Follow The Federal Prop 8 Trial Online Now!

The federal Proposition 8 trial began at 9:30am in San Francisco. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker is presiding over the case, which is called Perry v. Schwarzenegger with Bush v. Gore opponents Ted Olson and David Boies joining forces to claim that California's ban on gay marriage passed by voters in November 2008 violates the federal constitution guarantees of Equal Protection and Due Process. Proposition 8 is being defended by heterosexual supremacist attorney Charles Cooper, because the state of California, in the form of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown have declined to defend it in court, because they agree that the measure is unconstitutional.

The United States Supreme Court issued an emergency stay this morning which said:

ORDER IN PENDING CASE
09A648 HOLLINGSWORTH, DENNIS, ET AL. V. PERRY, KRISTIN M., ET AL.
Upon consideration of the application for stay presented to
Justice Kennedy and by him referred to the Court, it is ordered
that the order of the United States District Court for the
Northern District of California, case No. 3:09-cv-02292,
permitting real-time streaming is stayed except as it permits
streaming to other rooms within the confines of the courthouse in
which the trial is to be held. Any additional order permitting
broadcast of the proceedings is also stayed pending further order
of this Court. To permit further consideration in this Court,
this order will remain in effect until Wednesday, January 13,
2010, at 4 p.m. eastern time.

Justice Breyer, dissenting.
I agree with the Court that further consideration is
warranted, and I am pleased that the stay is time limited.
However, I would undertake that consideration without a temporary
stay in place. This stay prohibits the transmission of
proceedings to other federal courthouses. In my view, the
Court’s standard for granting a stay is not met. See Conkright
v. Frommert, 556 U. S. ___, ___ (2009) (slip op., at 1–2)
(Ginsburg, J., in chambers). In particular, the papers filed, in
my view, do not show a likelihood of “irreparable harm.”

With respect, I dissent.

What this means is that the proceedings (which I believe are still being videotaped) will not be streamed to any other courthouse except the one in San Francisco, and the video will not be uploaded to YouTube.com.

However, if you want to follow the trial there are numerous different ways:

Rick Jacobs of Courage Campaign is liveblogging from the courtroom at http://prop8trialtracker.com/

Dan Levine is tweeting the trial at http://twitter.com/FedcourtJunkie

Bilerico has a web page showing all the relevant tweets on the issue

Firedoglake has numerous live bloggers at http://firedoglake.com/prop8trial/

Follow the twitter hashtags #prop8 and #prop8trial

I really don't understand how the heterosexual supremacists who are so scared that Proposition 8 supporters will be intimidated if videotape is uploaded to YouTube think that the identities of every single person who testifies in the trial will not be broadcast all over the blogosphere ad twitterverse. This is 2010, it is absolutely impossible to keep the information private, especially when you are talking about a trial which is determining the constitutionality of the most hitly contested ballot measure on a social issue in U.S. history!