News just broke that the California Supreme Court has overturned the ban on gay marriage that they initially enforced in 2004 after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom gave the green light, opening a month-long window when thousands of gay couples traveled to the Bay Area to get hitched.
The Supreme Court basically said that Newsom couldn’t take matters into his own hands, and neither could they until the lower courts acted first. Fast-forward to 2008, and the Supreme Court finally declares “that domestic partnerships are not a good enough substitute for marriage in an opinion written by Chief Justice Ron George,” according to the New York Times.
The LA Times offers a more in-depth analysis of the decision, essentially saying that this is hardly the end of the road, even in California.
The state high court’s ruling was unlikely to end the debate over gay matrimony in California. A group has circulated petitions for a November ballot initiative that would amend the state Constitution to block same-sex marriage, and the Legislature has twice passed bills to authorize gay marriage. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed both.
I find the hypocrisy and lack of foresight in the US deplorable. As we look back, 40 years removed from the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the contradiction inherent to the phrase “all men are created equal,” as written by slave-owners, is now widely accepted among all but the staunchest of rascists.
Yet most are incapable of drawing the parallel here. In the infinitely-wise words of Chris Rock, “gay people deserve to be just as miserable as the rest of us.”
For the record, I love marriage and I love my wife. And although the dynamic does shift between a couple after marriage, the bulk of the significance is legal. Provided you worked well before taking the plunge.
Still, some people in this country continue to cling to some anachronistic credo of Christianity calling the shots in people’s lives when it comes to who they can and can’t marry. Make no mistake, the easiest way to maintain national homophobia without ascribing to it is shifting the blame to God. Bush all but donned a white collar each time he spoke publicly in support of the ban on gay marriage.