The eNotes Blog What are Prop 8 and DOMA and Why Do TheyMatter

What are Prop 8 and DOMA and Why Do TheyMatter This week, as the Supreme Court released its rulings on a variety of different issues, supporters of same-sex marriage were particularly anxious to hear an important piece of news: the Court’s ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California’s Proposition 8. What is the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)? The Defense of Marriage Act is a federal law that restricts federal marriage rights to opposite-sex couples. It was enacted on September 21, 1996 under the Clinton administration, though Clinton, among others who were involved in the law’s enactment, has since changed his position and advocated for its repeal. Supreme Court deems DOMA unconstitutional The law’s exact wording on the issue of marriage is as follows: â€Å"In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any   ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative   bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word `marriage means   only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife,   and the word `spouse refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is   a husband or a wife.† (Defense of Marriage Act) Among others, these are the benefits that have been denied to same-sex marriages under the Defense of Marriage Act: Insurance benefits for government employees Social Security survivors’ benefits Immigration benefits Joint tax return benefits What is Prop. 8? Prop. 8, or California Proposition 8, is a ballot proposition passed in California’s November 2008 elections. Much like DOMA, it declares that only opposite-sex marriages may be recognized by the state of California. The proposition effectively overturns a California Supreme Court ruling released in May of 2008 that found marriage to be a  fundamental constitutional right that should be granted to all couples. The timeline of same-sex marriage history in California is shown below: March 7, 2000: Proposition 22 is passed 61.4% to 38%, defining marriage in California as the union between a man and a woman. September 2, 2007: The California Senate approves Assembly Bill 849, a bill about fisheries-research measures that was amended to address the legalization of same sex marriage. September 6, 2007: The California State Assembly approves Assembly Bill 849. September 29, 2007: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoes the Assembly Bill 849, citing Proposition 22 as an indication of voter opinions on the issue and saying that the legality of same-sex marriage should be decided by the courts. May 15, 2008: The California Supreme Court strikes down Proposition 22 as well as a law passed in 1977, both of which denied same-sex marriage legal recognition. Governor Schwarzenegger pledges to oppose Proposition 8, which would be voted on in November of that same year. November 4, 2008: California voters pass Proposition 8 with 52% voter approval, essentially overturning the California Supreme Court’s May ruling. US Supreme Court hearings    Proposition 8:    The plaintiffs in this case were Kristin Perry, Sandra Stier, Paul Katami, and Jeffrey Zarrillo. Both same-sex couples were denied marriage licenses under Prop. 8 in May of 2009. Because both then Attorney General Jerry Brown and then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declined to defend Proposition 8 in court, the defendants for this case were two groups: ProtectMarriage.com, under the leadership of Dennis Hollingsworth, and the Campaign for California Families. They take the place of the Attorney General and Governor in the case. It’s worth noting that current Attorney General Kamala Harris and current Governor Jerry Brown both ran on platforms that included a declination to defend Prop. 8 in court.    The Prop. 8 case, or Hollingsworth v. Perry, answered the following question as stated by the Court: â€Å"Whether it violates the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment for a State to use the ballot-initiative process to extinguish the state constitutional right of gay men and lesbians to marry a person of the same sex.† (Petition for Writ of Certiorari) This refers to Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that the law must provide all citizens with equal protection and cannot remove a citizen’s rights without due process: â€Å"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.† (Amendment 14, Section 1) Many claim that there was no argument against Prop. 8’s unconstitutionality because the State has no vested interest in keeping same-sex couples from marrying. Defense of Marriage Act: In this case, also known as United States v. Windsor, Edith Windsor was the plaintiff. In 2007, Windsor was married to Thea Spyer in Toronto, Canada. But when Spyer died in 2009, at a time when New York legally recognized same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions, as it continues to do today, Windsor was required to pay $363,053 in federal estate taxes. Had the federal government recognized Windsor and Spyer’s marriage, Windsor would not have had to pay any of these taxes. Because the Department of Justice has declined to continue a defense of the Defense of Marriage Act, the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the House of Representatives (BLAG) will take its place. This group consists of five members of the House of Representatives. There were three questions presented in this case: â€Å"Whether the executive branch’s agreement with the court below that DOMA is unconstitutional deprives this Court [the Supreme Court] of jurisdiction to decide this case† (Writ of Certiorari). â€Å"Whether the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the United States House of Representatives has Article III standing in this case† (Writ of Certiorari). Article III standing allows a party to argue a case despite the fact that it is not directly impacted by the outcome of that case, in a legal sense. In a December episode of Hardball, Chris Matthews noted that the Lawrence Case Opinion (which deemed anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional), given by Justice Anthony Kennedy, potentially provides a basis on which to rule DOMA unconstitutional by its outlining of personal liberty: â€Å"Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions. Freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct.† (Lawrence Case Opinion) Woman shows support for gay marriage Moreover, many pointed to the fact that the Supreme Court has deemed marriage a fundamental right on fourteen accounts, including the case of Loving v. Virginia, which declared the illegality of interracial marriages unconstitutional. The Loving v. Virginia case was referenced several times during the Supreme Court’s hearing and is expected to have held serious weight in the Court’s decision. What were the rulings? The Supreme Court released its decisions on these two cases the morning of Wednesday, June 26th. In the California Proposition 8 case, a 5 – 4 majority found, as NPR’s Carrie Johnson explains, â€Å"the petitioners [i.e. the defendants] lack standing so the court avoids the underlying issue, remands and wipes away the decision by the 9th Circuit Court of appeals, which means for now the lower court ruling invalidating California’s Prop 8 stands.† This means that same-sex marriage is now legal in California, though this decision does not have national implications for same-sex marriage. In the United States v. Windsor case, the Court found the Defense of Marriage Act to be unconstitutional, as it violated the Fifth Amendment by not granting same-sex couples the â€Å"equal liberty† that they are guaranteed. The decision, a 5 – 4 split with the majority opinion delivered by Justice Anthony Kennedy, requires the national government to recognize the federal marriage rights of same-sex marriages. It does not, however, require all fifty states to issue same-sex marriage licenses, as some had hoped would occur. Despite this, however, many proponents of same-sex marriage believe this decision to have been a great victory and a monumental step forward for marriage equality. Further Reading: Throughout both of these cases, many compared the civil-rights in question with those addressed by Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. You can find an online study guide for the letter here: http://bit.ly/1aNVhXw. : Matthews, Christopher. â€Å"Supreme Court to Legalize Gay Marriage? (December 7, 2012 – MSNBC),† YouTube video, 13:50, posted by HenryBloggit,   December 8, 2012, youtube.com/watch?v=WZYL6Gou-eE. Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, Hollingsworth v. Perry No. 12-144. Web. Accessed June 25, 2013. supremecourt.gov/docket/PDFs/Brief_in_Opposition_of_Respondent_San%20Francisco.pdf. Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, United States v. Windsor No. 12-307. Web. Accessed June 25, 2013. supremecourt.gov/docket/pdfs/brief_of_respondent_edith_windsor_%28jurisdiction%29.pdf. Wikipedia, s.v. â€Å"Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group,† accessed June 25, 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipartisan_Legal_Advisory_Group. Wikipedia, s.v. â€Å"California Proposition 8,† accessed June 25, 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8. Wikipedia, s.v. â€Å"Defense of Marriage Act,† accessed June 25, 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_Marriage_Act. Wikipedia, s.v. â€Å"Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,† accessed June 25, 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution Wikipedia, s.v. â€Å"Hollingsworth v. Perry,† accessed June 25, 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollingsworth_v._Perry#Parties. Wikipedia, s.v. â€Å"Same-sex marriage in California,† accessed June 25, 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_California#History. Wikipedia, s.v. â€Å"United States v. Windsor,† accessed June 25, 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Windsor.

Biography of Cambodia Politician Pol Pot

Biography of Cambodia Politician Pol Pot Pol Pot. The name is synonymous with horror. Even in the blood-drenched annals of twentieth-century history, Pol Pots Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia stands out for the sheer scale and senselessness of its atrocities. In the name of creating an agrarian communist revolution, Pol Pot and his underlings killed at least 1.5 million of their own people in the infamous Killing Fields. They wiped out between 1/4 and 1/5 of the countrys entire population. Who would do this to their own nation? What kind of monster kills millions in the name of erasing a century of modernization? Who was Pol Pot? Early Life A child named Saloth Sar was born in March of 1925, in the little fishing village of Prek Sbav, French Indochina. His family was ethnically mixed, Chinese and Khmer, and comfortably middle-class. They owned fifty acres of rice paddies, which was ten times as much as most of their neighbors, and a large house that stood on stilts in case the river flooded. Saloth Sar was the eighth of their nine children. Saloth Sars family had connections with the Cambodian royal family. His aunt had a post in the future King Norodoms household, and his first cousin Meak, as well as his sister Roeung, served as royal concubines. Saloth Sars elder brother Suong was also an officer at the palace. When Saloth Sar was ten years old, his family sent him 100 miles south to the capital city of Phnom Penh to attend the Ecole Miche, a French Catholic school. He was not a good student. Later, the boy transferred to a technical school in Kompong Cham, where he studied carpentry. His academic struggles during his youth would actually stand him in good stead for decades to come, given the Khmer Rouges anti-intellectual policies. French Technical College Probably because of his connections rather than his scholastic record, the government gave him the scholarship to travel to Paris, and pursue higher education in the field of electronics and radio technology at the Ecole Francaise dElectronique et dInformatique (EFRIE). Saloth Sar was in France from 1949 to 1953; he spent most of his time learning about Communism rather than electronics. Inspired by Ho Chi Minhs declaration of Vietnamese independence from France, Saloth joined the Marxist Circle, which dominated the Khmer Students Association in Paris. He also joined the French Communist Party (PCF), which lionized the uneducated rural peasantry as the true proletariat, in opposition to Karl Marxs designation of the urban factory-workers as the proletariat. Return to Cambodia Saloth Sar flunked out of college in 1953. Upon his return to Cambodia, he scouted out the various anti-government rebel groups for the PCF and reported that the Khmer Viet Minh was the most effective. Cambodia became independent in 1954 along with Vietnam and Laos, as part of the Geneva Agreement which France used to extract itself from the Vietnam War. Prince Sihanouk played the different political parties in Cambodia off against one another and fixed elections; nonetheless, the leftist opposition was too weak to seriously challenge him either at the ballot box or through a guerrilla war. Saloth Sar became a go-between for the officially recognized left-wing parties and the communist underground. On July 14, 1956, Saloth Sar married teacher Khieu Ponnary. Somewhat incredibly, he got work as a lecturer in French history and literature at a college called Chamraon Vichea. By all reports, his students loved the soft-spoken and friendly teacher. He would soon move up within the communist sphere, as well. Pol Pot Assumes Control of Communists Throughout 1962, the Cambodian government cracked down on communist and other left-wing parties. It arrested party members, shut down their newspapers, and even killed important communist leaders while they were in custody. As a result, Saloth Sar moved up the ranks of surviving party members. In early 1963, a small group of survivors elected Saloth as Secretary of the Communist Central Committee of Cambodia. By March, he had to go into hiding when his name appeared on a list of people wanted for questioning in connection with leftist activities. Saloth Sar escaped to North Vietnam, where he made contact with a Viet Minh unit. With support and cooperation from the much better-organized Vietnamese Communists, Saloth Sar arranged for a Cambodian Central Committee meeting early in 1964. The Central Committee called for armed struggle against the Cambodian government, (rather ironically) for self-reliance in the sense of independence from the Vietnamese Communists, and for a revolution based on the agrarian proletariat, or peasantry, rather than the working class as Marx envisioned it. When Prince Sihanouk unleashed another crack-down against leftists in 1965, a number of elites such as teachers and college students fled the cities and joined the nascent Communist guerrilla movement taking shape in the countryside. In order to become revolutionaries, however, they had to give up their books and drop out. They would become the first members of the Khmer Rouge. Khmer Rouge Take-Over of Cambodia In 1966, Saloth Sar returned to Cambodia and renamed the party the CPK: Communist Party of Kampuchea. The party began to plan for a revolution, but was caught off-guard when peasants across the country rose up in anger over the high price of food in 1966; the CPK was left standing. It wasnt until January 18, 1968, that the CPK started its uprising, with an attack on an army base near Battambang. Although the Khmer Rouge did not overrun the base entirely, they were able to seize a weapons cache which they turned against the police in villages across Cambodia. As violence escalated, Prince Sihanouk went to Paris, then ordered protesters to picket the Vietnamese embassies in Phnom Penh. When the protests got out of hand, between March 8 and 11, he then denounced the protesters for destroying the embassies as well as ethnic Vietnamese churches and homes. The National Assembly learned of this capricious chain of events and voted Sihanouk out of power on March 18, 1970. Although the Khmer Rouge had consistently railed against Sihanouk in its propaganda, the Chinese and Vietnamese communist leaders convinced him to support the Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk went on the radio and called for the Cambodian people to take up arms against the government, and fight for the Khmer Rouge. Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese army also was invading Cambodia, pressing the Cambodian army back to less than 25 kilometers from Phnom Penh. Cambodian Genocide In the name of agrarian communism, the Khmer Rouge decided to completely and immediately remake Cambodian society as a utopian farming nation, free of all foreign influence and the trappings of modernity. They immediately abolished all private property and seized all products of field or factory. The people who lived in cities and towns, some 3.3 million, were driven out to work in the countryside. They were labeled depositees, and were given very short rations with the intention of starving them to death. When party leader Hou Youn objected to the emptying of Phnom Penh, Pol Pot labeled him a traitor; Hou Youn disappeared. Pol Pots regime targeted intellectuals, including anyone with an education, or with foreign contacts, as well as anyone from the middle or upper classes. Such people were tortured horrifically, including by electrocution, pulling out of finger and toenails, and being skinned alive, before they were killed. All of the doctors, the teachers, the Buddhist monks and nuns, and the engineers died. All of the national armys officers were executed. Love, sex, and romance were outlawed, and the state had to approve marriages. Anyone caught being in love or having sex without official permission was executed. Children were not allowed to go to school or to play, they were expected to work and would be summarily killed if they balked. Incredibly, the people of Cambodia did not really know who was doing this to them. Saloth Sar, now known to his associates as Pol Pot, never revealed his identity or that of his party to the ordinary people. Intensely paranoid, Pol Pot reportedly refused to sleep in the same bed two nights in a row for fear of assassination. The Angka included only 14,000 members, but through secrecy and terror tactics, they ruled a country of 8 million citizens absolutely. Those people who were not killed immediately worked in the fields from sun-up to sun-down, seven days a week. They were separated from their families, ate in communal dining messes, and slept in military-style barracks. The government confiscated all consumer goods, piling vehicles, refrigerators, radios, and air conditioners up in the streets and burning them. Among the activities utterly banned were music-making, prayer, using money and reading. Anyone who disobeyed these restrictions ended up in an extermination center or got a swift ax-blow to the head in one of the Killing Fields. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge sought nothing less than the reversal of hundreds of years of progress. They were willing and able to erase not only the symbols of modernization but also the people associated with it. Initially, the elites bore the brunt of Khmer Rouge excesses, but by 1977 even peasants (base people) were being massacred for offenses such as using happy words. Nobody knows exactly how many Cambodians were murdered during Pol Pots reign of terror, but the lower estimates tend to cluster around 1.5 million, while others estimate 3 million, out of a total population of just over 8 million. Vietnam Invades Throughout Pol Pots reign, border skirmishes flared from time to time with the Vietnamese. A May 1978 uprising by non-Khmer Rouge communists in eastern Cambodia prompted Pol Pot to call for the extermination of all Vietnamese (50 million people), as well as of the 1.5 million Cambodians in the eastern sector. He made a start on this plan, massacring more than 100,000 of the eastern Cambodians by the end of the year. However, Pol Pots rhetoric and actions gave the Vietnamese government a reasonable pretext for war. Vietnam launched an all-out invasion of Cambodia and overthrew Pol Pot. He fled to the Thai borderlands, while the Vietnamese installed a new, more moderate communist government in Phnom Penh. Continued Revolutionary Activity Pol Pot was put on trial in absentia in 1980, and sentenced to death. Nonetheless, from his hideout in the Malai district of Banteay Meanchey Province, near the Cambodia/Thailand border, he continued to direct Khmer Rouge actions against the Vietnamese-controlled government for years. He announced his retirement in 1985, supposedly due to problems with asthma, but continued to direct the Khmer Rouge behind the scenes. Frustrated, the Vietnamese attacked the western provinces and drove the Khmer guerrillas into Thailand; Pol Pot would live in Trat, Thailand for several years. In 1989, the Vietnamese withdrew their troops from Cambodia. Pol Pot had been living in China, where he underwent treatment for facial cancer. He soon returned to western Cambodia but refused to take part in negotiations for a coalition government. A hardcore of Khmer Rouge loyalists continued to terrorize the western regions of the country and waged guerrilla war on the government. In June of 1997, Pol Pot was arrested and put on trial only for the murder of his friend Son Sen. He was sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life. Death and Legacy On April 15, 1998, Pol Pot heard the news on a Voice of America radio program that he was going to be turned over to an international tribunal for trial. He died that night; the official cause of death was heart failure, but his hasty cremation raised suspicions that it might have been suicide. In the end, it is difficult to assess Pol Pots legacy. Certainly, he was one of the bloodiest tyrants in history. His delusional plan for reforming Cambodia did set the country back, but it hardly created an agrarian utopia. Indeed, it is only after four decades that Cambodias wounds are beginning to heal, and some sort of normalcy is returning to this utterly ravaged nation. But a visitor does not even have to scratch the surface to find the scars of Cambodias Orwellian nightmare under the rule of Pol Pot. Source: Becker, Elizabeth. When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, Public Affairs, 1998. Kiernan, Ben. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, Hartford: Yale University Press, 2008. Short, Philip. Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, New York: MacMillan, 2006.