Jesse Choper Explains Legal Argument in Support of Gay Marriage

-NPR Day To Day, May 16, by Madeleine Brand
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90517603&ft=1&f=1059

“The argument they will make is: This is discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation—which it plainly is—and that that discrimination violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. And that sexual orientation, much like gender, race, ethnicity, are to be given special consideration by the court.”

-San Francisco Chronicle, May 17, by Bob Egelko
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/17/MNQR10O1OC.DTL

“I know of no case in which a (law) sought to deprive someone retroactively of a right they had at the time,” said Jesse Choper, a constitutional law professor at UC Berkeley who filed arguments in support of the same-sex couples in the case decided this week.

-KCRW-FM To The Point (Los Angeles), May 19, by Warren Olney
http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/tp/tp080519can_same-sex_marriag

“The fact that many, many citizens voted contrary to the Supreme Court’s decision is true in virtually every constitutional decision made in either a federal or state Supreme Court finding that government action violates equal rights. If lots of people hadn’t voted to take that action, the case would never had reached the Supreme Court. So that’s true with all of the rights of the accused that the Supreme Court has found, that’s true with the rights of women that many courts have found, that’s true of the racial cases as well.”