Douglas Whaley

In November of 2009 I was clearly dying of an enlarged heart (atrial fibrillation being the main culprit).  I’d been on the heart transplant list for ten months, and I was told by my doctors at The Ohio State University Ross Heart Hospital that if I was lucky enough to get a heart it would likely not happen until sometime in 2010.  It is one thing intellectually to think you are getting a heart transplant in 2010, and quite another to have a morning phone call (I was working at the computer) on Nov. 23, 2009, in which the pleasant female voice announced: "Mr. Whaley, we have a heart for you." This was the most startling sentence I have ever heard in my life! My old heart started beating very fast indeed. As I’ve detailed elsewhere (see Related Posts below), thereafter things happened very quickly.  By midnight I had a new 27-year old heart, and eight days later I was home!  The whole experience was like science fiction, and these days, seven years l

  I am a law professor who has paid a lot of attention to gay rights for decades, and I am a gay activist who has worked to create and preserve our rights for over forty years.  My husband tells me that Facebook is filled with posts worrying that gays are in major trouble because of Trump’s election, and asked me to write this post explaining what can and cannot happen, and what’s likely to occur.   Let’s take the rumors one by one. 1.  Is Gay Marriage Ending? No.  The Supreme Court’s decision in  Obergefell v. Hodges  (2015) ruled that the United States Constitution requires that gays be given equal marriage rights with straights.  That will remain the law of the land until one of two things happens: (1)  an amendment to the Constitution is passed by Congress and the States saying otherwise (very unlikely—you couldn’t even get the process started in Congress), or (2) the Supreme Court itself overrules  Obergefell . The Court cannot act