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posted Friday, June 27, 2008 - Volume 36 Issue 26 |
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California's landmark Gay marriage decision
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| California's landmark Gay marriage decision
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by Ed Decipolzuane -
SGN Contributing Writer
Monday, 17 June, was a historic landmark in California history as Lesbian and Gay couples had, for the first time, the legal right to marry, with all of the commensurate rights and responsibilities that come with it. California is only the second state to have granted Lesbian and Gay couples the legal right to marry, Massachusetts being the first. Same-sex marriages are also legal in the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Spain, Canada and South Africa. Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey and New Hampshire have civil unions, California and Oregon have broad domestic partnership laws which allow the rights enjoyed by married couples, and Maine, Washington, Hawaii and the District of Columbia have limited domestic partnerships. New Mexico, New York and Rhode Island have no laws regarding the issue. Cross-state recognition of civil unions is growing as Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey and New Hampshire legally accept partnerships granted out-of-state.
Hawaii lead the nation in the Gay marriage struggle when the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled, in 1993, that the state had to show compelling reason to ban same-sex marriage, and sent back to a lower court a case by same-sex couples seeking to marry. In 1998, Hawaii voters approved a state constitutional amendment retracting the role of the courts and reserving the right to define marriage to the legislature, which subsequently restricted marriage to only male-female couples. After the Hawaii controversy, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act, which reserved the right to define marriage to the states, and for federal purposes defined marriage as only between males and females.
A flurry of state votes in the last several years, led by Alaska, Nebraska and Nevada, resulted in 27 states now having constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage, and four of those banning civil unions altogether. Senator John McCain's Arizona is the only state to have rejected a state constitutional ban - this despite an increase in Gay marriage approval of more than 1% per year since 2004 (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press). According to Pew, 17 of those constitutional bans are so broadly written that they could be interpreted to ban other rights of same-sex partners.
Constitutional bans will be decided this fall in California, Arizona and Florida, and high court cases are pending in Iowa and Connecticut. Washington couples lost their case in front of this state's high court when in 2006 it decided that Gay couples had no right to matrimony under the state constitution.
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