Some thoughts on Gay Marriage and California

lexisONE(R) reprinted Same-Sex Marriage And Racial Justice Find Common Ground and I thought the following worth passing along

"''Perez was a really courageous decision,'' said Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern and the author of ''Same Sex, Different States: When Same-Sex Marriages Cross State Lines'' (Yale, 2006). ''It was handed down at a time when it was just taken for granted that legally entrenched racism was not anything you could do anything about.''

That may be why the legacy of Perez exerted a powerful pull in the same-sex marriage case.

''The Perez case shaped the environment for the court, shaped the landscape in which it was ruling,'' said Suzanne Goldberg, a law professor at Columbia who submitted a brief supporting same-sex marriage. ''This is the court that made history by rejecting bans on interracial marriage and did not see the sky fall.''

Indeed, Mr. Koppelman said, Perez represented something of a challenge for the current court.

''You don't want to look timid,'' he said, ''when the justices in Perez were bold. It had to have put moral pressure on the court.''

Perez helped answer a central question before the court. Why was California's domestic partnership law, which provides virtually all of the legal rights and obligations that go with heterosexual marriage, not enough?

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Jennifer C. Pizer, a lawyer with Lambda Legal, which represented gay and lesbian couples in the same-sex marriage case, said there were limits to the analogy with Perez. ''We're talking about constitutional principles,'' Ms. Pizer said, ''not social parallels.''

It should be noted that California did not slide into the ocean. Yes, that is sarcasm for those supporting the idea that Indiana needs to amend its state constitution.