... Particularly egregious, he says, is that Walker ignored the most obvious precedent, Baker v. Nelson, a Minnesota Supreme Court case dismissed by the US Supreme Court in 1972...."The district court did not confront the Supreme Court’s holding in Baker, binding authority from this Court, or any of the well established lines of authority opposed to its conclusions. It did not distinguish them. It did not explain why it believed they were wrongly decided. It did not even acknowledge their existence. It simply ignored them." (same cite as above).
From Wiki:
"On May 18, 1970, two University of Minnesota gay student activists, Richard Baker and James Michael McConnell, applied for a marriage license in Minneapolis. The clerk of the Hennepin County District Court, Gerald Nelson, denied the request on the sole ground that the two were of the same sex. The couple filed suit in district court to force Nelson to issue the license
The couple first contended that
Minnesota's marriage statutes contained no explicit requirement that applicants be of different sexes. If the court were to construe the statutes to require opposite-sex couples, however, Baker claimed such a reading would violate several provisions of the U.S. Constitution:
First Amendment (freedom of speech and of association),
Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment),
Ninth Amendment (unenumerated right to privacy), and
Fourteenth Amendment (fundamental right to marry under the Due Process Clause and sex discrimination contrary to the Equal Protection Clause).
The trial court dismissed the couple's claims and ordered the clerk not to issue the license.
The [Minnesota Supreme] Court first dealt with the statutory interpretation. Based on the common usage of the term "marriage" and gender-specific references elsewhere in the same chapter, the Court held that the statutes prohibited marriage between persons of the same sex.
This familiar restriction, the Court reasoned,
did not offend the Due Process Clause because procreation and child rearing were central to the constitutional protection given to marriage...
On October 10, 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a one-sentence order dismissing the case "for want of a substantial federal question."
In most cases presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court's refusal to hear the case is not an endorsement of the decision below. However, since this case came to the Court through mandatory appellate review, the summary dismissal may be considered a decision on the merits of the case."
More on this case, and subsequent* cases, here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_v._Nelson
* For example:
"In Citizens for Equal Protection v. Bruning (2006), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit rejected claims by Nebraska citizen organizations that the state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage offended the U.S. Constitution's Equal Protection Clause, among other provisions. While Baker did not appear in the court's Fourteenth Amendment analysis, the court's opinion did note in its concluding passage:
"Indeed, in Baker v. Nelson, when faced with a Fourteenth Amendment challenge to a decision by the Supreme Court of Minnesota denying a marriage license to a same-sex couple, the United States Supreme Court dismissed "for want of a substantial federal question." There is good reason for this restraint."
It's probably not best to rely on sound bites from your favorite political commentator to try to convey meaningful conclusions about the law, eh, Mo?
