This is me, ConnorP, and the contents of my brain when it doesn't belong anywhere else, or even if it does. Various topics, various thoughts, various degrees of seriousness, but all me.
A qualified Hooray! is in order here. This is good, but not yet over.
This ruling can still be appealed to the entire 9th Circuit Court, or to the Supreme Court
The Court gave a very narrow ruling, not commenting on the constitutionality or legality of Same Sex Marriage, but simply on Proposition 8 itself.
This battle is nowhere near over. But for now, we can be happy.
TPM:
A federal appeals court in California has upheld a lower court’s ruling that Proposition 8, the state’s ban on gay marriage, is unconstitutional, writing that the law “serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples.”
Judge Stephen Reinhardt, in the court’s 128-page opinion, wrote that “although the Constitution permits communities to enact most laws they believe to be desirable, it requires that there be at least a legitimate reason for the passage of a law that treats different classes of people differently. There was no such reason that Proposition 8 could have been enacted.”
“All that Proposition 8 accomplished was to take away from same-sex couples the right to be granted marriage licenses and thus legally to use the designation of ‘marriage,’ which symbolizes state legitimization and societal recognition of their committed relationships,” Reinhardt wrote. “Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples. The Constitution simply does not allow for ‘laws of this sort.’”
Proposition 8 was a 2008 ballot measure, approved by voters, that amended the state constitution to ban same-sex couples in California from getting married.
In 2010, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker, presiding over a challenge to the law by two gay couples and the American Foundation for Equal Rights, ruled that the law was unconstitutional. Walker wrote that “Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license.”
