Update: legal interpretation of California ruling
May 16th, 2008 by Holly Fox
Slate.com analyzes yesterday’s California Supreme Court ruling overturning laws making same-sex marriage illegal here. Author Kenji Yoshino argues that while Massachusetts will always have the honor of being the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, the California ruling is legally more significant.
The California Supreme Court came to the same conclusion [as the Massachusetts Supreme Court], but in terms that have more legal bite and greater political consequence.
It’s complicated to explain the difference in the rulings and I’ll leave that up to Slate, but key to understanding the weight of the California ruling is the concept of strict scrutiny. Chief Justice Ronald M. George found that excluding gays from marriage violated their fundamental rights, meaning that
the state would have to produce a compelling reason to bar gays from what the court deemed “the most socially productive and individually fulfilling relationship that one can enjoy in the course of a lifetime.”
Another important part of the ruling was the rejection of tradition as a basis for excluding gays from marriage.
Allowing tradition to thus entrench itself, [George] said, would have allowed for laws barring interracial couples. And, as he noted, the California Supreme Court struck down a ban on interracial marriage in 1948, almost two decades before the U.S. Supreme Court did in Loving v. Virginia.
Keep in mind that there is already an initiative on California’s November ballot seeking to amend the constitution to ban same-sex marriage. If that initiative passes then yesterday’s ruling would no longer hold any weight.
Do any of you have legal experience and an opinion on the ruling? Do you think the parallel between racial discrimination and the discrimination against sexual orientation is valid?
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