ABA Wedded to Gay Marriage

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At its just-concluded annual meeting in San Francisco, the American Bar Association overwhelmingly passed a resolution urging governmental entities to "eliminate all of their legal barriers to civil marriage between two persons of the same sex who are otherwise eligible to marry."

According to a report on the Jurist Legal News and Research Website ( http://Jurist.law.pitt.edu), the ABA vote comes one week after Judge Vaughn Walker, the Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, ruled Proposition 8 violated the Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Jurisdictions that permit same sex marriage include Massachusetts, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and the District of Columbia.

There was a time (too long ago) when the ABA was in the vanguard of legal issues such as gay marriage, rather than playing catch up with the courts, but kudos to the legal association for speaking out at all on the civil rights issue.  Admittedly, this post neither relates to media law nor journalism, but "TUOL" toiled for years for the American Bar Association Press and wanted to give a shout out to the ABA for doing the right thing.