rhythmia

For those of you who haven't heard yet, last November California put civil rights up for a vote. Marriage equality. And it lost. Yeah, I know, and this is my home. >.<

This January, Proposition 8 was taken before a Ninth Circuit (Federal) judge to challenge it's constitutionality. Judge Walker took public comment and was going to allow the trial to be publicly televised and also broadcast on Youtube. Defendants (pro-8) appealed to the Supreme Court, who said nope, can't do it.

So! There are transcripts at a variety of wonderful places, such as http://prop8trialtracker.com, www.firedoglake.com (there's a few people writing there in several different posts, but there's always someone at trialtracker linking to the relevant posts in the comments), the San Jose Mercury News (My home newspaper! The link is to day 6, but just check out the sidebars), and the ever informative KQED public tv station.

And from the transcripts, the awesome people at http://marriagetrial.com/ will be putting up a re-enactment of the courtroom. Starting Wednesday, I believe. An article about what they're doing can be found here!

So the Prop 8 trial in my good ol' state of California started Monday. Supreme Court ruled against allowing live media coverage. So much for transparency.

to try to make up for that, the Courage Campaign is doing live blogging from the courtroom.

http://prop8trialtracker.com

Please check it out.

ETA:
Reading through the first couple of days of courtroom summaries is amazingly edifying. A couple of the expert witnesses give us a crash course in the history of marriage in the United States, history of LGBT discrimination in the US, and lots of sociological tidbits. Also the folks commenting on the liveblogging are building into a thriving community, and people are sharing relevant links left and right.

Also! A hilariously relevant flash animation as SF Gate.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/01/13/fiorewhose.DTL