Andrew Pugno, General Counsel for ProtectMarriage.com, has issued an email update that includes this:
Our Proposition 8 Legal Defense Fund has won a key victory in the early rounds of the latest legal assault against traditional marriage.
As you know, on the heels of our victory at the California Supreme Court to uphold Prop 8, a new legal challenge was filed in May, this time in Federal Court, to invalidate the will of the people. Their claim is that Prop 8 violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Notably, they asked the Federal Courts to suspend Prop 8 while this lawsuit works its way through the courts, which would have reopened the floodgates of same-sex marriage licenses in California.
Today, in yet another victory for traditional marriage, Judge Vaughn Walker refused to grant the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction designed to put Prop 8 on hold. The Court’s action supports the will of the people who voted to restore the definition of traditional marriage last November as between a man and a woman, and for that we are grateful.
Marriage between a man and a woman predates government, is recognized as the foundation of the family and has been the will of the people in California and 43 other states every time the people have been allowed to vote on the issue. Today’s ruling maintains the time-honored meaning of marriage. Any argument that the longstanding meaning of marriage that has served humanity for many millenniums somehow violates basic Constitutional rights is preposterous, and we are confident that this early victory in the latest challenge foretells an ultimate victory for marriage in the courts, even if we must go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
ProtectMarriage.com and the Proposition 8 Legal Defense Fund remain the only parties that have consistently fought to preserve Prop 8. Once again, California’s Attorney General, Jerry Brown, abandoned his duty to uphold the will of the people and argued that Prop 8 is unconstitutional. Fortunately, the judge, seeing that officials such as Brown have shirked their duty, also officially granted our Prop 8 official proponents the official status of “intervenors,” meaning we have full legal rights to defend the peoples’ will and the institution of marriage itself in Court . . .
