California manages to mess it up big time with Prop 8 ruling

May 26th, 2009

The California Supreme Court just upheld Proposition 8 but also ruled that the existing 18,000 marriages that were performed while gay marriage was legal will remain valid.

I’m still waiting for the PDF to load so I can read the full opinion but I’ll offer more of myÂ opinions after that happens. If you would like to view the full opinion find it here:Â California Prop 8 ruling (re-hosted as official link is nearly impossible to load)

It seems that at least some of the judges realize the stupidity of Prop 8 and the horrible discrimination that it codifies-
“our task in the present proceeding is not to determine whether the provision at issue is wise or sound as a matter of policy or whether we, as individuals, believe it should be a part of the California Constitution”

The ruling is essentially making the argument that because civil unions are still valid the only change that Prop 8 presented was a change in the “designation of the term ‘marriage’” and that Prop 8 does not, in fact, deny “the constitutional right of same-sex couples to ‘choose one’s life partner and enter with that person into a committed, officially recognized, and protected family relationship that enjoys all of the constitutionally based incidents of marriage.’” Clearly this court has never explored the hell that was racial segregation during our country’s “separate but equal” period.

Find a rally near you

PS – I don’t hate Jesus or Christians. I chose this photo as a representation of what the religious wrong have done – used a religion that is supposed to preach harmony and love for your family and neighbors to impose completely unrelated ideals on others. Each and every person who uses religion as a tool for their own personal gain and to discriminate against others should be horribly ashamed of themselves.

Tags: civil rights, gay, gay marriage, Gay Rights, homosexuality, prop 8

Posted in: Gay Rights, News

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Thain

I sort of breezed through it, so I’m probably going to have missed something major here but some of the stuff at the end caught my attention. It seems from the get-go, the appeal was made on a technicality, the definition of “constitutional amendment” vs “constitutional change”. I wonder if the better appeal should have been made on the grounds of whether or not it is constitutional to allow an amendment that removes the rights of an individual. If you get to the end, it hypothesizes about the possibility of removing various voting rights, women’s rights, etc. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t know the ins and outs of the Cali constitution, but it seems to me there ought to be some provision about not abridging the rights of the individual. I would think that stripping away the right to marry for a large group of people falls squarely under that heading, no matter what mechanism is used to do it.

Any rumbles of another appeal or anything, or is everyone headed to Starbucks for 5 seconds of whining about it, then talk about how Adam Lambert should have won?
http://www.thatdorkjordan.com Jordan

Well the problem becomes that this was an amendment to the constitution. If you amend the constitution – something that may have been unconstitutional previously becomes constitutional. Thus the argument _had_ to be about the process through which the amendment was made.

As for the next steps… By 2010 there will be a ballot initiative to reverse Prop 8 in California. Basically amending the constitution to strike the previous amendment. The good news is every time equality is defeated it gets a lot of attention and recently that has been quite positive (Iowa, DC, Maine, New York soon, Illinois soon, most likely NJ going to marriage instead of civil unions).