Jim Burroway has reproduced an interesting exchange from the Ninth Circuit’s ruling denying an en banc hearing for the Prop 8 case. Three of the judges who dissented from the denial had this to say:
O’SCANNLAIN, Circuit Judge, joined by BYBEE and BEA, Circuit Judges, dissenting from the order denying rehearing en banc:
A few weeks ago, subsequent to oral argument in this case, the President of the United States ignited a media firestorm by announcing that he supports same-sex marriage as a policy matter. Drawing less attention, however, were his comments that the Constitution left this matter to the States and that “one of the things that [he]’d like to see is–that [the] conversation continue in a respectful way.”
Today our court has silenced any such respectful conversation. Based on a two-judge majority’s gross misapplication of Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996), we have now declared that animus must have been the only conceivable motivation for a sovereign State to have remained committed to a definition of marriage that has existed for millennia, Perry v. Brown, 671 F.3d 1052, 1082 (9th Cir. 2012). Even worse, we have overruled the will of seven million California Proposition 8 voters based on a reading of Romer that would be unrecognizable to the Justices who joined it, to those who dissented from it, and to the judges from sister circuits who have since interpreted it. We should not have so roundly trumped California’s democratic process without at least discussing this unparalleled decision as an en banc court.
For many of the same reasons discussed in Judge N.R. Smith’s excellent dissenting opinion in this momentous case, I respectfully dissent from the failure to grant the petition for rehearing en banc.
Whiny. As Jim points out, hate groups will likely quote parts of that over and over again. The two original judges who wrote the Ninth’s opinion upholding Vaughn Walker’s lower ruling, smacked their colleagues down in response:
REINHARDT and HAWKINS, Circuit Judges, concurring in the denial of rehearing en banc:
We are puzzled by our dissenting colleagues’ unusual reliance on the President’s views regarding the Constitution, especially as the President did not discuss the narrow issue that we decided in our opinion. We held only that under the particular circumstances relating to California’s Proposition 8, that measure was invalid. In line with the rules governing judicial resolution of constitutional issues, we did not resolve the fundamental question that both sides asked us to: whether the Constitution prohibits the states from banning same-sex marriage. That question may be decided in the near future, but if so, it should be in some other case, at some other time.
It’s like the dissenting justices didn’t even read the original opinion.
For their part, proponents of the Prop 8 hate ban have confirmed that they intend to take the case to the Supreme Court, where the first chance for it to be granted cert will probably not come before October.
