article_snippet: What's more, I certainly never thought that, 50 years after a march for voting rights went from Selma to Montgomery, that the first couple to get married there would be a courageous African-American couple, Tori Sisson and Shanté Wolfe, who camped out overnight on the sidewalk outside the courthouse just to be the first in line.
article_snippet: They slept on that chilly pavement despite the ravings of Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court, who has issued baseless edict after baseless edict urging the state's probate judges to ignore a federal court ruling (which supersedes a state ruling) and to refuse to treat LGBT people equally under the law.
article_snippet: In an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo on Thursday, Chief Justice Moore even compared refusing marriage licenses to gay couples to refusing to enforce the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision (which upheld the legal status of slaves as property).
article_snippet: I'm not a trained lawyer, but the logic seems to be that the refusal to treat people like slaves under the law is similar to the refusal to grant gay and lesbians gay equal rights to marry under the law.
article_snippet: That logic is not only faulty (restricting rights is not similar to expanding them) but offensive.
article_snippet: Many are highlighting the echoes of the past in Alabama right now; of Gov. George Wallace actually blocking two African-American students from entering the auditorium of the University of Alabama as they tried to desegregate the school; of civil rights battles come and gone.
article_snippet: In just a few months, the U.S. Supreme Court could end this chapter of our history once and for all.
article_snippet: That's why this spring, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that will determine whether the U.S. Constitution can tolerate that kind of discrimination.
article_snippet: But, after Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, and Shelby v. Holder, the case gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act in 2013, sometimes it seems like the voices of the American people don't get heard by those nine Justices.
article_snippet: In past civil rights struggles, such as the one that took place half a century ago in Selma, Alabama, well-intentioned people far from the fray had no easy way to express such as the one that took place half a century ago in Selma, Alabama, well-intentioned people support.