Joe Sudbay reports more startling developments in the case of Edie Windsor, who is challenging the constitutionality of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. Recall that last week, Paul Clement — the lawyer House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and the House Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG) hired to defend the law — filed a brief dismissing Windsor’s motion for summary judgment and identified the work of professional anti-gay activists without making them available for deposition. Windsor’s lawyers had filed a motion asking the Court to strike the hearsay documents and today they went a step further, submitting the affidavit of Professor Lisa Diamond, one of the authors cited by Boehner’s lawyers. Remarkably, Diamond claims that “Boehner’s crack legal team misconstrued and distorted her writings.” From Diamond’s affidavit:
BLAG misconstrues and distorts my research findings, which do not support the propositions for which BLAG cites them. Specifically, on p. 11 of their opposition to the motion of summary judgment, BLAG quotes the following statement from one of my papers: “…there is currently no scientific or popular consensus on the exact constellation of experiences that definitively ‘qualify’ an individual as lesbian, gay, or bisexual” — as support for their claim that sexual orientation is not immutable. This is incorrect. My quoted statement concerns the scientific and popular debate over the defining characteristics of LGBT individuals and it says nothing whatsoever about the immutability of sexual orientation itself. [...] Neither this article nor any of my other published work supports BLAG’s claim that ‘a high number of persons who expereince sexual attraction to members of the same sex early in their adult lives later cease to experience such attraction.
Read the full affidavit here.
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