Word: olson
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When super-lawyers Ted Olson and David Boies went to court last week to ask a federal judge to toss out California's Proposition 8, one might have expected longtime gay-marriage advocates to welcome the move with open arms. After all, not only is Olson, 69, one of the preeminent members of the Supreme Court bar and Boies an acclaimed trial lawyer who famously squared off with Olson in 2000 when they took opposing sides in the Supreme Court's landmark Bush v. Gore election case. But perhaps even more important symbolically, Olson is a former top lawyer...
...much as they appreciate having two such prominent lawyers on their side, gay-rights veterans worry that Olson and Boies' approach could backfire. Now is no time to test the federal judiciary - where conservatives hold sway - on the issue of gay marriage, they argue. (See pictures of the gay-rights movement, from Stonewall to Prop...
...interview with TIME, Olson said he and Boies had met with gay-rights groups to discuss their concerns before filing the suit over the controversial law banning gay marriage but ultimately decided to move forward anyway. "We have given this a great deal of thought," said Olson, who noted that sitting on the sidelines hardly guarantees that some other plaintiff won't seek his or her own day in court. "Both David and I have seen cases at the Supreme Court brought by people who didn't know what they were doing. We feel we do know what...
...filing this case, Olson and Boies have moved the gay-marriage debate to the front and - critically - center of American political discourse. For all the successes gay-rights lawyers from the ACLU and other groups have had over the years, they never quite escaped the perception of many Americans that the cause was somehow a fringe concern of primary interest to advocates and opponents. As recently as last year, gay marriage was considered so extreme that no major candidate from either party in the presidential election had any qualms about opposing...
...Olson's flat refusal to see civil unions as an acceptable compromise could do more to raise the pressure on President Barack Obama and the Democrats to move toward embracing gay marriage than anything the ACLU could achieve. And with such Republican credentials, his involvement quietly indicts the notion that gay rights must be a partisan issue. (Read "Why Gay Marriage Was Defeated in California...