Politicians, business leaders, athletes and other high-profile figures are racing to announce their support for gay marriage before the Supreme Court holds landmark arguments next week — an unusually broad and public push.

Many of them have filed formal briefs with the court. Others have stayed out of the legal case but made public declarations that they said were carefully timed in hopes that they might sway the justices.

“Those kinds of things make the court feel that what they’re doing is sensible,” said Alan Morrison, who teaches constitutional law at George Washington University. “It may not affect the constitutional questions, but the court does want to feel comfortable.”

On Thursday, the American Academy of Pediatrics, which represents 60,000 doctors, published a policy statement saying that whether a child is raised by gay or straight parents has no effect on development.

Dr. Thomas McInerny, president of the academy, told NBC News that the policy change was in the works for two years but that the academy hurried its announcement so the policy would be available for the justices.

“We are an apolitical organization,” he said. “On the other hand, we do feel very strongly about the best interests of children.”

The court will hear arguments in two cases. One is about Proposition 8, a ban on gay marriage approved by California voters in 2008. The other is about the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which blocked federal recognition of same-sex unions.

In the final days before a Supreme Court deadline to file papers in both cases, prominent Republicans rushed to add their names to a brief arguing that gay marriage promotes the conservative values of stability and mutual obligation.

Besides former governors and members of Congress, the 131 signers of the brief included top aides in the administration of George W. Bush and senior advisers to the presidential campaigns of Sen. John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney last year.

And last week, Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio became the first Republican senator to support same-sex marriage. Portman, whom Romney considered as a running mate, said that he had had a change of heart on the matter after his son, who is 21, came out.

Portman did not sign the Republican brief before the Supreme Court but said that the upcoming arguments were a factor in his decision to go public.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former secretary of state and a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, released a video last week through a gay rights group and said flatly: “I support marriage for lesbian and gay couples.” As a candidate in 2008, she had opposed gay marriage but supported civil unions.

Her announcement came after her husband, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law as president, published an Op-Ed in The Washington Post encouraging the Supreme Court to overturn it.

“I now know that, even worse than providing an excuse for discrimination, the law itself is discriminatory,” he wrote.

Morrison, from George Washington University, who filed a brief that called parts of DOMA “utterly irrational,” said that the gay rights cases may be unprecedented in drawing support from such a broad spectrum of society.

Earlier this month, more than 100 corporations, including Google, Nike and Estee Lauder, signed two briefs in support of gay marriage — arguing that blocking recognition is just not legally wrong but hurts their businesses.

Lloyd Blankfein, the head of the investment bank Goldman Sachs, told The New York Times that captains of industry “wanted to attach themselves to what may be the last great civil rights issue of our time.”

And on Monday, Rashad Evans, a mixed martial arts fighter, told the gay website Outsports that he felt a duty to support gay rights as a competitor in “a macho-type sport.”

“I have kids,” he told the site. “I don’t want them growing up in a society where they, or their friends, could be second-class citizens based on which person they fall in love with or who they want to be happy with.”

He joined a brief filed by Chris Kluwe, a punter for the Minnesota Vikings, and Brendon Ayanbadejo, a linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens.

Marc Solomon, national campaign director for the gay rights group Freedom to Marry, said that his group was pleased that the cause had drawn such broad support, particularly from the political right.

“Our side has put forth the most powerful case that could be made that America is ready,” he said. “There is no question that justices live in the real world.”

Polls show increasing public support for gay marriage. A Washington Post-ABC survey earlier this week found 58 percent for gay marriage and 36 percent opposed — a mirror image of public opinion less than a decade ago.

Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, a leading group opposed to same-sex marriage, said that the pediatrics academy had taken a “transparently political step” by endorsing gay marriage and had been influenced by studies produced by gay-marriage advocates.

“Which parent can a child do without — her mother or her father?” he said in a statement. “We remain confident that the U.S. Supreme Court will uphold the ability of states and the federal government to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman, a definition that has served our nation well for hundreds of years.”

Another group opposed to gay marriage, the Traditional Values Coalition, mocked Portman’s announcement last week by publishing a hypothetical statement from a parent who came out in favor of drunken driving because her son is a drunk driver.

When the Supreme Court takes up the question Tuesday and Wednesday, most of the public statements won’t matter, said Tom Goldstein, a founder of the widely read Scotusblog, which analyzes the court.

What’s more, he said, “Some of these developments are a double-edged sword. The cases rely to some extent on the notion that homosexuals face widespread discrimination and hostility. The fact that the country is coming around so fast ironically could hurt their cause in court.”

The announcement by the pediatrics academy could matter because it speaks directly to conservatives and their concerns in the case, he said, but “what someone thinks in Hollywood couldn’t be more irrelevant.”

This story was originally published on Thu Mar 21, 2013 1:54 PM EDT

WASHINGTON -- More than 200 businesses on Wednesday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down a federal law that restricts the definition of marriage to heterosexual unions, in one of corporate America's most prominent efforts to support same-sex marriage.

The companies signed on to a friend-of-the-court brief in Windsor v. United States, a high-profile case challenging the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). They ranged from technology giants Microsoft Corp and Google Inc to Wall Street financiers such as Citigroup Inc and Goldman Sachs Group Inc to vineyards and yogurt makers in California.

Thomson Reuters Corp, which owns the Reuters news agency, also supported the submission.

The companies want the Supreme Court to void a key provision in the federal law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. They largely stayed away from constitutional arguments attacking the law and instead focused on the business nuisance the law created.

DOMA forces employers to treat employees with same-sex spouses differently from those with opposite-sex partners, the companies said, depriving gay employees of certain healthcare and retirement benefits that may be on offer. The law also creates headaches for human resources officials, they said.

"HR departments would tell you it is a disaster trying to deal with DOMA when you are a large employer, because you have these employees who are legally married, but now you've got to put them in a different box for W-2s, for ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act), for retirement benefits, and it's really vexing," said Sabin Willett in an interview. Willett wrote the brief for his law firm, Bingham McCutchen, which handled the matter pro bono.

Separately, lawyers representing another group of employers, including some of the same companies, said they planned to file a brief on Thursday in a related case that questions a California law, known as Proposition 8, banning gay marriage.

The two cases are to be argued before the Supreme Court on March 26 and 27. A decision is expected by the end of June.

While corporate America has long offered domestic partnership benefits and made efforts to attract gay employees, the filing seemed to represent a new step in an effort to promote the issue.

"It is old news that big business is friendly to lesbian and gay unions," said Yale law professor William Eskridge, who has argued on behalf of gay rights. "But there has never been a business brief quite like this one with so many signatories on such a landmark issue," he said.

A group of prominent Republicans, including former advisers to President George W. Bush, are also expected to file a brief challenging the California law, adding heft to backers of gay rights.

The arguments appeared directed at Justice Anthony Kennedy, as a moderate and potential swing vote, to show the kind of wide support that exists, Eskridge said.

'HURTING BUSINESS'

The brief grew out of a previous effort to represent business interests in another case challenging the DOMA law, according to Willett.

That case brought together some 70 companies that felt courts may not have understood the full business impact of the law.

"When people talk about DOMA, they usually, and rightly so, focus on its impact upon human beings ... but people may not realize, and courts may not realize, this thing is hurting business, too," Willett said.

In the brief filed on Wednesday, the companies argued that DOMA "requires that employers treat one employee differently from another, when each is married, and each marriage is equally lawful."

DOMA does not create any uniformity nationwide, they said, because 12 states either authorize same-sex marriage or recognize marriages that have been performed in other states.

That creates a burden for employers, particularly those who do business nationally, they added.

The law also forces companies to discriminate, sometimes in contravention of their own internal policies and local laws, when dealing with healthcare plans and other benefits, the companies said.

In briefs already filed in support of restricting marriage to heterosexual unions, business interests have not been represented. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has not taken a stand on the issue.

The U.S. Supreme Court today essentially put the government's expanded terror surveillance program beyond legal challenge, tossing out a lawsuit filed by a group of lawyers, journalists, and civil rights groups who claimed they were improperly swept up in the law's reach.

By a 5-4 ruling, the court said the challengers couldn't show that they were actually harmed by the government's foreign terrorist surveillance program, set up during the George W. Bush administration to allow the monitoring of suspected terrorists overseas. Congress eventually approved the program, with some changes.

The issue in this case was what happens when targets of the program talk by phone or e-mail with people in the United States. The challengers claimed that because their jobs required them to talk with people overseas likely to be targeted by the program, they've had to change how they operate – traveling overseas to meet with potential clients and sources instead of talking to them by phone.

In other words, while the challengers said they couldn't prove their conversations were intercepted, because the expanded terror surveillance program is classified, it was so likely that they had the legal standing to sue.

Not so, said the five-member majority, in an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito. Their theory, he said, "is too speculative." And even though the challengers say they've had to take expensive measures to avoid the surveillance they fear is taking place, they "cannot manufacture standing by choosing to make expenditures based on hypothetical future harm."

Writing for the dissenters, Justice Stephen Breyer said the harm the challengers claim "is as likely to take place as are most future events that commonsense inference and ordinary knowledge of human nature tell us will happen."

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Supporters of same-sex marriage hope for a boost this week when dozens of high-profile Republicans, many no longer in office, submit their legal argument to the Supreme Court on why gays and lesbians should be allowed to wed, bucking their party's platform in a move that one who had a change of heart on the issue said would “strengthen our nation as a whole.”

More than 80 Republicans are signatories to the "friend of the Court" brief to be filed in the case over Proposition 8, a California law banning same-sex marriage, according to the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which is waging the legal battle against the law. The nation’s high court will hear arguments in the case in late March. The New York Times first reported on the brief.

Credit: Stephen Lam / Reuters file

Meg Whitman, HP's chief executive officer and president, at a meeting on Jan. 16. She says she has had a change of heart on the issue of gay marriage.

One scholar described the effort as “inconceivable” just two years ago, and one of the signers, former California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, said in a blog that she had changed her mind on the issue, “like several others who have either sought or held public office, including President Obama.”

“As the Republican nominee for governor of California three years ago, I supported the majority of Californians who voted for Proposition 8 and against same sex marriage,” Whitman, president and chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard Co., said in a separate statement. “After careful review and reflection since then, I have come to embrace civil marriage for same sex couples.”

She noted in her blog that same-sex families “should have equal access to the benefits of marriage” and later added: “Establishing a constitutional right of marriage equality in California will strengthen our nation as a whole.”

Six former governors, including Jon Huntsman of Utah and Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, and members of President George W. Bush’s cabinet, such as former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, four former and two current members of Congress signed the brief, AFER said. Members of the Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain presidential campaigns also signed.

The brief will be filed Thursday, according to the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group. Additional names were still being added to it, said AFER, which noted one of its lead attorneys on the case was a conservative, former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, who argued for Bush before the Supreme Court after the disputed 2000 presidential election. 

Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law School professor and author of “From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage,” called it an “incredibly important development” and noted the brief could influence Justice Anthony Kennedy, whom he said was the swing vote on gay marriage.

“The fact that more and more Republicans are coming out in favor of gay marriage simply confirms how dramatic the shift in public opinion has been -- and that is a fact that likely is of great significance to Justice Kennedy,” he wrote to NBC News in an email. “Even two years ago, it would have been inconceivable that this many prominent Republicans would have been willing to buck their party platform on the issue.”

In an article last week, former Republican presidential candidate Huntsman wrote that as governor he had backed civil unions but now was supporting marriage for gays and lesbians.

“The party of Lincoln should stand with our best tradition of equality and support full civil marriage for all Americans,” he wrote. “This is both the right thing to do and will better allow us to confront the real choice our country is facing: a choice between the Founders’ vision of a limited government that empowers free markets, with a level playing field giving opportunity to all, and a world of crony capitalism and rent-seeking by the most powerful economic interests.”

Huntsman’s argument echoed parts of the legal brief, which The Times said made the case that allowing same-sex marriage would promote conservative ideals of limited government and individual freedom as well as provide the children of gay couples a two-parent home.

The legal brief was dismissed by the National Organization for Marriage, which on Monday pledged $500,000 to defeat Republican lawmakers supporting any law to allow same-sex marriage in Minnesota, a state considering such legislation.

“None of these people are actively in politics. They are not running for office because they know … supporting same-sex marriage will end your career if you’re a Republican,” said Brian Brown, NOM's president. “There’s overwhelming support for traditional marriage in the Republican party, that’s why it’s part of the party platform, and any attempt by the establishment to redefine marriage and redefine what it means to be a conservative will mean the death of the Republican party.”

But LGBT groups said the brief was further proof of changing attitudes on the issue. Marc Solomon, national campaign director for Freedom to Marry who saw the brief, said the list included Republicans going back to the Reagan administration.

He noted Meg Whitman’s new position represented a “significant shift,” while others who had signed, such as Republican Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida and Richard Hanna of New York, have also sponsored federal legislation that would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which bars federal recognition of same-sex marriage.

Steve Schmidt, who worked on the 2004 Bush re-election effort and as chief strategist on McCain’s 2008 presidential bid, has been a “powerful supporter” of same-sex marriage, Solomon said.

“I think most importantly, it’s the broad swath of leaders” on the list, Solomon told NBC News. “We’re no longer just dealing with … one or two ‘mavericks’ who are willing to sort of stick their neck out. …

“This is a big swath of Republicans, of mainstream Republicans, who view the freedom to marry as part of their conservatism rather than something separate from it.”

The Supreme Court will also hear arguments in late March on Section 3 of DOMA, which the Obama administration has encouraged the justices to strike down. In its argument, the federal government noted that Proposition 8 and similar measures in other states was evidence that anti-gay discrimination remained a major problem.

Related:
US asks Supreme Court to strike down law denying benefits to same-sex couples
Supreme Court to take up same-sex marriage issue

A federal prosecutor came in for some biting criticism today from two Supreme Court justices for a racially charged remark made during a criminal trial.

The comment by the justices came as the court declined to hear the appeal of a man who was convicted in a Texas federal court of being in on a drug conspiracy. 

The issue for the defendant, Bongani Charles Calhoun, was whether he knew that the people he accompanied on a road trip were about to buy illegal drugs, or whether he was merely along for the ride.

During cross-examination, Calhoun said he distanced himself from the others when one of them arrived at their hotel room with a bag of money. 

The prosecutor, an assistant US attorney in the Western District of Texas, pressed him to explain why he didn't want to be there.  The prosecutor asked, "You've got African-Americans. You've got Hispanics, and you've got a bag full of money.  Does that tell you -- a light bulb doesn't go off in your head and say, 'This is a drug deal?'"

After he was convicted, Calhoun -- who is African-American -- claimed the prosecutor's racially charged remark violated his constitutional rights by appealing to the jury's prejudice.  The court today declined to take up his appeal, because his lawyers failed to properly pursue the issue in the lower courts.

But Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer said they couldn't let the case pass without writing to dispel any doubt of whether the Court's denial of the case "should be understood to signal our tolerance of a federal prosecutor's racially charged remark. It should not," they wrote.

"By suggesting that race should play a role in establishing a defendant's criminal intent, the prosecutor here tapped into a deep and sorry vein of racial prejudice that has run through the history of criminal justice in our Nation.

"It is deeply disappointing to see a representative of the United States resort to this base tactic more than a decade into the 21st century," they said.

"We expect the government to seek justice, not to fan the flames of fear and prejudice."

The justices also said it was troubling to see the Justice Department fail to immediately condemn what happened. Instead, they said, during the appeals in the lower courts, the government called the prosecutor's remark "impolitic" and said it did not affect the outcome of the trial "even assuming the question crossed the line."

Only when the case reached the Supreme Court did the Justice Department concede that the remark was "unquestionably improper."

"I hope never to see a case like this again," wrote Justice Sotomayor for herself and Justice Breyer.

As the 40^th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision takes place on Tuesday, a majority of Americans – for the first time – believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

What’s more, seven in 10 respondents oppose Roe v. Wade being overturned, which is the highest percentage on this question since 1989.

“These are profound changes,” says Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted this survey with Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart and his colleagues.

Related: Poll shows public lowers expectations heading into Obama's 2nd term

McInturff adds that the abortion-related events and rhetoric over the past year – which included controversial remarks on abortion and rape by two Republican Senate candidates, as well as a highly charged debate over contraception – helped shaped these changing poll numbers.

“The dialogue we have had in the last year has contributed … to inform and shift attitudes.”

View the poll results here

The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision established a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, at least in the first three months of pregnancy.

According to the poll, 54 percent of adults say that abortion should be legal either always or most of the time, while a combined 44 percent said it should be illegal – either with or without exceptions. 

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That’s the first time since this poll question was first asked in 2003 that a majority maintained that abortion should be legal. Previously (with just one exception in 2008), majorities said abortion should be illegal.

In addition, a whopping 70 percent of Americans oppose the Roe v. Wade decision being overturned, including 57 percent who feel strongly about this.

That’s up from the 58 percent who said the decision shouldn’t be overturned in 1989; the 60 percent who said this in 2002; and the 66 percent who said this in 2005.

By comparison, just 24 percent now want the Roe v. Wade decision overturned, including 21 percent who feel strongly about this position.

Much of this change, the NBC/WSJ pollsters say, is coming from African Americans, Latinos and women without college degrees -- all of whom increasingly oppose the Supreme Court decision being overturned.

The NBC/WSJ poll was conducted Jan. 12-15 of 1,000 adults (including 300 cellphone-only respondents), and it has a margin of error of plus-minus 3.1 percentage points. 

Related: 40 years after landmark decision, restrictions on abortion grow