More on the California Gay Marriage Ruling

From the NYTimes:

The 4-to-3 decision, drawing on a ruling 60 years ago that struck down a state ban on interracial marriage, would make California the second state, after Massachusetts, to allow same-sex marriages.

It's so interesting to me that the ruling that overturned a ban on interracial marriage is the precedent used to remove the ban for gay marriage. This has been my chief argument to Christians, to the opposition. There was a time (yes, there really was) when two people of different races could not marry legally in this country. The justifications were most often religious - citing the biblical texts that prohibit the idea of inter-marriage between two different tribes and even the passages in the New Testament that suggest that it is against God's law to be "unequally yoked." Interracial marriage was seen as sin. Sound familiar?

I remember about fifteen years ago in California that I had a conversation with a friend who lived in Tustin (Orange County). Her kids were going to a public high school and she planned to move them to a private white school, away from all the Latinos in the public school. Her reasoning? Didn't want to promote the possibility of dating Chicanos. Who you date is who you marry, her thinking went, and she didn't want her kids assuming that it was okay to marry someone of another race/culture. "But I'm not a racist," she said. "I think they all deserve the right to vote."

I gaped at her. This is supposedly a legitimate way to talk about the clash of cultures in California? This is how we promote in this country a sense of fairness and unity (hive off the rich white kids to private school so they won't intermix and intermarry with non-white kids)? I have to say: I'm just glad this kind of attitude had been relegated to private behavior, not mandated by the state.

So this ruling about gay marriage, is just one more step in the right direction - making it possible for heterosexuals to confront their own deep phobias of how "gayness" might encroach on their comfort zones. I'm sure heteros will be busy crafting counter-measures to protect their private religious schools from hiring gays (as if gays would want to teach in these places anyway) and they will want their churches to promise to never marry gays.

But the best news is that over time, the right for gays to marry will become more and more of a given and there will even be a moment when Christians will wonder, as they look back, why anyone ever thought there was a justification for not permitting the government to give marriage licenses to homosexual couples. That day will be a good one.

Update: From over on the Brokeback Mountain forums, I found this post by Jack who has culled the important info about a ballot measure versus a ruling by the Supreme Court. This information effectively warns the electorate from thinking they can contravene the rights established in the constitution through a majority.

Although California decisions consistently and vigorously have safeguarded the right of voters to exercise the authority afforded by the initiative process (see, e.g., Associated Home Builders, etc., Inc. v. City of Livermore (1976) 18 Cal.3d 582, 591), our past cases at the same time uniformly establish that initiative measures adopted by the electorate are subject to the same constitutional limitations that apply to statutes adopted by the Legislature, and our courts have not hesitated to invalidate measures enacted through the initiative process when they run afoul of constitutional guarantees provided by either the federal or California Constitution.

pg 111-112

They also cite the US Supreme Court which said:

"The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections."

and

“It is irrelevant that the voters rather than a legislative body enacted [the challenged law], because the voters may no more violate the Constitution by enacting a ballot measure than a legislative body may do so by enacting legislation.”

That ought to settle the stomachs of some of the anxious who fear the conservative base...