California Supreme Court Overrules Gay Marriage Ban
Gay marriage was made illegal in California through an initiated measure and a vote of the people. Previous to that, it had been banned by the legislators themselves. But the state’s Supreme Court is overruling the will of the people through a court decision which, frankly, reads more like a proclamation from a monarchy than a ruling from one branch of government in a representative democracy:
We need not decide in this case whether the name “marriage” is invariably a core element of the state constitutional right to marry so that the state would violate a couple’s constitutional right even if — perhaps in order to emphasize and clarify that this civil institution is distinct from the religious institution of marriage — the state were to assign a name other than marriage as the official designation of the formal family relationship for all couples. Under the current statutes, the state has not revised the name of the official family relationship for all couples, but rather has drawn a distinction between the name for the official family relationship of opposite-sex couples (marriage) and that for same-sex couples (domestic partnership). One of the core elements of the right to establish an officially recognized family that is embodied in the California constitutional right to marry is a couple’s right to have their family relationship accorded dignity and respect equal to that accorded other officially recognized families, and assigning a different designation for the family relationship of same-sex couples while reserving the historic designation of “marriage” exclusively for opposite-sex couples poses at least a serious risk of denying the family relationship of same-sex couples such equal dignity and respect. We therefore conclude that although the provisions of the current domestic partnership legislation afford same-sex couples most of the substantive elements embodied in the constitutional right to marry, the current California statutes nonetheless must be viewed as potentially impinging upon a same-sex couple’s constitutional right to marry under the California Constitution.
Personally, I don’t really have a dog in the gay marriage hunt. I don’t really care if gays want to marry one another. I’m not going to march in the streets and carry on as though such unions were some sort of a “right,” but I’m not opposed to it either.
What I am concerned about, however, is the legislative process and the way it’s being usurped by the judiciary.
The people of California made their will on this issue known through the legislative process, and later more directly through the initiated measure process. Given that government in America is supposed to bend to the will of the people, how can a group of justices invested with no legislative power possibly have justification to eschew the clearly expressed will of Californians?
Again, I don’t really care if gays marry. But I do worry about the decidedly un-American way in which gay activists are going about advocating their issues. One has to wonder if it’s even in their interest to win their issue in this manner given the resentment their fellow citizens are bound to feel as to their will, as expressed through the legislative process, being completely ignored.
The gays may have won this ruling, but they’ve also won a whole lot of ill-will from their fellow citizens. It would be better - albeit slower - to convince enough of their fellow citizens to support gay marriage rather than to ram the issue down their throats through the improper use of judicial power.
