(05-26) 14:30 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- California's voters, not its courts, are the final judges of same-sex couples' right to marry. And even if they're barred from marrying, gays and lesbians are not the victims of unconstitutional discrimination. Those were the two clearest messages in Tuesday's 6-1 ruling by the state Supreme Court that upheld Proposition 8, the November initiative that amended the California Constitution to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. They came from a court that had seemingly said something quite different a year earlier. In May 2008, a 4-3 majority led by Chief Justice Ronald George said California's voter-approved law that allowed only opposite-sex couples to marry violated the rights of gays and lesbians to choose their spouses and discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation. Defenders of the law argued that it merely preserved the traditional definition of marriage and that same-sex couples who registered as domestic partners had all the rights of heterosexual married couples under state law. George responded then that denying gays and lesbians the "historic and highly respected designation of marriage" deprived their families of "equal dignity and respect." But on Tuesday - after an $85 million campaign that ended Nov. 4 with Prop. 8 winning 52 percent of the vote - George led a majority that declared the right to marry was not essential for gays' and lesbians' equality and that the people were the ultimate deciders of what should be included in their Constitution.
Same-sex weddings stand
The 18,000 same-sex couples married before Nov. 4 remain legally wed, the chief justice said in a unanimous portion of the ruling. Applying Prop. 8 retroactively to dissolve those marriages, he said, would disrupt "thousands of actions taken in reliance on (last year's ruling) by these same-sex couples, their employers, their creditors and many others." CONTINUE READING..
