Letters To My Country

April 26, 2011

To put pressure on lawyers defending clients or laws because lobby groups don’t like them is deeply illiberal. It remains disgusting, for example, that rightwing groups targeted lawyers defending terror suspects and Gitmo prisoners. When the far right did this, it was despicable. Now that the left is doing it [in regards to DOMA], it remains just as despicable.

Memo to the gay rights leadership: the ends do not justify the means. Let DOMA have the most robust defense it can possibly muster and let us argue just as passionately for its unconstitutionality. When civil rights groups bully, they lose the moral high-ground. When you have men like David Brock leading the charge - and there are no means he has ever eschewed to achieve his ends - the danger is that we prove the far right’s point. We must be better than them.

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Andrew Sullivan (who is gay). I agree with this entirely. Prop 8 fell in a California District Court precisely because the legal and logical arguments it rests on were entirely without merit. No amount of intimidation or disapprobation will win the legal argument against DOMA. Intimidation and threats have no place in civil discourse.

Lawyers who protect unpopular clients are patriots, not pariahs. Liberals who support Gay Marriage must not forget that our legal system is a neutral arbiter with respect to the passions of the people. I view DOMA as some of the vilest law ever to be proposed; but so too do Pro-Lifers, for example, feel that Roe v. Wade is equally vile, because it allows the wholesale slaughter and murder of innocent babies. The point here is that the more unpopular and repugnant the client, the more necessary access to effective legal counsel becomes to ensure that people have fair access to justice, and laws are overturned on their (lack of) legal merits, and not merely on indirect popular disapproval.

The legal system protects us all, and while paying a private law firm $500,000 in taxpayer money to defend DOMA may be excessive, the principle itself is valid and must be preserved; If the tables were turned, and it was a GOP president declining to protect healthcare reform because he thought it was unconstitutional, Liberals would undoubtedly approve if Congress hired a private firm to help defend the law on behalf of its supporters. The legal system is a neutral arbiter, and access to representation, no matter how unpopular or repugnant the client, is paramount to a fair and balanced process.

12:36pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZMMjnx4daeV7

(Notes: 9)