Two new related news items:

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From World News - Canada

Toronto Open on Weekend for Gay Marriage License

By Rajiv Sekhri

TORONTO (Reuters) - Toronto's wedding registry office will open this weekend for the first time in its history to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples who want to take advantage of Canada's recently changed marriage laws.

The city has already issued 225 marriage licenses for same-sex couples and expects hundreds more to tie the knot this weekend. It has received about 15 inquiries a day from around the world since June 10, when an Ontario court set aside the definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman as unconstitutional.

About a million people are expected to visit Toronto for Gay Pride this week, which finishes with a parade on Sunday.

Brad Ross, a spokesman with the city of Toronto, said 25 of the 225 gay marriage licenses issued so far have gone to U.S. couples and some couples have applied from as far as Europe, China, Cayman Islands, Israel and the West Indies.

Ross said the city will also keep its marriage chapel open over the weekend. It is making two meeting rooms available for those who wish to marry there if the chapel is occupied.

Heterosexual couples are also welcome to get licenses or tie the knot over the weekend, he said.

"It's a very convenient time for people. Everybody is in the same place (for Gay Pride Week)," said Rev. Brent Hawkes of the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto, the majority of whose members are gay or lesbian.

He will perform six weddings this weekend and plans to marry his partner John on their 25th anniversary, in three years time.

A landmark ruling by an Ontario provincial court on June 10 included homosexual unions into the definition of marriage.

The federal government signaled its acceptance of gay marriage a week later when it decided not to appeal the provincial court's decision.

"We are now full participants in Canadian society. Apartheid is gone," said Bruce Walker, a lawyer in Toronto who plans to marry his partner of 26 years in the next six months. "It has been a 26-year struggle."

South of the border, the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this week struck down a Texas law banning sodomy between same-sex couples, in effect ending all anti-sodomy laws in the 13 states where they still exist.

But gay marriages are not allowed in the United States. Vermont allows gay civil unions but not full marriage.

"I am amazed to live in such a beautiful country," Walker said of Canada. "It is beyond my wildest imagination that it happened so quickly."
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From Supreme Court AP:

Supreme Court Looking Less Conservative

By ANNE GEARAN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - In blockbuster rulings on affirmative action and gay rights and in less heralded decisions this term, a Supreme Court dominated by conservative jurists looked less conservative than it has in years.

"On vitally important issues to social conservatives, they suffered serious defeats this term," said Thomas Goldstein, a Washington lawyer who specializes in the Supreme Court. "There was not a single victory to balance it out."

Serendipity plays a role in the mix of cases the court hears in a given year, and it can be misleading to look at any one year in isolation.

Still, the 2002-2003 session will be remembered for its exceptions to the conservative rule, lawyers and law professors said.

In the term that ended last week, the high court bolted from a decade of rulings striking down or limiting racial formulas, and upheld the continued use of race as a factor in university admissions.

The justices also made an about-face on the question of whether gay men and women can be prosecuted for what they do in the privacy of their bedrooms. That caused one of the court's core conservatives, Justice Antonin Scalia, to sputter that his colleagues had "taken sides in the culture war."

No less a conservative stalwart than Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist led the majority this spring in departing from the court's march to increase state rights at the expense of federal control in a case about family leave for state workers.

The court also upheld a legal aid financing program for the poor that political conservatives called an unconstitutional government assault on private property.

"These decisions were not as conservative as might have been expected," said Emory University law professor Robert Schapiro. "The affirmative action ruling is one I'll be teaching for many years to come."

The court's work left Douglas Kmiec, a Pepperdine University constitutional law professor and former legal adviser to Republican presidents, shaking his head.

"In affirmative action, federal-state relations, and, after the sodomy case, basic — and I do mean very basic — principles of constitutional interpretation have been tossed aside, not conserved."

That is not to say the court abandoned its conservative leanings.

A string of law-and-order rulings strengthened government powers to go after suspects and punish criminals. For example, the court upheld the nation's strictest "three-strikes" law, ruling that a California man's 50-years-to-life sentence for stealing videotapes was not unconstitutionally harsh.

Those tough-on-crime rulings were in keeping with the court's rightward shift under Rehnquist's leadership, a path that has taken the court far from its progressive stance under the Civil Rights era stewardship of Chief Justice Earl Warren.

It is a mark of the current court's fundamentally conservative outlook that all nine justices voted to allow Michigan to cancel family visits for prisoners caught with drugs, and that a six-member majority said Congress can require public libraries to block objectionable material on their Internet terminals or lose federal money.

Rehnquist and fellow conservative Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas still held sway in a large percentage of the 73 cases decided this term. The three usually vote together and prevail when they can attract one or both of the court's center-right justices, Reagan appointees Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy.

It was O'Connor who joined more liberal justices to preserve affirmative action. That vote was 5-4. It was Kennedy who provided the crucial vote in the sodomy case.

In that case, the court set out a constitutionally protected right to adults' private sexual conduct. The government has no business peeping in bedroom windows, the court said in a ruling written by Kennedy.

O'Connor also voted to strike down a Texas sodomy ban, making the overall ruling 6-3, but she would not go nearly as far as Kennedy and her more liberal colleagues.

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson was among many conservatives who condemned the decision, which he said would take the nation "down into a moral sewer."

The nine justices closed their term without any announcement of an impending retirement.

An opening on the court had been hotly anticipated on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, since it would give President Bush his first opportunity to name a Supreme Court justice.

The anticipation peaked with release of the court's final opinions Thursday, the day the court most disappointed political and social conservatives with its gay rights ruling.

"No justice may have retired physically, but a number managed to retire intellectually," Kmiec said.