How to win friends and influence Supreme Court Justices

I'll grant you, making legal arguments for discrimination is a tricky business. But that's the task some folks have taken on in arguing for DOMA and California's Prop 8 at the Supreme Court.

For example, check this one out from the Thomas More Law Center:

Reserving marriage to a man and a woman thus reflects the inherent distinction between those pairs capable of engaging in the act which can produce human offspring, and those pairs which cannot.

The thing is, they're making that argument to a court made up of one woman who was never married, one who was married and divorced with no children, one man who is married with no biological children and one man who is married with two adopted children.

That last one happens to be Chief Justice John Roberts.

Chief Justice John Roberts is the father of two children, Jack and Josie, both 12. They were adopted four months apart as babies in 2000, after Roberts and his wife, Jane, then 45, spent several years trying to adopt.

John Eastman, Chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, had this to say about Robert's family:

You're looking at what is the best course societywide to get you the optimal result in the widest variety of cases. That often is not open to people in individual cases. Certainly adoption in families headed, like Chief Roberts' family is, by a heterosexual couple, is by far the second-best option.

Oh yeah, I'm sure that's going to go over really well with the Chief Justice. Wouldn't you want your kids to know that the home and loving family you've provided for them ranks as "second-best?"

This just goes to show that making an argument on behalf of fear and hate is always a losing proposition.