CNN's Lisa Bloom Hints Same-Sex Marriage Opponents are 'Lunatic-Fringe Bigots'

CNN legal analyst Lisa Bloom condemned the voter-approved Proposition 8 in California in an editorial on CNN.com on Tuesday, and labeled the Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas decision in 2003 as “the gay community's Brown v. Board of Education.” Bloom would later imply that the supporters of Prop 8 were “lunatic-fringe bigots.”

The legal analyst began the January 12, 2010 editorial, titled “Prop 8 is simply unconstitutional,” by contrasting “reckless heterosexual nuptials,” such as the 23 marriages of a grandmother in Indiana, with her friends Wilbert and Carlos, “‘free men’ together 16 years and lovingly raising a son, [who] are shut out of the 1,100 federal and hundreds of state legal benefits that come with marriage.” She continued by dropping another personal anecdote, citing the “children in same-sex families: kids like my friends’ son Dorian, growing up with the sting of knowing that his parents are second-class citizens in their own country.”

Bloom, who also is a legal analyst on CBS, devoted much of her CNN.com editorial using many of the typical left-wing talking points about same-sex “marriage,” which included her comparison between Lawrence v. Texas, and the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision which ended the segregation of schools.

Study after study finds that something about marriage makes us live longer, healthier lives. Married folks have significantly better mental health, engage in fewer risky behaviors, eat healthier, have less illness and are just plain happier.

And don’t tell me that civil unions are exactly the same as marriage. If that's true, then let's let gays and lesbians pick first. If they pick marriage, and heterosexuals are relegated to civil unions, no problem, right, since they are exactly the same?...

As a civil rights lawyer for 23 years, there is no question at all in my mind that as a matter of constitutional law, the federal court must strike down any law that creates a subclass of Americans, shutting them out of legal privileges and protections available to others, merely because they are gay.

Seven years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Lawrence v. Texas, the gay community’s Brown v. Board of Education, striking down state laws that criminalized private, consensual gay sex, saying: “The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.”

When all the testimony about legal rights, benefits and protections in the Prop 8 trial is said and done, Perry v. Schwarzenegger is ultimately about just that.

Towards the end of her commentary, the analyst predicted that those who opposed the legalization of same-sex “marriages” would end up being marginalized like those who opposed interracial marriages:

Our gay and lesbian friends and neighbors are entitled to respect for their private lives, and the state cannot demean their existence, even by majority vote. Seven out of 10 Americans supported laws banning interracial marriage at the time our president’s black father and white mother married.

But the Supreme Court knew that our federal Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the law was a bedrock American principle that sometimes requires the courts to lead, and so lead they did, striking down antimiscegenation laws in 1967. Now, only lunatic-fringe bigots would support those laws.

My favorite anti-Prop 8 placard read: “When do I get to vote on your marriage?” Same-sex marriage may be a politically volatile and complex issue, but as a matter of federal constitutional law, it’s simple: Fundamental rights must be granted equally across the board to all American citizens. Equal means equal. The rest, constitutionally speaking, is just noise.

This isn’t the first time Bloom has referenced the Brown decision in a defense of same-sex “marriage.” During a panel discussion on Campbell Brown’s program on May 27, 2009, the legal analyst concluded, “I think it’s a huge civil rights issue, and this is the first court ruling that I’m aware of that says that a majority vote- a bare majority vote, can take away the constitutional rights of a protected minority group. You know, Brown versus Board of Education was very unpopular at the time. It wasn’t up for a majority vote, and not- neither have any of the civil rights of American minorities ever been up for a popular vote. That’s the beauty of our constitutional system.”