To nobody's surprise, the California Supreme Court both upheld that state's Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage, and preserves the gay marriages that occurred before the ban was passed this November. The LA Times has a copy of the court's ruling (pdf). From that ruling:
...the principal issue before us concerns the scope of the right of the people, under the provisions of the California Constitution, to change or alter the state Constitution itself through the initiative process so as to incorporate such a limitation as an explicit section of the state Constitution.
The issue at hand wasn't the validity of a simple majority writing into the state's constitution its willingness to subvert the rights and freedoms of a minority to form families, but, instead, whether Proposition 8 "amended" the California state constitution or "revised" it. Doing so by ballot initiative is acceptable for the former under California law, but not for the latter.
Meanwhile, the court recognized the rights of same-sex couples to form long-term relationships and families, and acknowledged that Proposition 8 affected only a narrow spectrum of rights. Gays still enjoy protection from discrimination, for example, under California law.
In short, while this ruling is disappointing while still not unexpected, there's still a lot of room for hope. Dan Savage:
In 2000 California voters approved a law banning same-sex marriage. It was a ballot initiative, like Prop 8, but just a law, not a constitutional amendment. And it was that law, Prop 22, that the CA Supremes struck down in 2008, in their historic ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. And voters in 2000 approved Prop 22 in by a nearly 22-point margin. And eight years later the same voters would approved Prop 8 by four points. That's an 18-point shift in favor of marriage equality in just eight years. That's extraordinary progress. A loss is still a loss, and a loss sucks, but the trend is so strongly in our favor that we cannot lose hope. The anti-gay bigots know that they're losing this debate, and it's why they're so hot to amend state constitutions now, while they still can, while they can still count on the votes of the old, the bigoted, and the easily manipulated. But they are losing and they know it.
We're going to go back to the ballot box in California in 2010 or 2012 and voters are going to repeal Prop 8. Fundamental civil rights should not be subject to a popular vote, of course, and the CA Supremes had an opportunity to reaffirm that ideal. They chose not to, they buckled, and so we, unlike other minority groups, face the challenge of securing our rights at the ballot box. That seems daunting prospect until you recall 2000's Prop 22 and compare its margin of victory to that of 2008's Prop 8. Again, we witnessed an eighteen point shift in favor of gay marriage in California in just eight years. We can move another four points. We just have to stay in the fight and remind ourselves and each other that we are winning.
And that's not even considering that belief in same-sex rights is strongly correlative to age, and that any future vote will therefore be closer. And that's also not mentioning that this election's Proposition 8 was one of the biggest surprises of the election, and got a lot of attention because of it. And as same-sex marriage proponents are gearing up for their own initiative, which would abrogate Proposition 8, it'll get a lot of focus, and its campaign will be smarter.
And then there's this, in the wake of Massachusetts' five-year anniversary of legalizing gay marriage:
Lake Research Partners, who conducted the survey, asked 600 Massachusetts residents whether they would vote for or against a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Fully 62% of respondents said they would oppose such an amendment, up from 52% in a similar 2005 survey. Interestingly, the poll found that many residents supported marriage equality because it promoted traditional values like commitment and responsibility. This finding will surely come as a suprise to anti-gay marriage advocates who argue that it undermines the foundations of the family.
A lot of folks who are "protecting" marriage by opposing same-sex marriage apparently don't realize their efforts are actually undermining real families, many with children. That's the unspoken truth about the anti-gay movement in this country. You see it in anti-abortion rhetoric, too. It's not really about families and children. It's about using the state to enforce a particular and prejudiced moral code on all Americans. |
