swan_tower | Prop 8 info

Just as a heads-up to interested folks. (No, I haven't gotten to work yet. Surprise!)

First of all, they're still counting provisional/absentee/early/etc. votes, so the result is not official. However, it's highly likely that the measure will pass.

But, its passage in the election isn't the end. Lawsuits have already been filed. Short form, as I understand it, is that same-sex marriages were recognized in California because the CA Supreme Court ruled that opposing them was unconstitutional. Amending the constitution, according to more educated opinions than mine, doesn't remove the conflict with Article I. So on legal grounds, the amendment itself may be struck down as unconstitutional. Getting around that would require revising the original text of the constitution, which is much harder to do.

Moreover, as that link points out, the CA justices said back when they made their decision that there were two ways to solve this problem. The easier one was to legalize same-sex marriage. The much, much harder one was to say, "to hell with this; civil unions for everybody, gay or straight." Which in some ways I'm in favor of: I don't think what the government says about a relationship and what a given religion says about it should have anything to do with one another. If we could actually push through a terminology change that would recognize the difference, I'd be in favor of it. But (as noted in the comments to that post) this creates a massive inter-state problem, since civil unions are not simply marriage by another name, not under the variety of state laws the U.S. has. So this may be more of a nuclear option than anything else: do all the people who voted for Prop 8 really want to go down that road?

Let's be pessimistic, though, and say the amendment stands, and the legal fight continues. This analysis lays out the basics of how it would fare in the U.S. Supreme Court. Short form of that one is, this could be the queen sacrifice (no pun intended <g>) that wins the chess game. There's a strong body of federal law and precedent and so on that can be mobilized to support gay marriage rights, and a Supreme Court decision in that direction would address this question in all fifty states at once. And while we may be worried about conservative justices, conservative or not, they have to respect the implications of the law.

kittenrae suggests those implications would, in the end, be in favor of acceptance.

So: while the proposition will likely pass, the results may not be as bad as you fear. And the fallout from here will be interesting to watch.

(Links by way of

zellandyne.)