Kagan Takes the Hot Seat

If you were to judge Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan solely on her public statements, you might be at a loss when it comes to determining her positions on gay issues.

In 2003, as dean of Harvard Law School, she sent a letter to students describing the military’s antigay “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy as “a profound wrong — a moral injustice of the first order.”

Then, six years later at her nomination hearing for U.S. solicitor general, she said, “There is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.”

Yet, as hearings for Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination get underway Monday, her friend and former colleague Harvard professor Larry Lessig says gay people would have a friend in this potential justice. “My sense of her is that she’s a progressive,” he says. “She has what I think are the right views about how to think about equal protection [and] how to think about how to interpret the Constitution.”

There’s little question that, if she’s confirmed, Kagan will have a hand in deciding a good number of cases of importance to gay men and lesbians. So, with that in mind, The Advocate On-Air’s Jason Bellini talks with Lessig, other Kagan friends and associates, and court watchers, to get a sense of just where she’ll stand. Watch Bellini’s report below.