GAY MARRIAGE LEGAL IN CALIFORNIA

[Guest EurythmicThrust]

HISTORIC RULING BY THE CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT!

The judges overturned the ban against gay marriage (Prop 22), paving the way for Californians to join Massushcuetts as the only states to allow same sex couples to legally marry!

Ther are still obstacles to be faced, but this ruling has frankly shocked me (thought the judges would vote against overturning the ban, saying Ca's domestic partnership laws have the gays covered already). There is a petition poised to be on the Nov 08 ballot that would write into the state Constitution that marriage should be between a man and a woman, so thats the next battle. And of course the right wingers will try to attach this to the Democratic Presidental nominee.

For today though, I sit here knowing I can now legally marry my partner!

[TotallyOz]

It was a great ruling. Fantastic for all.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/05/15/same.sex....iage/index.html

[TampaYankee]

While the ruling is great news, I wish this would have waited until next year. It is unfortunate that this wedge issue receives an elevated profile as we head toward the general election.

I don't know the specifics of the California constitutional ammendment process but I fear that discrimination may be enshrined in the California constutution at then end of the day.

[AdamSmith]

I don't know the specifics of the California constitutional ammendment process but I fear that discrimination may be enshrined in the California constutution at then end of the day.

Side note. A Massachusetts resident, I'm married to my partner of 14 years. After the Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2004 that marriage discrimination based on sexual orientation violated the state constitution, we laid aside notions that marriage is a conformist bourgeois institution, etc., etc., and got hitched. Because (1) it was what our hearts told us to do; (2) in this context, being old married farts seemed, paradoxically, the best way to stake a life on the social frontier; and (3) my thought especially - if they ever repealed it, the marriages entered into while it was in force could not be revoked, so we would stand as something of the same reminder as Jewry during the Christian Middle Ages - incontrovertible reminders that an alternate reality exists.

Main note, and civics lecture: Massachusetts, after some saber-rattling by rightist elements in the legislature, did NOT enact a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and thus reverse the court's ruling. Part of why not was the genius of John Adams, author of the Massachusetts state constitution (by most accounts, the oldest functioning constitution in the world). Adams believed, and said repeatedly, that the people's good sense would win out if they were given enough time to consider any issue and not be swayed by the passions of the hour. To amend the state constitution, therefore, not one but two successive sessions of the state legislature have to approve the proposed amendment, and then it has to go before the people in a general ballot. After a couple of years of seeing gay marriage in operation, the balance of popular opinion in the state turned from against it to in favor of it. To be sure, there were what opponents called legislative shenanigans in preventing the measure from reaching the ballot, but polls did not show any groundswell of sentiment to have it come up.

All this is to say that even if CA residents vote against it, I think it will only be a verdict on the flaws of their direct-democracy approach over the strengths of representive democracy, not on people's underlying sense of the rightness of gay marriage rights. History has begun moving the right way, I believe, and the tide will prove irresistable.