California Supreme Court Rules Lesbian and Gay Couples Have Right To Marry
The court ordered the offending language barring same-sex marriage stricken from the statute, and directed county clerks and other local officials to perform their duty to enforce the marriage statutes accordingly. Quotes from key sections of the ruling are available here.
According to the controlling opinion:
Our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibility to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation, and, more generally, that 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.
We conclude that, under this state’s Constitution, the constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage that are so integral to an individual’s liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process. These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish — with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life — an officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity according a union traditionally designated as marriage.“The court’s decision today upheld the highest ideals of fairness and opportunity that are embodied in the California Constitution,” said Shannon Price Minter, Legal Director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, who argued the case on behalf of 14 same-sex couples and two organizations, Equality California and Our Family Coalition.
Currently, lesbian and gay couples may legally marry in Massachusetts, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and South Africa. In 2007, an Iowa trial court held that Iowa’s marriage ban violates the Iowa Constitution. That case is now before the Iowa Supreme Court. A lawsuit challenging the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage in Connecticut is also pending before the Connecticut Supreme Court.
Anticipating this ruling, opponents of same-sex gay marriage are attempting to amend the California Constitution to discriminate against lesbian and gay couples. A group funded by numerous out-of-state interests hopes to qualify an initiative on the November ballot that would ask voters to alter the constitution by denying gay and lesbian couples the freedom to marry, which the court upheld today. The California Secretary of State has not yet determined if the initiative has qualified for the November ballot.
Written By:Clayton On May 15, 2008 2:02 PM Written By:well On May 15, 2008 3:09 PM
It's not about what the states gain or lose. The focus is on individual rights. The court says the state cannot treat similarly situated people differently.
civil rights is here, thank god
http://www.queersunited.blogspot.com
Its illeagal to overturn something that was voted on by the constituients. The judges should be fired because they think that they can over-rule the peoples vote. Thats not American.
The judges addressed that in their opinion. Basically, the citizens approved their state constitution, which trumps legislation. The court merely enforced the state's constitution.
It is the job of judges to enforce rights identified in the constitution: they should be praised.
To your point, here's what the Court said:
"Although defendants maintain that this court has an obligation to defer to the statutory definition of marriage contained in section 308.5 because that statute — having been adopted through the initiative process — represents the expression of the “people’s will,� this argument fails to take into account the very basic point that the provisions of the California Constitution itself constitute the ultimate expression of the people’s will, and that the fundamental rights embodied within that Constitution for the protection of all persons represent restraints that the people themselves have imposed upon the statutory enactments that may be adopted either by their elected representatives or by the voters through the initiative process."
It's not about what the states gain or lose. The focus is on individual rights.
But it is ludicrous to support individual rights that do not serve, and in fact preclude, the common good. And if we don't pay attention to the common good, individual rights will be the first thing to disappear. We quickly become a collective of competing, conflicting, and even contradictory rights if we don't consider the common good:
If the promotion of the self is understood in terms of absolute autonomy, people inevitably reach the point of rejecting one another. Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself. Thus society becomes a mass of individuals placed side by side, but without any mutual bonds. Each one wishes to assert himself independently of the other and in fact intends to make his own interests prevail. Still, in the face of other people's analogous interests, some kind of compromise must be found, if one wants a society in which the maximum possible freedom is guaranteed to each individual. In this way, any reference to common values and to a truth absolutely binding on everyone is lost, and social life ventures on to the shifting sands of complete relativism. At that point, everything is negotiable, everything is open to bargaining: even the first of the fundamental rights, the right to life.
This is what is happening also at the level of politics and government: the original and inalienable right to life is questioned or denied on the basis of a parliamentary vote or the will of one part of the people-even if it is the majority. This is the sinister result of a relativism which reigns unopposed: the "right" ceases to be such, because it is no longer firmly founded on the inviolable dignity of the person, but is made subject to the will of the stronger part. In this way democracy, contradicting its own principles, effectively moves towards a form of totalitarianism. The State is no longer the "common home" where all can live together on the basis of principles of fundamental equality, but is transformed into a tyrant State...
I still have found no facts that truely state, that same sex marriage will harm a Darn thing. If marriage is for procriation only, then EVERYONE has broken that rule. There can be no sex without trying to get a woman pregnate. Who is truely standing by that???????
Same sex couples are not trying to hurt marriage. What is hurting marriage is the fact that people do not care what they got married for and decide to get divorced. That is what is hurting the ideal of marriage.
REMEMBER those of you that feel marriage is for procriation only, NO SEX FOR YOU UNLESS A CHILD COMES FROM IT. IF NOT YOU MIGHT AS WELL GET DIVORCED AND SCREW UP MARRIAGE MORE!
D,
You misrepresent the position of the Church (which is a position based on natural law, not on the Christian creed). Marriage is not just for procreation. It also serves a unitive purpose.
Both ends of marriage -- procreative and unitive -- must be respected. That doesn't mean that every sexual act will generate new life, but that each act ought to be open to the possibility of conception. Homosexual acts are never open to that possibility... for obvious reasons.
You do raise a good point -- if contraception is OK, then hey, what's the big deal? The bigger problem in human society is contraception, which teaches us to use each other, rather than accept, revere and love each other totally - including the gift of fertility that both man and woman bring to conjugal love.
Can someone explain what the state and polis have to gain by recognizing homosexual unions? I mean, it's nice for the couple themselves, but why is the Supreme Court issuing an opinion that redefines marriage? As if they had a right do so...
Those who believe that same-sex genital coupling can lead to true human happiness and that it can also be good for society are going to believe that legislation protecting marriage as a heterosexual institution is discriminatory. There are time-honored communities, however, that beg to differ: Society owes its continued survival to the family, founded on marriage. The inevitable consequence of legal recognition of homosexual unions would be the redefinition of marriage, which would become, in its legal status, an institution devoid of essential reference to factors linked to heterosexuality; for example, procreation and raising children. If, from the legal standpoint, marriage between a man and a woman were to be considered just one possible form of marriage, the concept of marriage would undergo a radical transformation, with grave detriment to the common good. By putting homosexual unions on a legal plane analogous to that of marriage and the family, the State acts arbitrarily and in contradiction with its duties. The principles of respect and non-discrimination cannot be invoked to support legal recognition of homosexual unions. Differentiating between persons or refusing social recognition or benefits is unacceptable only when it is contrary to justice. The denial of the social and legal status of marriage to forms of cohabitation that are not and cannot be marital is not opposed to justice; on the contrary, justice requires it. Nor can the principle of the proper autonomy of the individual be reasonably invoked. It is one thing to maintain that individual citizens may freely engage in those activities that interest them and that this falls within the common civil right to freedom; it is something quite different to hold that activities which do not represent a significant or positive contribution to the development of the human person in society can receive specific and categorical legal recognition by the State. Not even in a remote analogous sense do homosexual unions fulfil the purpose for which marriage and family deserve specific categorical recognition. On the contrary, there are good reasons for holding that such unions are harmful to the proper development of human society, especially if their impact on society were to increase.