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Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Homo / History / Breaking News As One-Half of One of the 18,000 Same-Sex Marriages Performed in California Before Prop 8 Revoked the State's Gay Marriage Powers...

Posted by David Schmader on Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 11:55 AM

...I've been tasked with telling you how today's court decision re-confirming the unconstitutionality of Prop 8 affects me.

The answer: It's nice! I love when sanity prevails and is upheld, and both the parsing of the constitution-flouting elements of the Prop 8 legislation and the rejection of the notion that Judge Vaughn Walker should have recused himself from hearing the original appeal because he's a real-live gay are great.

But it doesn't change anything about my actual California marriage, in the same way that Prop 8 didn't change anything about my actual California marriage, just made it so other same-sex couples couldn't get their own same-sex California marriages. As I wrote at the time:

[Prop 8] did nothing to my marriage other than render it a novelty item, one of the 18,000 same-sex weddings performed during 2008's 18-week window of legality, the ridiculous arbitrariness of which will figure into all legal challenges to Prop 8 forever. I'm happy to be part of this klutzy march toward equality, and I'll be happy to watch it struggle onward for as long as I need to.

Hurrah for sanity and progress and onward. (And I'm super curious about the points brought up by Eli at the end of this post.)

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Does anyone know if the dissenting judge wrote an opinion? I'm morbidly curious of his rationale.

Posted by Dougsf on February 7, 2012 at 12:43 PM

Ugh. Mr. Schmader, do you have equal rights yet? Then, it's NOT progress. Talking about progress is NOT progress. Having some rights, but not equal rights, is NOT progress. Queers like you really hold back the movement by settling for whatever crumbs (or just talk about crumbs) the 1% wants to drop on you to get you to shut up.

Progress? At this rate, it'll be 2037 before we have equal marriage in every state. And THEN we'll still have DOMA.

Posted by Zepol on February 7, 2012 at 3:23 PM