Same sex marriage and irretrievable breakdown

Proposition 8 Issues

Explain the series of events that led to the passage of California's Proposition 8 and how it ended up in federal court.

On June 16, 2008, the Supreme Court of California issued a controversial decision to allow same-sex marriages in California (Edwards, Wattenberg, & Lineberry, 2009; Schwartz, 2009). The legal basis of that decision was that the refusal of the fundamental right to marry based on sexual preference violates the U.S. Constitution. More specifically, the California Supreme Court ruled that restriction of marriage rights to opposite-gender couples violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Constitutional Amendment. However, California is a state in which voters may challenge state law by referenda, which they did immediately afterwards in proposing an amendment to the California State Constitution in Proposition 8 (Edwards, Wattenberg, & Lineberry, 2009; Schwartz, 2009).

Proposition 8, known as the "California Marriage Protection Act," proposed a new provision to the California Constitution to define and recognize marriage as necessarily being a union between a man and a woman in California (Edwards, Wattenberg, & Lineberry, 2009; Keys, 2010). That proposition was passed by California voters on November 5, 2008, once again making same-sex marriage illegal in California as a matter of state law, although marriages of couples married in between June 16, 2008 and November 5, 2008 were recognized under the traditional legal "grandfathering" doctrine. Opponents of the Proposition 8 decision appealed the case and because the ruling being appealed had been issued by the highest state court in California, it was appealed directly to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal court with jurisdiction over appeals from decisions of the California Supreme Court (Edwards, Wattenberg, & Lineberry, 2009; Keys, 2010).

Determine which side you believe will win the case. In other words, is California's Proposition 8 in violation of the United States Constitution?

In my opinion, this nation is currently facing the exact same problem over the gay marriage issue that it faced a half century ago when many states still prohibited interracial marriages as a vestige of long-standing racism, particularly against black Americans. At that time, the arguments against interracial marriage were identical to those now popular among those still opposed to same-sex marriage. I also believe that in fifty years, Americans will look back at the current controversy over same-sex marriage in exactly the same way and future generations will wonder how it could ever have made sense to so many people that marriages of same-sex couples somehow "threatened" the institution of marriage.