More on the California gay marriage ruling

Couple of good articles in the LA Times about the state supreme court decision yesterday that overturned the legal ban on gay marriage.

It’s an instant presidential campaign issue, for starters. It’s not just California — it now raises the issue nation-wide again. McCain — who has made all the “right” noises about “protecting marriage” — now suddenly risks alienating either his GOP conservative base or his moderate base if he comes out either too strongly or too softly. I suspect it’s not as strong an issue to raise or pursue for most moderates as it is for the conservatives — but if he comes out as forcefully as he’ll be pushed to from the Right, it may seriously backfire.

Obama and Clinton have both taken a more center position on the issue — not favoring gay marriage, but okay with civil unions. If the Left presses the Democratic candidate to take a stronger stand, again, the center might get turned off; if the candidate fails to take a strong stand, though, it might turn off some of the (ahem) younger generation that, as a whole, approves of the whole gay marriage thing.

I think the risks are greater for McCain than the Democratic nominee, but it does bring the whole “values” issue back to the fore, and maybe will help demonstrate that people to the left of Pat Robertson have “values,” too.

For the moment, everyone’s treading water.

 All three offered finessed responses Thursday, saying that defining marriage is best left to individual states.

In an apparent effort to assuage supporters, McCain reiterated his belief that states have a right to ban same-sex marriage. Obama and Clinton emphasized support for civil unions and equal rights for same-sex couples.

In California, where it looks like there will be a ballot proposition to constitutionally ban gay marriage, the question is whether that will draw more conservatives to the polls or not. A lot of that may depend on how the presidential campaign plays out. Though, notably.

Not surprisingly, the most definitive political statement Thursday came from someone not on the November ballot: California’s Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“I respect the court’s decision and as governor, I will uphold its ruling,” Schwarzenegger said. “Also, as I have said in the past, I will not support an amendment to the Constitution that would overturn this state Supreme Court ruling.”

The actual decision goes beyond just this actual item.

The majority opinion, by Chief Justice Ronald M. George, declared that any law that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation will from this point on be constitutionally suspect in California in the same way as laws that discriminate by race or gender, making the state’s high court the first in the nation to adopt such a stringent standard.

Good on them. 

The court’s ruling repeatedly invoked the words “respect and dignity” and framed the marriage question as one that deeply affected not just couples but also their children. California has more than 100,000 households headed by gay couples, about a quarter with children, according to 2000 census data.

“Our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation,” George wrote for the majority. “An individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.”

Looking at the actual decision, the court framed it interestingly. Given that California already had a strong statutory domestic partnership law for gay couples …

Accordingly, the legal issue we must resolve is not whether it would be constitutionally permissible under the California Constitution for the state to limit marriage only to opposite-sex couples while denying same-sex couples any opportunity to enter into an official relationship with all or virtually all of the same substantive attributes, but rather whether our state Constitution prohibits the state from establishing a statutory scheme in which both opposite-sex and same-sex couples are granted the right to enter into an
officially recognized family relationship that affords all of the significant legal rights and obligations traditionally associated under state law with the institution of marriage, but under which the union of an opposite-sex couple is officially designated a “marriage” whereas the union of a same-sex couple is officially designated a “domestic partnership.” The question we must address is whether, under these circumstances, the failure to designate the official relationship of same-sex couples as marriage violates the California Constitution.

In other words, state law already made the status more or less equal — the court was looking at whether it could then call it different things without getting into “separate but equal” territory. They decided not.

Meanwhile, the Right is fulminating.

“This is yet another example of why the people need to go to the polls in November to defend the historic and natural definition of marriage,” said Ron Prentice, executive director of the Sacramento- and Riverside-based California Family Council, which opposes same-sex marriage.

Yeah — it’s all about “history” (and what’s “natural”). As the court noted, the same was true when it struck down (in 1948) bans on interracial marriage, too. But, then, using Mr Prentice’s arguments, maybe we can get a polygamy clause into his ballot measure, too — that’s not only natural and historical but Biblical as well.