Look, this has always been hilarious more than anything else. I can actually give a nod to Tipper Gore herself for pointing the way to Carnivore, a band, as you might imagine, that horrified the moralists.
―Carnivore, “Male Supremacy” (1985)
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necrophilia
Follow-up … Clean-up … Something-up
Rachel Maddow’s nearly giddy segment on msnbc last night noted that when the full effect of yesterday’s Supreme Court rejection of appeals against marriage equality reaches the states, the roster will equal thirty states. And she looked forward to decisions expected from the Sixth and Ninth.
Today, the hammer dropped in the Ninth; Dale Carpenter quips:
I haven’t read the Ninth Circuit opinion yet. I have to teach now, so it would be nice if the courts would stop issuing gay-marriage decisions for an hour or so.
The estimable Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog explains what happened in the Ninth:
The Ninth Circuit’s ruling was made up of three parts.
First, all three judges on the panel joined in an opinion by Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt finding that the Idaho and Nevada bans violate the constitutional guarantee of same-sex couples to be treated the same legally as opposite-sex couples. Second, Judge Reinhardt issued a separate opinion, for himself only, saying he would also strike down those bans under the Constitution’s Due Process Clause, arguing that the right to marry is a fundamental guarantee and that gays and lesbians have a right to share in that right. Third, Circuit Judge Marsha S. Berzon, in a separate opinion only for herself, said she would have also struck down the bans on the premise that they discriminate on the basis of gender.
The third member, Circuit Judge Ronald M. Gould, joined only the main opinion on the equal protection principle.
This ruling was perhaps the least surprising among four federal courts of appeals decisions striking down state prohibitions on same-sex couples marrying, and already-married couples gaining official state recognition of those unions, performed elsewhere.
This Is 