Cooper v Aaron

If you're like me you remember certain Supreme Court cases, even if you can't necessarily explain what they decided. Brown v Board of Education is easy: it outlawed segregation in public schools. How about Plessy v Ferguson? That’s one you likely remember in name only. It was the 1896 decision that Brown overturned: it had legalized state-supported hatred, uh, sorry, segregation. What about Roe v Wade? Yeah, easy: it gave women control of their own bodies. (Who would have thought a court needed to make that clear?)

Miranda v Arizona you probably know through hearing people read their “Miranda Rights” while being arrested — at least on TV. United States v Nixon ordered the embattled president to release the incriminating White House tape recordings.

Marbury v Madison is a name you surely remember from high school but probably wonder now what it was all about. It is perhaps the most important decision the court ever reached, as it established the concept of judicial review, the raison d’être of the court’s existence:

It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the courts must decide on the operation of each. — Chief Justice John Marshall

And that brings me to Cooper v Aaron, the 1958 decision which made clear that state courts were subservient to the U. S. Supreme Court, whether or not they agreed with the court’s decisions. States are not free to ignore the nine justices sitting in Washington.

The Alabama Supreme court seems to think otherwise. Yesterday it ordered state probate judges to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. To be clear the Alabama court ordered AL judges to ignore one federal judge, not the Supreme Court, but the trajectory of this fight is clear: as have other Southern states, Alabama believes it can do whatever it wants, the US Constitution and the Supreme Court be damned.

When will the South tire of being on the wrong side of history?

When will the Confederate states wake up to the new realities and stop trying to preserve the racist, misogynistic, homophobic past?

Will someone please tell the good folks in Alabama that the year is 2015?

Can we not turn our attention to things that really matter and get past this hateful Christian take on the world?

Enough already!
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Addendum: I've been called to task for lumping all the "Suthren" states together. I plead guilty to spacial profiling. Alabama is likely the worst, unless Mississippi takes that title, and I admit there are intelligent, progressive people even in those states. But the old farts who run the courts and the legislatures -- well their time needs to end. And my dearly loved Virginia recognizes gay marriage; if it can happen in the Capitol of the Confederacy it can happen anywhere.