Gay Marriage Upheld by USSC in Close Ruling

[crazy canuck]

The irony here is that my brother *did* marry a woman who inherited piles of money, truly wealthy - and they use none of it. They live as poor academics - they are both profs at the university of Iowa.   

I imagine you can live a decent upper middle class lifestyle on the salary of two professors.

Stop messing with Malthus' worldview that he grew up poor. 

[Fate]

Yeah, a two professor family isn't going to be poor. Cost of living in Iowa is cheap. Average income for where they live is 20k a year. Their household is going to be making at the very minimum 100k and more likely 150k-200k if they're associate or full professors.

[Tonitrus]

He could have mean that, despite having great wealth, they live very frugal lives.

[DGuller]

He could have mean that, despite having great wealth, they live very frugal lives.

But, much more likely, he's a bit out of touch about what it means it be poor.

[Admiral Yi]

He could have mean that, despite having great wealth, they live very frugal lives.

This theory is undermined by the "poor academics" line.

[Razgovory]

I don't understand why religious views should be more protected than other views.

Because you are a worthless European.  That's why you don't understand.

[The Larch]

I can't wait till that dreadful facebook filter goes away.

Agree. Everybody in my news feed is using it now. And most of them aren't even American.

It's a gay pride week thingie. The US situation is icing on the cake.

[garbon]

I can't wait till that dreadful facebook filter goes away.

Agree. Everybody in my news feed is using it now. And most of them aren't even American.

It's a gay pride week thingie. The US situation is icing on the cake.

Pretty sure though that facebook only came out with the filter just now because of Supreme Court ruling. Most of my friends are not gay and nearly all of them have it up.

[The Brain]

I don't understand why religious views should be more protected than other views.

Because you are a worthless European.  That's why you don't understand.

I don't think I'm worthless.

[garbon]

I don't understand why religious views should be more protected than other views.

Because you are a worthless European.  That's why you don't understand.

I don't think I'm worthless.

That's what a worthless person would think.

[MadBurgerMaker]

ISIS has infiltrated a Pride parade in London!



http://www.businessinsider.com/cnn-spots-isis-flag-at-gay-pride-parade-2015-6

[Martinus]

This must be the best headline ever at Pink News:

CNN confuses butt plug and dildo banner for ISIS flag at Pride

I guess this story could be used in philosophy and logic classes as an illustration of Occam's Razor in action. 

[Razgovory]

This must be the best headline ever at Pink News:

CNN confuses butt plug and dildo banner for ISIS flag at Pride

I guess this story could be used in philosophy and logic classes as an illustration of Occam's Razor in action. 

[Ideologue]

This was brought to my attention earlier today, and, upon looking up the ISIS flag, it's actually a fair mistake, since the buttplug flag is clearly patterned on it.  Fun stuff.

[jimmy olsen]

Is this accurate?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2015/06/obamacare-and-gay-marriage

...What's interesting, and so far under-appreciated about Mr Roberts' decision in the Obamacare case, is that the court explicitly denies that the executive branch had the authority to resolve the ambiguities in the text of the Affordable Care Act. Many commentators predicted that the case would be decided on a principle known as "Chevron deference", first articulated in Chevron USA v Natural Resources Defence Council, which states that the court should defer to the executive branch's interpretation of ambiguous statutory language, so long as it is reasonable. But some on the court, Mr Roberts included, don't much care for the Chevron principle. It weakens the power of judicial review, the court's authority "to say what the law is", as first set forth in Marbury v Madison, which Mr Roberts duly mentions in his ruling. Now, in cases of large "economic and political significance", the Chevron principle does not apply. The court had not fully embraced this limit on the executive branch's authority to interpret the meaning of legislation until now, in the Obamacare decision. Although the court happens to agree with the IRS's interpretation of the statute, Mr Roberts' ruling goes to some pains to say that, because the IRS had not been specifically empowered by the legislature to make this sort of economically and politically significant determination, it did not have the authority to do so. The court need not defer to the use of authority the executive branch doesn't have.

This is a very important development. The court has ruled that when the interpretation of ambiguous legislation has potentially profound consequences, and congress didn't delegate interpretative authority to a specific administrative agency, it is the court's job, not the executive's, to decide what the law says. "It is...the Court's task", Mr Roberts wrote, "to determine the correct reading" of an unclear law. Which is a nice way of telling the executive branch to take Chevron deference and stuff it.

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, calls Mr Roberts opinion "a masterwork of indirection". Mr Sunstein, who had a hand in the executive branch's interpretation of the Obamacare as the former head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, says that although the decision may vindicate the president's pet programme, "it is also a strong assertion of the court's, and not the executive branch's, ultimate power to say what the law is".

R.J. Lehmann, a senior fellow at R Street, a free-market think tank, sees a big smaller-government upside to Mr Roberts' Obamacare ruling. "Roberts has just opened a huge new avenue for challenges to administrative rulemaking", Mr Lehmann writes. "From labour laws to environmental standards—not to mentions reams and reams of tax rulings—there's no shortage of federal rules" now open to challenge. Indeed, conservatives and libertarians may soon happily come to rely on the Obamacare ruling in their quest to rein in an unruly executive bureaucracy. If they do so, they'll be conceding, at least implicitly, the model of the division of powers Mr Roberts has so cagily persuaded the court's liberals to sign on to. But this model is manifestly one of the legislature's rule-making supremacy, and the court's secondary, interpretive authority. Congress legislates. The executive gets to decide what ambiguous legislation means only if the decision doesn't have important economic or political consequences, or if congress has granted that authority. Otherwise, it is up the court to settle what the law says.

...