Word: courts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Last week the Vermont Supreme Court agreed with them, sort of. The court ruled, as no appellate court ever had, that gay couples have a right to the same benefits as heterosexual couples--with one monumentally symbolic exception. Same-sex couples still cannot obtain a marriage license...
Instead the court told the legislature to decide how best to extend to gays the perks married people enjoy, such as state tax breaks. It gave lawmakers the option to grant gays marriage licenses, but didn't require that step. The Governor is leaning toward a less controversial alternative: authorization of the arrangement known antiseptically as domestic partnership...
...state takes that route, the lawyers who initiated last week's case will go back to the state supreme court to argue that domestic partnerships are a separate-but-equal injustice. However, if Vermont decides to allow full marriage rights, gay activists will have a platform from which to challenge the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, a 1996 law banning federal recognition of same-sex marriages...
...Five years ago, the screenwriting partners turned the life of cross-dressing B-movie director Ed Wood into a critically acclaimed film starring Johnny Depp. Next they wrote The People vs. Larry Flynt, a Capraesque portrait of the porno kingpin who won a First Amendment case before the Supreme Court, with Woody Harrelson in the title role. But even for these masters of the "anti-biopic," which they describe as a movie biography of someone who doesn't really deserve one, telling the story of comedian Andy Kaufman presented a challenge...
...lamented his deviousness, his lack of candor, his tendency to ingratitude. His character flaws were widely discussed: his stubbornness, his vanity, his occasional vindictiveness, his habit of yessing callers just to be amiable. At times, his confidence merged into arrogance, diminishing his political instincts, leading to an ill-defined court-packing scheme and an unsuccessful attempt to purge his opponents in the 1938 by-elections. One must also concede the failures of vision that led to the forcible relocation of Japanese Americans, which deprived tens of thousands of men, women and children of Japanese descent of their fundamental civil liberties...