political figures are falling over themselves to endorse your side of the case. the fact of the matter is that no other group in history has been subjected to collude those rights as gay people. only two of those referendums have lost. one was in minnesota that already has a statute on the books preventing gay marriage. so i don t think the political power of gay people today could possibly be seen in a framework. i think gay people were weaker than women were. you just referred to a c change in people s understanding and values from 1996 when doma was enacted and i m trying to see where that comes from.
how all this went today and what happens next. but before we do that, there s one other thing from today s case that i think is totally worth hearing. this is not one of those smackdown moments for either side, but it was the very end of the arguments, end of the two hours, and it showed the strange and, i don t know, this unstable political core that s at the heart of these legal fights, because we have fights about the law but those fights do not happen totally independent of the political world in which we live. and the combination of legal and political sometimes gets woolly. and it was chief justice john roberts today who showed that most clearly in him trying to make the case that gay people should not be protected against discrimination because gay people aren t discriminated against. and the way you can tell that gay people aren t discriminated against in this country is that discrimination against gay people in some cases is starting
fellow republicans. you have to start somewhere. it s true. the laura the republicans hired to defend doma, paul clement, walked right past the media. he s a very respected laura on the right. but do you think him not wanting to talk to the press and no elected republicans wanting to talk about this, do thank you it s in part because of your brief, because you came out and said we re not taking the party line? i think there s a tremendous amount of respect for ted olson and what he s done. he has a deep well of respect and if not respect for the case he s arguing, the case he s arguing for republicans. and i think republicans are, as i always say, there s just some that simply disagree with us, but i think that people open to it really are doing a little bit
to be politically embarrassing for the bigot. and also, he points out, gay people have really good lawyers now. he says that to the gay rights laura arguing before him at the supreme court. it s a really strange and unstable moment. this is the last pete of tape i want to play for you. watch this. i suppose the seat change has a lot to do with the people supporting your side of the case p. i think the c change has to do with what was discussed in bowers and morns, which the understanding there was no difference that could justify in categorical discrimination. you don t doubt that the lobby supporting the enactment of same-sex marriage laws in different states is politically powerful, do you? with respect to that categorization of the term for purposes of scrutiny, i would, your honor. really? yes. as far as i can tell,
whatever other trovers that are resolved in those states. and by fencing those couples off, couples already married and treating them as unmarried for the purposes of federal law, you re not taking it one step at a time, you re not promoting caution. you re putting a stop button on it and you re having discrimination for the first time in our nation s history against a class of married couples. discrimination says the side that wants what it sees as discrimination overturned. and of course in that argument she gets an assist sort of from one of the more liberal justices who s probably inclined to agree with her assessment. now, as to the other side, here s what s really interesting. like the california case yesterday, there is a kind of strange situation about the anti-gay side in this, wherein the government doesn t want to defend it. this is a federal law. the president and the solicitor general agree that this is a bad law and that it s