likely been screwed by) at least a hundred since the new year.
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