Meet the Witnesses: Dr. Nancy Cott, Dr. George Chauncey

LGBT, NewsBites — By Speak Equal on January 12, 2010 at 12:20 pm

Nancy Cott
Nancy Cott, a U.S. history professor at Harvard and the author of Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, is scheduled to take the witness stand for a second day. Cott, a witness appearing on behalf of two gay couples who are suing to overturn Proposition 8, on Monday disputed assertions made by the measure’s sponsors during the 2008 campaign that cultures around the world always have recognized marriage only as a union of a man and a woman.

“To think of marriage as universal, the same around the globe, simply is not accurate,” Cott said, explaining that America’s founders knew that group marriages were common in other societies and among some Native American tribes. “The Bible is a document with characters that are practicing polygamy, which is the case with ancient civilizations.”

George Chauncey
Yale history professor George Chauncey is expected to testify about anti-gay bias. Chauncey is best known for his book, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, which was published to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.

Chauncey has testified as an expert witness in several major gay rights cases, and he was the organizer and lead author of the Historians’ Amicus Brief in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which weighed heavily in the Supreme Court’s landmark decision overturning the nation’s remaining sodomy laws. The professor was also was an expert witness in a landmark gay rights case that resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court invalidating a 1992 Colorado law that sought to prevent cities from extending civil rights protections to gays.

Tags: Anti-Discrimination, California, Debate, Education, Equal Rights, Equality, Federal Court, Gay Marriage, George Chauncey, GLBT, Harvard, Inclusion, LGBT, Marriage Equality, Nancy Cott, Prop 8, Proposition 8, Same-Sex Marriage, San Francisco, Trial, Witnesses, Yale