It has emerged that Chief Justice John Roberts' first cousin, Jean Podrasky, is an openly gay person who can now marry her same-sex partner in California thanks to a ruling authored by Roberts in Hollingsworth v. Perry, which had the effect of reinstating a California Supreme Court ruling striking down California's ban on gay marriage known as Proposition 8 by refusing to decide its merits on jurisdiction grounds.
Podrasky told Talking Points Memo's Brian Beutler that she asked the Chief Justice, who is aware of her sexual orientation, for tickets to hear oral arguments in the case this past March, and he agreed to give them to her. “I am so excited. I am absolutely overwhelmed,” Podrasky told [Beutler] in a phone interview Wednesday. “I can now get married. I feel like my partner and I have been in limbo for several years. We’ve been engaged for a couple years, but now we can start planning.”
“I was stunned he kind of went one way for us on one of the ruling, and the other way on the DOMA ruling,” she said. “I want to say I’m from a very, very big family — I have 12 cousins on both sides of the family,” she says. By that measure, even though he has immense power as Chief Justice, Roberts is just on the other side of a family disagreement. “I want to say that quite a bit of my family on that side are quite conservative and pretty Catholic. We have differences of opinions on many many things, but we are still family.”
Podrasky, who plans to wed her partner next spring, is unsure whether she will invite Roberts to her wedding. “I actually don’t know,” she told me. “I’m certainly inviting family [but] we don’t have our guests lists yet.”
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