While gay marriage in California was given a victory today when a federal judge in San Francisco overturned a ban on gay marriage in the state, I have also just learned that he has issued a stay against any immediate action on that, meaning that gays can’t get married just yet, as I understand it. If they did, they’d be in legal limbo.
But since this is a ruling by a federal court it could have implications nationwide. The judge ruled that the opponents of gay marriage failed to show how gay marriage would damage conventional marriage.
Gay people should be allowed to be married (at least in California), a federal court in San Francisco has just ruled. This news is so new that as I write this I have not seen word of it on the web yet, but I am catching a CNN TV report.
Of course this fight is not over until the U.S. Supreme Court has its say — and this is headed there.
What I have blogged previously on this subject is that although as a straight person I may have some resistance to the gay life style, I recognize it as a natural fact — people are born that way. And as such you cannot or should not discriminate against a class of people.
I understand that even though California voters passed a ban on same sex marriage, Proposition 8, current polls show that if the issue came before them now (even before today’s ruling) a majority might well vote to allow same sex marriage.
As I understand it, the federal court ruled that California’s Propositionb 8, banning same sex marriage, violated the equal protection and due process clauses of the U.S. Constitution.
And even though there are provisions in most states, I think, for civil unions for gays (or homosexuals), I have blogged that probably civil unions don’t make up for the fact that gays are banned from having regular marriage — separate is not equal, it was decided by the highest court in the early 1950s in Brown vs. the Board of Education, in a ruling that outlawed segregaged schools (black and white).
But of course this issue is not at its end yet — both sides had vowed to take it all the way to the Supreme Court — oh, I just heard that it is headed now to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has a liberal history.
I’ll probably have more to write on this when I get harder info.
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