This in from longtime FR friend Andrew Pugno, who serves as General Counsel for ProtectMarriage.com…
A Vigorous Defense for Traditional Marriage
By Andy Pugno, General Counsel, ProtectMarriage.com
As lawyers for the plaintiffs challenging Prop 8 neared the conclusion of their arguments and prepared to “rest their case” today, the court next turned its attention to the defense case put on by the Prop 8 Legal Team.
But that doesn’t mean our legal defense team, while waiting our turn to present the official defense, hasn’t been vigorously fighting to uphold Prop 8 during the plaintiffs’ case-in-chief. In fact, when the courtroom came to order this morning the time clock tells me that while plaintiffs have logged 28 hours in presenting their case, the defense team has logged nearly as much time – 27 hours – cross-examining the plaintiffs’ witnesses and introducing our own evidence into the record.
Before resting their case, plaintiffs began Week Three this morning with a “document dump,” which means they admitted into the trial record a slew of documents they view to be evidence to support their case. Nothing earthshaking in and of itself, but the subtext is utterly astounding.
Despite supposedly winning our appeal in the Ninth Circuit to protect the privacy of our internal Prop 8 campaign records, the trial judge has still forced us to hand over literally tens of thousands of pages of sensitive campaign memos, emails and other documents to the plaintiffs. After sifting through our internal documents for facts they think aid their case, they had them labeled as trial exhibits and added to the court record.
So if the Yes on 8 campaign has been forced to open up its internal campaign records for this court trial, then shouldn’t also the No on 8 campaign have to do so, too?
Well, although we filed a motion some time ago asking the court to order the “No on 8” campaign to disclose to us the same types of documents as those we had to disclose to them, the court has refused to rule on our request and thus we have been prevented from examining even one single document from the opponents of Prop 8.
This is the sort of striking disadvantage we have suffered all along even before trial started and now during trial. Since the moment the case started, the court has consistently sided with our opponents as they continue to “railroad” their case against the people’s right to vote for traditional marriage.
Another example: For months the plaintiffs have been practically foaming at the mouth to get our campaign manager, Frank Schubert, onto the stand to be questioned as a witness. Having come up empty-handed in their search for evidence of “anti-gay bias” in campaign records, they suddenly dropped their plans to call Mr. Schubert to the stand.
But when we announced plans to call Mr. Schubert as our own witness to help defend Prop 8, they filed a motion to prevent him from testifying at all. They got their chance to question Mr. Schubert on the stand but when they saw the whites of his eyes, they blinked.
After plaintiffs rested their case today, our legal team called to the stand our first witness, Dr. Kenneth Miller, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna and expert on California politics. Dr. Miller’s task was pretty straightforward: to lay out the reality that gays and lesbians in California have achieved enormous political power at all levels of government. Why is this important? Because to trigger the highest level of constitutional protection in favor of their claims, our opponents need to prove that gays and lesbians are a vulnerable and “politically powerless” minority.
To show that homosexuals are not politically powerless, Dr. Miller provided “striking” examples of the many ways in which they have won support for their political agenda in California, claiming allies such as federal officeholders (both US Senators and President Obama) , local and statewide elected officials (more than 30 local officials, mayors of the top three cities, and every single Constitutional officer); organized labor (more than 54 such groups opposed Prop 8); major newspapers (21 of 23 opposed Prop 8 while the other two took no editorial position); major corporations (including a consortium of Silicon Valley businesses), and the fact that the “No on 8” campaign actually raised more money than the “Yes” side.
Far from being “politically powerless,” the evidence has firmly established that the political influence of gays and lesbians in California has become quite powerful.
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