Matthew J. Franck, writing at Moral Accountability:
On the marriage issue, on the other hand, Obama apparently felt forced to engineer a more “moderate” position by the appearance of Proposition 8 on the California ballot. (Similar measures on the November ballots in Arizona and Florida had much lower national profiles than the struggle in California.) In California, where 61% of the voters had chosen in a 2000 referendum to prohibit same-sex marriage by statute, the state supreme court had decided last May 15 by a 4-3 vote to overturn that prohibition. The court held that “equal dignity and respect” under the state constitution required the state to accord persons a “right to marry” and other person of the same sex. California law had made civil unions or “domestic partnerships” available to same-sex couples since 1999, and those unions – expanded over time to encompass virtually every attribute of marriage but the name – had been unaffected by the 2000 ballot initiative. But in its May 2008 ruling, the Court decided that such civil union arrangements were not a cause for celebrating the generosity of Californians toward same-sex couples, but grounds for condemning them for “bigotry” and “narrow-mindedness.” The withholding of the name “marriage” was itself the decisive injustice; as the court put it, “the failure to designate the official relationship of same-sex couples as marriage violates the California Constitution.”
