Yay

Great news out of California today:

In a much-anticipated ruling issued Thursday, the California Supreme Court struck down the state's ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional.

This vindicates Mayor Gavin Newsome's courageous decision to buck California's so-called Defense of Marriage Act and issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples.  Sometimes you have to do what seems like breaking the law to advance civil rights.  Martin Luther King would approve.

Here's the nut of the decision, which roots gay marriage firmly within a person's fundamental, individual, inalienable rights:

[W]e conclude that, under this state's Constitution, the constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage that are so integral to an individual's liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process.  These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish -- with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life -- an officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage.  As past cases establish, the substantive right of two adults who share a loving relationship to join together to establish an officially recognized family of their own -- and, if the couple chooses, to raise children within that family -- constitutes a vitally important attribute of the fundamental interest in liberty and personal autonomy that the California Constitution secures to all persons for the benefit of both the individual and society.

Only one line in the news story today troubles me:

An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is likely. The federal high court has never addressed the question of same-sex marriage.

I don't see the federal jurisdiction here at all.  Marriage has always been a state, not a federal, matter.  However, given the current makeup of the high court and its willingness to find federal jurisdiction on other cases that have historically been matters of state law (see, e.g., Bush v. Gore), I'm not as confident as I'd like to be.  There will be battles ahead.

Then too, the drool-flecked pulpit-banger wing of the GOP is ramping up a campaign for a referendum on an amendment to California's constitution banning same-sex marriage.  That might well come down in November of this year, once again injecting the old Fear Of A Gay Planet fervor into the Presidential race.  Again: there will be battles ahead.

But for today, let's celebrate a victory for love and reason.