Ed Whelan is all over the Federal Court case against Prop 8 and the legal shennanigans to televise the trial. This case is fast turning into a the worst sort of Soviet-style show trial, designed more to make an example out of dissenters from the regime, than to administer justice.
Any intelligent and fair-minded judge would recognize that the obvious candidates for a pilot program would be low-profile cases that present no apparent risk of intimidation or abuse of trial participants and in which all parties consent to televised coverage. Only an idiot or a hardened ideological advocate for same-sex marriage — and (presiding Judge) Walker is no idiot — would imagine that the Proposition 8 case is a good candidate for the program.
A coalition of major media companies has asked Walker to have the Proposition 8 trial televised because “televising this modern-day Scopes trial would present viewers with a national civics lesson on a hotly contested issue that crosses social, political, educational, and religious boundaries.” But the role of the courts is not to “present viewers with a national civics lesson.” It’s to decide cases fairly. In some cases, that goal might not be jeopardized by televising the proceedings. But in other cases it will be.
The very fact that these media companies
are intent on portraying the Proposition 8 case as a “modern-day Scopes trial” reinforces the ample evidence that this trial should not be televised. If Judge Walker persists in failing to recognize that elementary fact, the national civics lesson that he will be providing is yet another reminder that too many of our federal judges willfully abuse their authority in order to advance their own political agendas.
Read all of Ed Whelan’s article here.