Til Cowardly Ruling Do We Part
Alan Mittelstaedt

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Should voters toss the chief justice in 2010?
It doesn’t take a legal scholar to point out the obvious reason why the California Supreme Court, led by Ron George, got it so wrong in their ruling that denied gays the right to marry. They saw the ghost of Rose Bird and feared the anti-gay-rights mob would recall them.
George et al continues to fool some of my better-informed friends and colleagues, including the editorial writers at the L.A. Times. For amusement — and motivation to act — check out today’s solo editorial, which seeks to draw lessons of a corrupt West Virginia high court jurist for California. We’re advised, of course, not to recall George in 2010 because it’s not like he was on the take from corporate interests when he bungled the gay-marriage ruling. Nice logic if you believe money trumps rights.
The cowardly George takes hero status in the editorial for bowing to the will of the people only months after upholding the legal foundation of same-sex unions. Maybe we should induct him into the Flip Floppers Hall of Fame when we vote to keep him on the high court next year.
In the gay-marriage cases, George’s votes demonstrated conscience, professionalism and restraint. He voted to uphold same-sex unions out of the strong conviction — which this page shares — that the Constitution does not allow society to deny the protection of marriage to gay couples any more than it once denied it to those united across race. The ruling was right on the law, and will certainly be validated over the long march of history.
Months later, voters tacked in the other direction, narrowly rejecting gay marriage and amending the Constitution to allow California to recognize only the unions of heterosexual couples… George subordinated his politics — as evidenced by his writing — to the weight of constitutional opinion. He voted to uphold the proposition, even though it undid his own work. Permitted latitude within the strictures of the Constitution in the first case, George was able to vote his conscience; bound by the Constitution in the second case, he yielded…
This is not West Virginia. Corporate interests are not knocking off justices who disagree with them and seating more accommodating replacements. But intimidation has no place in our judicial life any more than it does in Appalachia. The 1986 campaign against Bird and her colleagues now stands for many as a reminder that well-intentioned systems of accountability may be hijacked by special interests, a lesson learned too often and at great cost in California. It was misguided in its first iteration; it would be regrettable in its second.
In fact, maybe it’s worse — or at least as bad — as in West Virginia.
Posted in California Supreme Court, Los Angeles Times, gay marriage |
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