David Boies and Ted Olson, who helped upend California’s gay-marriage
ban and triggered a national wave of similar lawsuits, are urging a U.S.
judge in Virginia to make the state the South’s first to accept same-sex
unions.

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring said last month he wouldn’t
defend the state against a lawsuit by two gay couples seeking to marry,
comparing the ban to the state’s prohibition on interracial unions
overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967. With the attorney general
now on their side, Boies and Olson are set to argue the case today in
federal court.

“Virginia has argued on the wrong side of some of our nation’s landmark
cases -- in school desegregation in 1954, on interracial marriage” in
1967, Herring said in announcing the shift. Herring was the fourth state
attorney general to stop defending a state in lawsuits over gay-marriage
bans.

Boies, one of the country’s best-known litigators, and Olson, a senior
Justice Department official under Republican President Ronald Reagan,
will face lawyers for two county court clerks and the state’s Registrar
of Vital Statistics.

The two couples Boies and Olson represent in Virginia are asking U.S.
District Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen in Norfolk, Virginia, to rule
without a trial that a provision in the state constitution denying
same-sex couples the ability to marry violates the U.S. Constitution’s
14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law. The measure
was approved by referendum in 2006.

- - -

Anti-gay, anti-abortion activist Republican Ken Cuccinelli was
Virginia's previous attorney general. He was defeated in his attempt to
become Virginia's governor.


--
There’s no point crying over spilled 4-Methylcyclohexanemethanol.