Over 100 newly-minted lawyers walked out of their own graduation at the University of Michigan Law School on Saturday to protest the ceremony’s commencement speaker, anti-gay Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH). As Andrew Selbst, one of the student organizers of the walkout, explains, Portman’s chilly reception is merely the latest sign that the senator’s opposition to marriage equality and other basic human rights no longer has a place is American society:
The walkout was a statement to a broader audience – America. I think this whole episode fits within the thesis of Minnesota Law Professor Dale Carpenter’s recent New York Times Op-Ed about King & Spaulding’s withdrawal from defending DOMA: The legal profession has simply moved past the point where LGBT rights are just another political issue, instead recognizing that discriminating against any group of people based on who they are is simply unacceptable in today’s society. This walkout, like the Op-Ed, like the Justice Department’s refusal to defend DOMA, is another data point for this observation. Here, even more specifically, we were saying that the for the next generation of lawyers, this is not even a debatable
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment