Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Is thursday the big day?

Californians have been waiting since early June for our Supreme Court to issue a ruling on marriage equality. Once the State heard arguments on March 4 they had 90 days to issue their ruling: a deadline of June 4.

But the issue may come this week. Today I got an email from the Gay and Lesbian Center in Los Angeles. The email is a call for people to show up for a public demonstration after the court issues its ruling, either to celebrate or protest depending. The email invites us all to show up in West Hollywood on the evening of whatever day the ruling is issued. But then there's this interesting sentence:

"Any day now, perhaps even this Thursday, the California Supreme Court will issue its ruling on same-sex marriage..." The bold is in the original.

The rumor is that the State Court will require marriage equality for same sex couples. The question is whether they will require the change immediately (by simply opening the existing marriage laws) or whether they will throw it back to the legislature to draft new laws. The California legislature has already twice passed marriage equality laws that were on both occasions vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger.

The case the court is deciding, btw, goes back to the several months in 2004 when Mayor Gavin Newsom allowed same sex couples to marry in San Francisco. Those marriages were later invalidated by the court. But some of the previously married couples then brought suit holding that the state was wrong to invalidate their marriages. Both myself personally, and my church, and many other Unitarian Universalist congregations in California signed on to an interfaith amicus brief showing our support as religious people for marriage equality.

1 comment:

Lilylou said...

You're in the place Washington state was a couple of years ago, waiting to see what our State Supremes would do. They essentially sent it back to the legislature, which has subsequently managed to enact two domestic partnership bills providing some (not all) the benefits of marriage, but we are still working toward full marriage privileges.

I hope your Supremes are gutsier than ours.