SAN FRANCISCO — Supporters of California's gay marriage ban filed an appeal Thursday of a federal judge's ruling striking down the voter-approved
law.
The appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was expected, as lawyers on both sides of the legal battle repeatedly vowed to carry the fight to a higher court if they lost.
On Wednesday, a federal judge in San Francisco overturned California's Proposition 8, which restricts a marriage to one man and one woman. U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker ruled the law violates federal equal protections and due process laws.
The 9th Circuit court has no deadlines to hear the case, which will be randomly assigned to a three-judge panel. It's expected that the panel will order both sides to submit written legal arguments before scheduling a hearing.
The outcome in the appeals court could force the U.S. Supreme Court to confront the question of whether gays have a constitutional right to wed.
Appeal filed over gay marriage ruling in Calif. | General Headlines | Comcast.net
GODly citizens in California voted overwhelmingly to ban gay marriage in their state. That should have been the end of it.
First, the referendum known as Proposition 8 was not a law, it was an amendment to the California constitution. Second, yes, GODly citizens voted by a margin of 52-48 to strip a minority population of a civil right, which was entirely proper in any Republic, just like all good Aryan citizens voted to strip those filthy Jews of their rights, property, and lives. Good company you keep, Christians.
Now, let's take a trip back, before taking a trip forward, and see how we got here, California. First, there was no law and no constitutional amendment about gay marriage, just policies in local county governments. In some places, gays could marry and in others, they couldn't. Everyone wanted a uniform set of laws: gays to allow, hyper-religious folks to ban. The religious folk won in the form of a state legislative law, and all was regularized.
Of course, that was untennable, and the pro-gay-marriage side filed suit which wended its way all the way up to the California State Supreme Court, which found that the California version of DOMA violated the California Constitution, which insured equal protection, even for dirty, filthy homos. After a period of fallout, the legislature followed the Supreme Court decision and regularized civil marriage procedures to insure gay people could marry, and 18,000 of them did.
Of course, that was intolerable from the hyper-religious perspective, and so was born, quite illegitimately, a popular referendum to undo the equal protection now insured to non-heterosexual Californians by both the Supreme Court of the State of California and the California Legislature by a simple majority.
Side note here, the actual, constitutional means whereby the California constitution may be ammended all require supermajorities. This referendum is an extra-constitutional means to amend the constitution.
To help the hyper-religious folks in California to fund the advertizing blitz to get the word out about Prop8, Mormon carpet baggers from Utah come in with coerced tithes from Mormons from all over, not just in California, buy the election and still only manage a 2% margin of victory.
Well. They got their illegitimate constitutional amendment, so the SCOTSOCA's hands are now tied, but there's still the federal system to appeal to, and so two gay couples, one lesbian, one gay men, who had tried to obtain marriage licenses and who were denied, filed a civil rights lawsuit based on the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the federal Constitution. The plaintiffs were represented by opposite sides of the monumental case from 2000 of Bush v. Gore over the Florida recounts, Theodore Olsen, who represented George Bush, and David Boies, who represented Al Gore. The mere fact that this case brought these two notable former opponents together on the same side would have been enough to make this case national news.
During the case before the Federal 9th District Court for the Northern Circuit of California, the plaintiffs routinely shredded the arguments of the defendants of Prop 8, while the defendants routinely could not come up with a single cogent response in court to such basic questions as "How do the marriages of these 18,000 gay couples damage the marriages of heterosexual couples in the state of California?"
In the end, the outcome was a fait accompli and simultaneously irrelevant, as each side had declared that they would appeal to the Federal 9th District Court for an en banc proceeding, and from there to SCOTUS, if they lost. So, the only question was who would be doing the appeal. After such a series of non-arguments from the defense, it was no surprise that it was the hyper-religious pro-heterosexual-only-marriage side who had to file that appeal.
The judge in the case, cited as Perry v. Schwarzenegger for one of the women plaintiffs and the Governor of California, Ju. Vaughn R. Walker had no choice but to issue the holding:
Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.
And to the
republic for which it stands. There is no "rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license". As I've said all along, being anti-gay-marriage is irrational, at least as irrational as being anti-black-marriage.
More interregnum noise results from the judge staying the his own decision until today until and unless someone can make a cogent argument to continue the stay until the appeal to the 9th District as a whole, the stay will come down, something I completely expect. As soon as the stay ends, it will again be legal for gay and lesbian Californians to get married... at least... those who live along the coast... in the Northern California Circuit Court's jurisdiction.
At this point, the hyper-religious, anti-gay-marriage forces had a choice. They could admit defeat, on a small scale, and throw in the towel, and gays could only get married in a portion of California. But, we've already mentioned, they are not rational, so they have filed that appeal. Note, however, that the 9th District en banc resides in the same city as the Circuit Court for Northern California. The appeal will likely be heard in the same
building as Perry v. Schwazenegger. The appeal is also a fait accompli.
By appealing, the forces behind Prop8 are just going to extend this ruling to not just the Northern California Circuit jurisdiction, but to the entirety of California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, and Hawaii.
At that point, the ball will again be in the Prop8-proponents' courts to appeal the guarantee of equal marriage rights for homosexuals to the entire rest of the country by appealing to SCOTUS. At any time, they can stop and lick their wounds, but I think we all know they will not do this. This is going to the Supreme Court, and this will be the final statement that will put the final nail in the coffin of claims to keep homosexual citizens in a second class status with respect to civil marriage.
