Fresh Air covers marriage equality decision
/Today's Fresh Air (Was The Most Current Supreme Court Session 'A Liberal Term For The Ages'?, July 2, 2015) is an interview with Adam Liptak, New York Times Supreme Court correspondent, discussing the just concluded term and decisions, including Marriage Equality (Obergefell v. Hodges).
There's a good amount of material to read on the episode's webpage and Fresh Air, as usual, is a worthwhile listen (audio file at the link or listen via your favorite podcast app).
A few key parts of the interview are transcribed at the link. Here's one (brackets and bold text added):
[Marriage Equality] is a huge and important and transformative victory, but in some ways it's symbolic and partial, because much of the nation still doesn't have laws against discriminating against gay and lesbian people. So in much of the nation you can get married in the morning and fired in the afternoon from your job for being gay and then denied housing because you're gay. So the court decision only does so much and is limited to marriage, and unless legislatures act to impose general laws against sexual-orientation discrimination, the work of the gay-rights movement is not yet done. It's a funny thing that you get to marriage first and job discrimination later.
And this bit of inside baseball:
TG: A lot of law firms wouldn't touch the anti- marriage equality side. Why not?
AL: Among a large number of Americans, ...and certainly Americans who come from, call it, elite backgrounds, you know, from the fancy colleges and law schools, and certainly what Justice Scalia in a memorable phrase called, “lawyers who work in high rise buildings”, this issue is done; there's only one side to it and the other side is pure bigotry. So that told you something about where at least the legal culture, the mainstream legal culture was on this question.
And this about the “age” of the court with respect to the coming presidential election:
Much of the court is quite old, so the next president is very likely to have one, two, three appointments, so that aspect of the presidential campaign — about what it will do to the Supreme Court — is one that I imagine will play [a] fairly large role.
Terry Gross asks Liptak about Justice Kennedy's written opinion (which we quoted partially in our Gay marriage post below) around 6:40 in (about 7:45 in the podcast version).
