OPINION: A 9-0 Supreme Court ruling for gay marriage? 10-4
Yes, I know that the conservative bloc on the court includes justices who have thundered and inveighed against gay rights —
All four conservatives were clearly skeptical last week when the court heard arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges, but the safe prediction is a 5-4 ruling establishing gay marriage as a constitutional right, with Justice
But some court observers thought they heard Roberts looking for a way to make it 6-3 when he said from the bench, “I’m not sure it’s necessary to get into sexual orientation to resolve this case. I mean, if Sue loves Joe and Tom loves Joe, Sue can marry him and Tom can’t. And the difference is based upon their different sex. Why isn’t that a straightforward question of sexual discrimination?”
The three outliers would then have to ask themselves, “Do I really want to earn the contempt of history with one last futile shake of my wizened fist at this expansion of human rights? Do I want my name in the
That’s the choice they face. Public opinion has undergone a dramatic and generationally driven shift on gay marriage.
Here, starting with the most recent and going back, are the levels of support for the idea in polls taken in 2015:
The CNN survey found support among 18- to 34-year-olds at 72 percent, a reminder that opposition to same-sex marriage is literally dying off, and that these approval numbers are only going to get bigger. The conservative justices know this.
They also know that it’s good for the country when landmark cases are decided unanimously. Think of Brown v.
A 9-0 ruling tells America “move on, this issue is settled.” It enhances the legitimacy of the decision and, therefore, of the court itself while minimizing the potential for backlash.
Gay marriage will become legal and then, as it’s shown to harm no one, matter of fact. It won’t be long until the vast majority of Americans wonders what all the fuss was about and regards today’s opponents with the same pity and contempt with which we now regard those holdouts in the 1960s who felt racial intermarriage should be illegal.
Justices are keenly aware of their legacies and the judgment of posterity. They know that if they don’t find some narrow or highly technical grounds on which to base a grudging concurrence, that judgment will be harsh. And that yet another explosion of feckless, obstructionist sanctimony will only leave its toxic residue on them.
A tip that will change your life
Tabbed browsing is a blessing, but tab overload is a curse.
Most of you know what I mean. You’re on the Internet, following links and opening new sites, sometimes linking three and four pages deep, checking your social media accounts and running occasional searches, all in one browser window. All the pages are “hidden” under the one you’re currently looking at, but each is quickly accessible by clicking on what look like file-folder tabs near the top of your screen.
Before the introduction of this feature in the early 2000s, if you didn’t close out old browser windows, your desktop quickly became cluttered and difficult to navigate.
It became too easy, however, to have 20 or more pages open under different tabs — interesting articles, scintillating columns, funny videos, email queues, blogs, the results of shopping searches, calendars, maps — and, accordingly, to find your computer responding more and more slowly to commands as all these open tabs used vital memory.
Closing out tabs to free up system resources is never as quick and easy as it sounds. Some pages you want to save but you don’t want to bookmark permanently; others you want to have handy for the next hour; others you’re probably done with but want to keep open just in case.
A few weeks ago I found an exquisite solution: OneTab, a free add-on for Chrome and Firefox. Clicking the OneTab icon consolidates all your open tabs into one web page, where links to each formerly open tab appear on a menu that you can save, edit or export.
In a test,
A PC Pro software critic called it a “must-have,” a
I say go download it now at one-tab.com. And thank me later.
Re:Tweets
It’s often impressive to me how much certain writers can fit into the tiny box of Twitter’s microblogging platform. Consider this playlet by @OtherDanO’Brien that won this week’s reader poll for funniest tweet of the week:
(
“Is the book report any good?”
Yes, sir.
“How’s it prepared?”
A 9-year-old stayed up till
“Ooh, I’ll have that.”
Find all 10 finalists and comment on this column at chicagotribune.com/zorn
___
(c)2015 the Chicago Tribune
Visit the Chicago Tribune at www.chicagotribune.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Category: Daily Witness, National
