Last week’s diversion into the troubled mind of Michelle Shocked was, in a sense, a fitting introduction to this week in which the Supreme Court will hear two cases that deal directly with Marriage Equality.

Tomorrow and Wednesday will bring challenges to California’s Prop 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act, respectively.  We’ll cover both here on my show in the morning, and on the Randi Rhodes Show in the afternoon..  Yes, it’s double-headers all week long…

This morning on my show, music journalist Chris Willman will join in to give the postscript on the very sad Michelle Shocked saga.

Nicole Belle, as she does every Monday morning, will be with me in the second hour for Fools on the Hill, in which we recap the Sunday talk shows, specifically their preview of this week’s SCOTUS action…

Facing some the Supreme Court hearing arguments this week on DOMA and Prop. 8 in California, marriage equality was the big discussion on the Sunday shows.

Some shows, like the final UP with Chris Hayes, did it right and booked actual gay people and activists to come on and talk about why equality was important to them, what it felt to not have their relationships legalized and validated.  But unfortunately, most of the Beltway media Sunday shows thought that the best people to opine on marriage equality were right wing conservative (and often long disgraced) Christian activists who have actively worked against equality.

People like Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council.  Keep in mind, the FRC has been listed as a “Hate Group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, so I can’t begin to understand why the Beltway media still legitimizes him.

And Gary Bauer of the deceptively named American Values does the typical Republican thing of simply denying inconvenient facts.  He tells Chris Wallace that “polls are skewed” if they show that Americans support marriage equality.

Openly gay Hilary Rosen wasn’t given any time to really offer her first person experience of why marriage equality is important to same sex partners by David Gregory, nor point out any of the rights that are withheld from partnerships.  But when Ralph Reed (whose personal history, again, should rightly keep him from the Sunday shows) tries to tie the reason marriage equality is bad for procreation, she is able to smack him down before David Gregory changes the subject.

Conservative opinion writers have tried find their way to cautioning against marriage equality without sounding too religious, although their arguments aren’t any more sensible.  David Brooks is worried that we’re going too far too fast and this is overreach on the part of SCOTUS and Peggy Noonan agreed, saying that ‘black robed masters’ shouldn’t tell Americans what’s right for them.

And then Rand Paul proves how shallow and money-focused he is by telling Chris Wallace that his solution for gay couples is to institute a flat tax for everyone and then heterosexual married couples won’t have any tax benefits that the gays can’t have too.  No, really.

This afternoon on the Randi Rhodes Show I’ll speak with former Congressman Bob Ney about his new book, Sideswiped: Lessons Learned Courtesy of the Hit Men of Capitol Hill, and more….