Heaneyland!

Just to play devil's advocate -- *literally*, to hear some tell it -- isn't the urgency of this item called into question by the post directly below it? Would you have predicted that GOP-nominated judges would be clearing the way for gay marriage?

The relationship between a president and the decisions made by that president's Supreme Court nominees are not at all predictable. In the article you cite, Kennedy played a pivotal role in RvW's being upheld. He was nominated by Bush the First. Antonin Scalia -- Scourge of All That is Good and Right in This Land -- voted correctly that laws against flag burning were unconstitutional.

I might also note that if RvW was overturned, that hardly means that abortion will therefore be illegal throughout the land. It *will* bring the fight back to center stage, that's for sure, but it will certainly not mean that all is lost. Many Republicans understand something that the Christian right does not: If abortion were truly made illegal everywhere for even a day, the GOP would essentially be destroyed for a generation.

I think if RvW was overturned in the Supreme Court, you'd be amazed at how fast laws making abortion legal would be put into place -- because the GOP would be loathe to fight it in any significant way. I refer you to the numerous Republicans who think the FMA sucks royally.

Not that I am hoping my theory is put to the test.

> Just to play devil's advocate -- *literally*, to hear some tell it --
> isn't the urgency of this item called into question by the post
> directly below it? Would you have predicted that GOP-nominated judges
> would be clearing the way for gay marriage?

Indeed not. But the Republicans who appointed them aren't George W. Bush, who has been spending much of the past four years nominating judges hostile to women's reproductive rights. My point is not that only Democrats have it in them to nominate decent judges (Souter was a Bush appointee, and he's been an excellent justice), but the current administration is clearly interested in packing as many judicial benches as possible with the sort of ideologues who aren't so interested in that whole separation of church and state thing.

> Antonin Scalia -- Scourge
> of All That is Good and Right in This Land -- voted correctly that
> laws against flag burning were unconstitutional.

I take no responsibility for days on which Scalia was drunk.

> ...the GOP would be loathe to fight it in any significant way. I
> refer you to the numerous Republicans who think the FMA sucks
> royally.

True enough. If Bush's extremist agenda manages to make those Republicans the mainstream again, that would be wonderful. More Arlen Specters, less Bill Frists. But I have no desire to sit through four more years of assaults on civil rights hoping it'll all get sorted out later.