Breaking News from ABCNEWS.com:
May 15, 2008 / Thursday

CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT OVERTURNS BAN ON GAY MARRIAGE, PAVING WAY FOR STATE TO BECOME SECOND TO ALLOW GAY NUPTIALS, THE AP REPORTS

http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/wireStory?id=4859659

California ban on same-sex marriage struck down

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In a much-anticipated ruling issued Thursday, the California Supreme Court struck down the state's ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional.

Several gay and lesbian couples, along with the city of San Francisco and gay rights groups, sued to overturn state laws allowing only marriages between a man and a woman.

"There can be no doubt that extending the designation of marriage to same-sex couples, rather than denying it to all couples, is the equal protection remedy that is most consistent with our state's general legislative policy and preference," said the 120-page ruling.

It said that the state law's language "limiting the designation of marriage to a 'union between a man and a woman' is unconstitutional, and that the remaining statutory language must be understood as making the designation of marriage available to both opposite-sex and same-sex couples."

With the ruling, California becomes the second state to allow same-sex couples to legally wed. Massachusetts adopted the practice in 2004, and couples don't need to be state residents to wed there.

Vermont, New Jersey, New Hampshire and Connecticut permit civil unions, while California has a domestic-partner registration law. More than a dozen other states give gay couples some legal rights.

Seven other jurisdictions around the world have legalized same-sex marriage: Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, South Africa and the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec.

San Francisco officials in 2004 allowed same-sex couples in the city to wed, prompting a flood of applicants crowding the city hall clerk's office. The first couple to wed then was 80-year-old Phyllis Lyon and 83-year-old Dorothy Martin, lovers for 50 years.

"We have a right just like anyone else to get married to the person we want to get married to," Lyon said at the time.

One issue before the justices was whether San Francisco's laws carried legal weight when the rest of the state banned same-sex marriages. Gay rights advocates argued the state was violating their civil rights by limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples. The state law in question is the Defense of Marriage Act, Proposition 22.

Oral arguments in the case in March lasted more than three hours, a sign of the political and legal issues at stake. Six cases were consolidated.

Groups saying they were promoting a pro-family agenda had vowed to fight a statewide law allowing same-sex marriage.

"The government should promote and encourage strong families," said Glen Lavy of the Alliance Defense Fund. "The voters realize that defining marriage as one man and one woman is important because the government should not, by design, deny a child both a mother and father."

An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is likely. The federal high court has never addressed the question of same-sex marriage.

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

What I find encouraging about this in a political sense (and admittedly it is still very early in the game) is that neither the Drudge Report nor the Washington Times is headlining this story. Hopefully the right-wing loonies won't try to mobilize an anti-gay storm surge as they did back in 2000 to rally their base, using gay-marriage as the "end of the world" scenario to get conservatives out to vote.

McCain, although not endorsing gay marriage, has publicly stated he is adamantly opposed to a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, as it is more properly an issue for the states. Let's see if he changes his tune, now that he desperately needs the fundamentalists to turn out on his behalf.

Yep, I've already got a pair of flip-flops all packaged and ready to mail the good Senator ... just in case.

The conservatives must have gotten their stiite together on this: NOW it's the lead story both on Drudge and on Washington Times -- LOL. It took them a little while, but I guess they've seen the light -- gotta jump on this issue big time to rally the troops.

Also, an interesting sidelight: the Washington Times uses the word "gay" in their story. This is different from their usual practice of using the word "homosexual," apparently feeling the latter word has more negative feelings attached to it for their readership.

And to tie this to the DADT issue, here is Congresswoman's Tauscher's statement on gay marriage in California (She is a CA Congressional Representative, and she is the lead author of the Military Readiness Enhancement Act to repeal DADT):

Congresswoman Ellen O. Tauscher
10TH District – California

Washington (202) 225-1880 –Walnut Creek (925) 932-8899 – Fairfield (707) 428-7792 – Antioch (925) 757-7187



FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Kevin Lawlor, 202/225-1880

May 15, 2008 www.house.gov/tauscher

Rep. Ellen Tauscher Applauds Calif. Supreme Court for Overturning Gay Marriage Ban

Washington, DC - In response to The California State Supreme Court overturning a ban on same-sex marriages; Rep. Ellen Tauscher released the following statement in support of the Court’s decision.

“This is the right decision for California and I hope the rest of America will follow suit. Marriage is a civil right. When we withhold it from one segment of the population we are doing a disservice to the principles of fairness and equality upon which our country was founded. I will continue to work in Congress to achieve this level of equality on the issue of marriage as well as related issues like the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, a policy that is preventing otherwise fully qualified men and women from serving their country in the military and by doing so damaging the readiness of our Armed Forces.”





###



Kevin W. Lawlor
Communications Director
The Office of Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher, California 10
202 225 1880
202 225 4182 (m)

www.house.gov/tauscher

=

This is a fascinating development. Having the most populous state in the nation legalize gay marriage is going to SERIOUSLY increase the pressure to honor the "Full Faith and Credit" clause - requiring other states to accept those marriages as legitimate.

At some point, some state is going to turn it around, and refuse to accept marriages performed in one or more other states as legal until they accept ALL marriages performed in their state as legal. THAT will be an interesting Supreme Court case.

I laugh when conservatives cite the "will of the people"


Honestly, since when does the gay couple thats been living next to you for 20 years, gets married and lives happily ever after for 40 years until they both die, affect you?

Sanctity of marriage my a$$. The divorce rate these days within 3 years is like 70%.

quote:

Originally posted by coolada:
Sanctity of marriage my a$$. The divorce rate these days within 3 years is like 70%.

More like 40-45%, according to this story, and not within three years, but overall - but still a valid point.

The main reason some of these folks are so dead set against gay marriage is that it's hard to demonize and label as perverts a coupla folks who have been married to each other for longer than you have.

quote:

Originally posted by BobApril:

quote:

Originally posted by coolada:
Sanctity of marriage my a$$. The divorce rate these days within 3 years is like 70%.

More like 40-45%, according to this story, and not within three years, but overall - but still a valid point.

Does that percentage include the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th divorces that some have? It's like a roller coaster out there. They've had more divorces than I've had sex partners!!! <slinking away before someone comments on this one>.......

Look how long it took for interacial marriges to become legal

My moms 53 and she is on her....hold on I actually need to think on this.

4th marriage.

quote:

Originally posted by Bleah:
The main reason some of these folks are so dead set against gay marriage is that it's hard to demonize and label as perverts a coupla folks who have been married to each other for longer than you have.

Hah, they are all jealous of the queers that are married longer than they have been alive!

I think California's decision is an incredible step that definitely goes down in the history books.

However, in tying it back to Don't Ask Don't Tell, it is a sad reminder of just how antiquated DADT is.

Our LGBT service members are fighting for freedoms that they themselves do not have the right to partake in.

One of the three reason that you can be discharged under DADT is "being married, or attempt to marry someone of the same sex".

A Washington Post editorial presents another view. It says that the court decision was bad, not because the author is against gay marriage, but because the backlash against the court decision is likely to wipe out the gains CA homosexuals already had in terms of civil unions.

Goin’ to the Chapel: A Quick Trip to Gay and Lesbian Marriages

by Rosa Maria Pegueros

If Rhode Island were to legalize gay marriage, it might make a ripple but with scarcely one million residents, a paucity of religious fanatics and a sterling tradition of religious tolerance starting with founder Roger Williams, the fuss over it would die off pretty quickly. Nevertheless, RI has not yet done so. With Massachusetts on our border, I believe that it’s only a matter of time, particularly since our attorney general, Patrick C. Lynch, broke legal ground in 1987 by issuing a legal opinion recognizing as valid same-sex marriages performed in Massachusetts.

Then there’s California. Approximately 38,000,000 people live there; they comprise over 12.5% of America’s population 303,824,646 (2008 est.) Now the California Supreme Court has ruled that gays and lesbians can marry. As the saying goes, when California speaks, people listen. A social earthquake there sends shock waves across the country. You can be sure that the lunatic fringe will be militant and armed, ready to force people back into the closet but how effective will they be against the rising tide?

In the eighties, I was involved in the gay and lesbian movement in California, organizing for changes in the law to end employment discrimination. Working with then state representative Art Agnos who sponsored AB-1, we succeeded in getting the bill approved by both houses of the legislature, only to have it vetoed by Gov. George Deukmejian: He said that there was no evidence of discrimination against gays and lesbians. It was a tough loss. We started the documentation project intended to collect evidence of discrimination so that he could not use that weak excuse again.

Then AIDS exploded on the scene. One of the leaders of the lesbigay movement, Clive Jones, created the first AIDS quilt and the movement took a turn as thousands of gay men lost their lives before the “cocktail” came into use that turned it into a chronic disease rather than one that killed all it touched.

Before President Bill Clinton took control of the White House in 1993, few in the community spoke seriously of gay marriage. In part, gay men were far more visible than lesbians, and they were — at the time — concerned less with that than with other aspects of being gay. For women, the lack of visibility had always been a mixed bag. Even the biblical proscriptions against homosexuality did not mention women: It seems that it never occurred to the authors of the Bible that women could be homosexual. There was also an element, among some in the community, of transgressiveness. Many gay people opposed gay marriage because they did not want to ape straight society. How much of that was self-protection, a rejection of what was clearly out of reach, cannot be measured.

Things changed during the 1990s because the Right ambushed Bill Clinton immediately upon his inauguration. They came at him with a question about legalizing gays in the military. While his initial response was that he would end discrimination against gays and lesbians, the opposition, led by Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA), chairman of the powerful U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, was so vehement, that Clinton was forced back into the now infamous “Don’t ask, don’t tell” proscription. By July of that year, it was all over.

Gay and lesbian leaders, especially Clinton fund raiser David Mixner, were furious at Clinton for the retreat to the hypocritical stance that kept American Armed Service personnel in the closet. Bill Clinton, who tried to govern from the center, could please no one in this regard. The Right considered “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to be the first toe in the door for legalizing homosexuality; while the lesbigay movement thought him a gutless wonder for backing down.

In the late 1980s, Virginia Uribe, a lesbian high school teacher at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles inaugurated Project 10, meant to help and give refuge to gay and lesbian teenagers. Noting the high degree of suicide among them, she believed that she could save lives by giving them support in the setting that was most hostile to them, their own school. I was at the president of the California NOW Foundation and we had helped to fund Project 10’s resource guide. I attended the hearing before the Los Angeles School Board over Project 10. It was the most poisonous assembly I have ever attended. All they were missing were crosses being burnt by men in white hoods.

Several fundamentalist preachers, including the Revolting Lou Shelton of the Christian Traditional Values Coalition, arrived early, flooding the hearing room with busloads of their adherents. Most of the pro-gay speakers had to wait in the adjacent courtyard, listening to the testimony over loudspeakers. The pros- and antis- took turns presenting their evidence. I was inside and appalled at the “testimony” offered by the antis-. They would read lurid descriptions of gay male couples and lesbians having sex. In those pre-Internet times, they must have had a grand time perusing pornographic magazines for just the right tidbit. Since fantasies of lesbians having sex have long been a part of straight male porn, and because there was so little in print by lesbians about sex at the time, one could surmise what some of their sources must be. Of course, read a description of anybody of any orientation having sex and it will sound pretty shocking. There must have been a great many bulging crotches at that hearing as they heard their fantasies read out loud into the public record. They did not succeed in shutting down Project 10 in spite of their religious fervor and prurient dramatic readings.

But change was afoot. Just as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” led to an uneasy truce in the armed services, AIDS forced gay men out of the closet and Americans were forced to acknowledge their gay and lesbians children.

With the movie Philadelphia starring Tom Hanks as a gay man infected with AIDS; Antonio Banderas as his lover, and Denzel Washington as his homophobic turned sympathetic lawyer, America saw gay people for the first time not as suicidal, tragic, pathetic creatures, but as ordinary, hard-working Americans, loved by their families and doing useful work in the world.

It was in this context that the movement towards gay marriage began. Lesbians who had lost their children to hostile former husbands because the force of the law was weighted on the side of the traditional family, began to win custody of their own children; more gay men won custody of their children as well. The laws and the judges were changing. Baby could have two mommies; artificial insemination made child-bearing possible for women without men, making it possible for a woman to choose to be a lesbian and to be a parent. Gay and lesbian couples were allowed to adopt children, and the slow-moving giant of social service policy, admitted (at least in some places in America) that a child with two parents in any combination would be better off than in soul-destroying multiple foster placements or institutionalization. My sister, a social worker with San Francisco’s Dependent Children’s Services, says she has no qualms about placing a child with a gay or lesbian couple. Given the high degree of culpability for child molestation by straight men, giving a child to a gay or lesbian couple is a far safer bet.

So we come to the matter of gay and lesbian marriage. We who want change would do well to remember (but not surrender to) the notion that change comes slowly, and it is always one step forward, two steps back. As the great abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without struggle.” Our history, with all its fits and starts, twists and turns, has finally made gay and lesbian marriage inevitable. It may be a long time before gay marriage is accepted in the conservative middle of the United States, but Massachusetts and California have started the ball rolling. There will be no going back.

Dr. Rosa Maria Pegueros is an associate professor of Latin American History and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island.

Very interesting op-ed. Thanks, HAWKER, for posting. I agree with the author.

I think if California allows gay marriages to proceed before the ballot initiative in November, it will be a very powerful force for defusing the negative stereotypes of gays and lesbians that are held by so many opponents of equal rights for the GLBT community. When the public sees images of average gay men and women getting married, loving couples who want nothing more than the same rights as their straight friends, neighbors, relatives and co-workers, it will go a long way to defusing the hype that gay opponents will no doubt foster in trying to defeat gay marriage.

quote:

Originally posted by dupontgaf:
When the public sees images of average gay men and women getting married, loving couples who want nothing more than the same rights as their straight friends, neighbors, relatives and co-workers, it will go a long way to defusing the hype that gay opponents will no doubt foster in trying to defeat gay marriage.

Will they see those images, Dupont? Or will the media - especially the extremist conservative portion of the media - show only the most flamboyant of the weddings, the ones that look like they arrived direct from Folsom Street? Heck, even the mainstream media likes a bit of sensationalism...

These next few months would probably be a good time for the hyper-exhibitionists to take a little break. I'm guessing that won't happen, though, and the worst of the right-wing media outlets will have plenty of pictures to counter images of the much more numerous "average gay men and women."

Or maybe I'm just having a pessimistic day, and seeing nothing but worst-case scenarios. We can hope.