by Tucker Lieberman

Created on: September 06, 2008

The highest court in the U.S. state of California ruled on May 15, 2008 that laws restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples were impermissible, clearing the way for the first valid same-sex marriages in that state to be performed the following month.

The opinion acknowledged that same-sex couples had sought marriage licenses in California beginning as early as the 1970s and that they had been answered with a 1977 law (Sections 4100 and 4101, later re-enacted as Sections 300 and 301) defining marriage as an opposite-sex relationship. In 2000, 61 percent of California voters asked to uphold this definition under the ballot initiative called Proposition 22 (which became Section 308.5). The plaintiffs claimed these statutes violated a "right to marry" that should be guaranteed by four clauses in the California Constitution - privacy, free speech, due process, and equal protection - and the court indeed found the restrictive marriage statutes to be unconstitutional.

[Please note that, where I have placed text below inside quotation marks, this is generally because I am quoting it from the Supreme Court's published opinion.]

Prior cases had established the right of "two adults who share a loving relationship," regardless of their sexual orientation, to have an "officially recognized family" and to raise children together. The California Legislature created "domestic partnerships" in 1999, becoming one of the first states to do so, and the rights of domestic partners gradually increased until they nearly matched that of married couples (except with regards to state income taxes). Domestic partners are required to be over the age of 18, unrelated, share a home and expenses, and otherwise be unmarried or unpartnered. They are also required to be of the same sex, unless at least one partner is elderly. The court quoted its own ruling in a prior case (Koebke v. Bernardo Heights Country Club, 2005): "[i]t is clear...that a chief goal of the [2003] Domestic Partner Act is to equalize the status of registered domestic partners and married couples."

The word "marriage" and its inherent intangible benefit of "dignity and respect" was determined to be an essential component of the right to establish a recognized family unit. Failing to make the label "marriage" available to gay couples "poses at least a serious risk of denying the family relationship of same-sex couples such equal dignity and respect" and "is likely to be viewed as reflecting an official view that their committed

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