Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Unconstitutional... AGAIN

Prop. 8 overturned in California, court says state can’t ban gay marriage

The 9th Circuit Court in California struck down as unconstitutional the state's voter-passed ban on gay marriage Tuesday, ruling 2-1 that it violates the rights of gay Californians.

"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," Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote in the decision. The court concludes that the law violates the 14th Amendment rights of gay couples to equal protection under the law. Access to gay marriage will remain on hold pending appeals to the decision.

The Circuit Court backed up District Judge Vaughn Walker, who ruled in August of 2010 that the state of California has no "rational basis" to single out gay men and women as ineligible for marriage. The group fighting for Prop. 8, which passed in 2008 after thousands of gay couples had already married, appealed Walker's decision arguing that it should be vacated because Walker is gay and has a same-sex partner. The 9th Circuit Court judges denied this motion.

Walker's sweeping 2010 decision was called a "grand slam" by gay rights advocates, who hoped it would convince the Supreme Court to rule states cannot outlaw gay marriage. But Reinhardt was explicit in his decision that his ruling is "narrow" and only relates to California, not to the entire nation. In California, gay people had the right to marry for five months before it was taken away by voters. This amounts to a violation of equal protection because a right was specifically taken away from a minority group, Reinhardt writes. But this argument would not apply to gay people in most other states, where gay marriage was never legalized in the first place. "It's a strong decision but it is not the ringing endorsement of broader marriage equality that some might have hoped for," Hunter College professor and gay rights advocate Kenneth Sherrill said.


The rest of the article here.

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