Score one for grammar
“I am not trying to be petty here,” said one of the two judges who refused to immediately halt the same-sex “marriages” taking place in San Francisco. But, the judge said, “That semicolon is a big deal.” San Francisco Superior Court Judge James Warren told the Proposition 22 Legal Defense and Education Fund that their request for the city to “cease and desist issuing marriage licenses to and/or solemnizing marriages of same-sex couples; to show cause before this court” was incorrectly written, and therefore he could not issue an order immediately halting the controversial marriages. “The way you’ve written this, it has a semicolon where it should have the word ‘or,'” the judge told the plaintiffs. “I don’t have the authority to issue [a temporary restraining order] under these circumstances,” the judge said. The second judge, Ronald Quidachay, said he wouldn’t rule until Friday at the earliest.
February 18th, 2004 at 2:28 pm
What a maroon. If the judge knew what word was supposed to be there, he should have fixed it himself and issued the order.
February 18th, 2004 at 2:51 pm
I don’t understand it. Replacing the semicolon with ‘or’ doesn’t make any sense.
They ask the city:
I would have expected them to ask the city to cease the activity AND show cause, which is what I suspect they meant by the semicolon.
This looks like a lame stall tactic to me…
February 18th, 2004 at 2:54 pm
I tend to agree with both of your assessments. But I’m all for gay marriage. Forgive my ends justifying the means stance.
February 18th, 2004 at 3:53 pm
Glenn: “Or” is right. The idea is that the city of SF must either stop what it’s doing, or provide a good reason why it should be allowed to continue. It doesn’t make sense to require both.
Uncle: whether the ends can justify the means depends, at least in part, on what you think those ends will be. Do you see this flurry of fake marriages helping the gay marriage cause in the long term? If so, how?
February 18th, 2004 at 4:03 pm
“What a maroon. If the judge knew what word was supposed to be there, he should have fixed it himself and issued the order.”
No, not really. As you point out, the two sentances mean different things. With the semi-colon, it means X AND Y. With the or it means X OR Y. they are two different things, especially in a legal sense. One gets action, one doesn’t. Judges shouldn’t tell lawyers what the lawyers meant to say – thats the lawyers job.
February 18th, 2004 at 4:04 pm
Actually, i do. Some of those couples will take their marriage certificates back to their respective states and use them as grounds to challenge various statutes. I’m all for it.
February 18th, 2004 at 4:55 pm
Kevin: It’s not an either-or. Lawyers should try to get rid fo all the typos, but that does not mean it’s OK for judges to pounce on a typo and say “I’m not gonna enforce this, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.” Forget your distaste for Prop 22 in particular – if judges can do that to this law, they can do it to every other law they don’t like. This not how judges are supposed to behave.
Uncle: interesting idea, but it will never work. Sooner or later, this matter will end up before an appellate court, and these bogus “marriages” will be declared null and void. Once that happens, there will be no full faith and credit argument to advance in foreign (out of state) courts. I suppose a rogue foreign court might pounce on the issue before the California courts have fully litigated the matter, but even if they do, all that’s going to accomplish is to create a little more short-term chaos. It won’t persuade a single member of the public to support gay marriage in principle, and it might well provoke Congress to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would ban gay marriage (and arguably civil unions, as well) from coast to coast.
February 19th, 2004 at 12:09 am
Xlrg:
Actually, NPR had two legal experts on today (one from Harvard Law School, one from the University of Nebraska) discussing the implications of gay marriage. One common theme was that the case law is very clear: the full faith and credit clause of the constitution does NOT require states to recognize marriages that would not have been legal in that state. Most of the case law comes from cases dealing interracial marriages, but other cases involved teenage marriage, first-cousin marriage, etc. So even now, the precedent is that the full faith and credit clause doesn’t apply here.
The other common theme was the impact of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which would pretty much nullify gay marriages in any state that didn’t recognize them.
The most interesting question came from a caller who’s stationed in the Navy in Florida. If a sailor (or member of another military branch) got a legally-sanctioned gay marriage, and they then listed their same-sex spouse as next of kin (spouses generally get that designation), would this violate “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and result in discharge and loss of benefits? I didn’t get to hear the answer, but it’s an interesting question, and one I hadn’t thought of. (And it points out the ridiculousness of “don’t ask, don’t tell…”)
February 19th, 2004 at 2:39 pm
TGirsh: that is the prevailing opinion on the full faith and credit clause. However, it’s not universally shared, and until gay marriage is legal in one state and someone sues to enforce it somewhere else, we won’t know.
February 18th, 2004 at 8:04 pm
Judge Nyah-Nyah
Via Say Uncle, Patterico and Calpundit comes news that Superior Court Judge James Warren relied on a stray semicolon in a proposed order yesterday as his excuse for refusing to halt the phony, illegal “marriages” currently being performed in San…