Smeared?
I had heard the claims that California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown had issued an “anti-gay” ruling in a child custody case. And although I’m not a single-issue sort of person when it comes to the judiciary, that certainly worried me. Fortunately, Steve Miller has checked the case, and he found something rather different from the claims in the media:
In Sharon S. v. Superior Court, a convoluted case in which the biological mother and her partner had broken up and now opposed each other in court, Brown wrote that second-parent adoptions ought to require “a legal relationship between the birth and second parent,” or else it would “trivialize family bonds.” And, in fact, California’s 2001 law affords registered domestic partners the same streamlined adoption process as stepparents. What Brown was saying is that the state need not create another right to adopt for two individuals with no such legal bond, and that legislators recognized this when they allowed registered domestic partners to adopt.
From all the other things I’ve heard and read, I’m looking forward to Judge Brown on the federal bench.
I’ve heard some allegations by opponents of Justice Brown by opponents on the left that her “libertarian” leanings were “inconsistent” with Constitutional jurisprudence. And so the People for the American Way quote her multiple times on several issues they deem to have been addressed in a specious manner. (http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=12751)
But looking at these citations, I can see nothing but reasons *for* her to sit on the federal bench.
Brown actually seems alright-libertarian and not anti-abortion (from what I can tell).
BTW, for us non-lawyers, what was she saying in the Steve Miller quote you had?
I just looked up Pryor is his own words-Brown seems good, but Pryor’s scary.