Tuesday Open Thread

Welcome to your Tuesday open thread. Have you recovered from watching the debate last night. If Obamacare was one of your drinking words you’re probably nursing a wicked hangover today.

Interesting – a California court has overturned DOMA on a bankruptcy case:

After reviewing the law as it relates to DOMA, the court concluded:

This court cannot conclude from the evidence or the record in this case that any valid governmental interest is advanced by DOMA as applied to the Debtors. Debtors have urged that recent governmental defenses of the statute assert that DOMA also serves such interests as “preserving the status quo,” “eliminating inconsistencies and easing administrative burdens” of the government. None of these post hoc defenses of DOMA withstands heightened scrutiny. In the court’s final analysis, the government’s only basis for supporting DOMA comes down to an apparent belief that the moral views of the majority may properly be enacted as the law of the land in regard to state-sanctioned same-sex marriage in disregard of the personal status and living conditions of a significant segment of our pluralistic society. Such a view is not consistent with the evidence or the law as embodied in the Fifth Amendment with respect to the thoughts expressed in this decision. The court has no doubt about its conclusion: the Debtors have made their case persuasively that DOMA deprives them of the equal protection of the law to which they are entitled.

The opinion is then signed by 20 of the 24 (or 25) bankruptcy judges in the district, presumably to show that a majority of the bankruptcy judges in the district approved of this method of addressing the question in the district. (The confusion comes because one of the signatories, Kathleen Thompson, is not listed as a judge on the court’s website.)

Will this stand? It should be interesting to watch. In my opinion, it’s cases like these that really hit home in how many legal obstacles are thrown in front of same sex couples, and why the law should change.

File this in the WTF files – Frank Luntz puts out a false tweet saying he’s taking over Gingrich’s campaign. For attention?

Following a tweet from the group’s executive director, early buzz about the speech was that Gingrich would use it to announce pollster Frank Luntz as his new campaign manager. Shortly afterward, Luntz said there was no truth to this, and admitted he had floated the idea himself for the sake of his own publicity.

I guess it worked on creating attention for Luntz. I doubt it will hurt Luntz’s career.