It appears that the California Supreme Court has decided to uphold the ban on same-sex marriages that the state’s voters passed in November. There would have been vociferous manifestations of outrage no matter how the decision might have gone — either from those who felt that an activist Court had overridden the expressed will of the people, or from those who feel that it isn’t the State’s business who marries whom, and that the ban violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. I am sure the latter group is sorely vexed by this ruling.
I certainly don’t mind if gay couples want to marry — it doesn’t gore any of my oxen, as far as I can make out, and I think it is rather mean-spirited to deny them participation in the custom — and I think it’s a pity that they couldn’t muster enough support amongst the voters to block the ban. But I don’t think an argument based on the Equal Protection Clause is compelling, as it is not the application of marriage laws equally to all married couples that is at issue, but the very definition of what a “married couple” is in the first place. This is, I think, the sort of thing that is better left to the voters than the courts.
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If only the voters could be trusted, we wouldn’t have needed a civil rights movement….
The voters in my state, California, also chose a body builder as their governor, and look where that got us.