UPDATE: Today is a very good day for human beings.
No reporting can speak quite as eloquently to the point as the opening of the ruling itself, the majority opinion, written by Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt.
You can find it here.
But here’s one line that sums up all:
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 opposite sex couples. The Constitution simply does not allow for “laws of this sort.”
The opinion (with minority commentary) goes on for another 128 pages.
But that’s the heart of the matter. Straight up.
The court’s decision, had it’s light moments, which in a back door way also spoke deeply to the issue.
As The wrap reports via Reuters:
The appellate court judges who ruled Tuesday that California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage, mentioned Jumbotrons, Frank Sinatra, movies and Marilyn Monroe along with Supreme Court precedents in their decision.
“Had Marilyn Monroe’s film been called ‘How to Register a Domestic Partnership with a Millionaire,’ it would not have conveyed the same meaning as did her famous movie, even though the underlying drama for same-sex couples is no different,” the judges wrote.
The judges wrote that in society, “We are excited to see someone ask, ‘Will you marry me?’, whether on bended knee in a restaurant or in text splashed across a stadium Jumbotron. Certainly it would not have the same effect to see, ‘Will you enter into a registered domestic partnership with me?’.”
They even invoked Groucho Marx, William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln — all in one paragraph:
“Groucho Marx’s one-liner, ‘Marriage is a wonderful institution … but who wants to live in an institution?’ would lack its punch if the word ‘marriage’ were replaced with the alternative phrase. So too with Shakespeare’s ‘A young man married is a man that’s marr’d.’ Lincoln’s ‘Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory,’ and Sinatra’s ‘A man doesn’t know what happiness is until he’s married. By then it’s too late.’”
The Court mentioned Shakespeare a few times:
“We emphasize the extraordinary significance of the official designation of ‘marriage,” the decision says. “That designation is important because ‘marriage’ is the name that society gives to the relationship that matters most between two adults. A rose by ay other name may smell as sweet, but to the couple desiring to enter into a committed lifelong relationship, a marriage by the name of ‘registered domestic partnership’ does not.”
The ruling by the 3-judge panel from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is due to be announced at 10 am, Tuesday.
Fingers crossed.
One day we’ll look back on this crazy period in which some among us were not allowed to marry the people they love because of the whacked notion that those unions, no matter how devoted, would do harm to the concept of marriage as a whole—and we’ll wonder what in the world we could possibly have been thinking.
Howard Mintz at the San Jose Mercury News has a good break down of the possible outcomes. Bob Egelko of the SF Chron also has a clarifying take.