{"id":100,"date":"2013-03-01T23:58:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-02T06:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/ecperson\/2013\/03\/01\/friend-of-the-court\/"},"modified":"2016-07-27T15:04:05","modified_gmt":"2016-07-27T22:04:05","slug":"friend-of-the-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/ecperson\/2013\/03\/01\/friend-of-the-court\/","title":{"rendered":"Friend of the Court"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
\u00a0Yesterday, the Obama Administration\u2019s Department of Justice filed an amicus curiae<\/i> brief<\/a> with the Supreme Court of the United States for Hollingsworth v. Perry<\/i><\/a>. The case revolves around whether Proposition 8<\/a>, the initiative in 2008 that amended the California state constitution to only recognize marriage between one man and one woman as legally valid, is constitutional.\u00a0 The Justice Department finds Proposition 8 unconstitutional.<\/div>\n

People who have been following the same-sex marriage cases in the United States that this is the second <\/i>\u201cfriend of the court\u201d brief that the Justice Department has recently filed on the issue. Two prior briefs were for Windsor v. United States<\/i><\/a> (one for the jurisdictional questions<\/a>, the other for the merits<\/a>), a case that will examine the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)<\/a> at the federal level. In that case, the Justice Department found DOMA indefensible. (Psst\u2026if you haven\u2019t seen The Good Wife\u2019s episode on DOMA<\/a>, you should.)<\/i><\/p>\n

The brief wires me like coffee. It wires Ellen DeGeneres too, as she was wondering what the Supreme Court would do with all that underwear.<\/a><\/p>\n

But it wires me because no doubt, this will be yet another sign to Obama\u2019s critics that the Administration is hopelessly secular. Despite the fact that Obama constantly opens speeches with \u201cScripture tells us\u2026<\/a>\u201d Mitt Romney told an adoring Republican crowd that he thought that Obama was inventing a new religion<\/a>: secularism. (Romney was subsequently trolled by Lawrence O\u2019Donnell<\/a> for saying that.) The Obama Administration\u2019s refusal to defend DOMA<\/a> and Obama\u2019s admission that he had evolved<\/a> to support same-sex marriage was evidence. Never mind that Obama justified supporting same-sex marriage with the Bible, using the Golden Rule to trump the controversial passages on sexuality. In these accounts, the Obama Administration is secular and hell-bent on taking religion out of the public sphere, and every mention of his support for gay rights, from his campaign speeches on equal love<\/a> to his Second Inaugural Address<\/a>\u2018s invocation of Stonewall and historic use of the word \u201cgay,\u201d demonstrated that Obama had gone off the religion-hating secular deep end.<\/p>\n

I agree with these people to the extent that I think that the Obama Administration is secular. But I don\u2019t think secularism, especially Obama\u2019s secularism, works that way. The Obama Administration\u2019s friend of the court brief is a case in point.<\/p>\n

Here are some observations:<\/p>\n