The latest on Prop 8 from the LA Times:
The California Supreme Court today upheld Proposition 8’s ban on same-sex marriage but also ruled that gay couples who wed before the election will continue to be married under state law.
….Although the court split 6-1 on the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the justices were unanimous in deciding to keep intact the marriages of as many as 18,000 gay couples who exchanged vows before the election. The marriages began last June, after a 4-3 state high court ruling striking down the marriage ban last May.
This doesn’t surprise me on either count. The argument that Prop 8 was a constitutional “revision” requiring a two-thirds vote, not a constitutional amendment requiring a majority vote, never seemed legally defensible. At the same time, all the marriages performed prior to Prop 8 were as legal as church on Sunday. I don’t know if even an initiative could retroactively annul them, but at the very least it would need to do so specifically and directly, which Prop 8 didn’t.
But it might soon be moot anyway. Prop 8 passed by only a bare majority, and public sentiment is continuing to change. An initiative to legalize gay marriage might well pass in 2010, and if it doesn’t it certainly will by 2012 or 2014 at the latest. Time is on the side of the good guys.
