T he federal court ruling last week that struck down California’s voter-approved Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage seems destined to change the legal landscape, and quite possibly the laws, that now prevent such marriages.
Many Americans may find that possibility reprehensible from a moral standpoint. But the court’s opinion, founded on the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, is so well-reasoned that it seems certain to make its way through appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, and perhaps become the law of the land, as it must, sooner or later, to meet this nation’s long-standing legal logic.
Whatever Americans may think of same-sex marriage, the constitutional doctrine of equal protection under the law clearly seems the sort of foundation for it that stands on stone. It defends the legal premise of equal rights that finally rid this nation of laws against miscegenation and interracial marriage; against withholding voting rights from women; against segregation; against poll taxes and other undue restrictions on voting rights and electoral representation for minorities; and against a range of restrictions on groups disfavored by the majority or by forces in favor of a legally unfair status quo.
In his lengthy, well-crafted decision, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, Vaughn R. Walker, concisely made that point, and went on to defend it in an opinion of more than 130 pages seemingly designed to propel the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court.
California’s Proposition 8 – and presumably other laws like it – “cannot withstand any level of scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause,” Judge Walker found. “Excluding same-sex couples from marriage is simply not rationally related to a legitimate state interest.”
He reasoned that in contemporary American society, marriage clearly does not require procreation. Even so, he found, same-sex couples have been widely shown to be able to have and to rear children without any evidence of harm to the children or to society. On the contrary, he said, children of same-sex couples benefit from the stability of the unions of same-sex couples, while denial of marriage simultaneously renders such couples to second-class citizenship.
He contended that marriages have become unions of equals that, for gays and lesbians, are betrayed through purely personal moral views by restrictions limiting same-sex couples to civil unions, or domestic partnerships, or disallowing any such legal arrangements altogether. Under present discriminatory laws, he found, the civil rights that apply to married couples are repeatedly distorted or denied for same-sex couples.
The judge, whose ruling springs from a weeks-long trial earlier this year over the reason for Proposition 8, found more broadly that the fundamental reason for Proposition 8 is not that same-sex couples are incapable of having or forming a relationship that conforms to the framework or values of traditional marriage. Rather, he found, it was a moral view “that there is something wrong with same-sex couples.”
“Moral disapproval alone is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and women,” he wrote.
Judge Walker’s dissection of the reason for and impact of California’s ban on same-sex marriage seems impossible to dismiss. Americans who oppose the concept on moral and religious grounds possibly could argue for the sanctity of traditional marriage as ordained by the rules and faith of their church, synagogue, mosque or religious center. It’s not clear whether Judge Walker would suggest, or impose, his legal view of marriage narrowly on churches.
But as for same-sex marriage performed by civil institutions under the scope of the Constitution, his ruling for legalizing same-sex marriage under the law seems faultless. If the Supreme Court upholds his ruling, it will reflect the benefit of equal protection under the law.