The State Supreme Court of California made a very plain ruling in May 2008 initially when it gave gays the right to marry. It's a travesty of California's ballot initiative process that the people were then able to vote away the rights the Supreme Court had awarded them.
This court was not activist, mostly all Republican and not inclined to rock the boat, but they did vote what they saw was the way the law was.
Today's decision was destined to happen because it was a weak case, the whole revision thing. Everyone involved should have gotten together and made the case a compelling one about the constitutionality of Prop 8, and maybe then we would have had a chance at winning instead of this lame argument of revision versus amendment.
This battle may have been lost, but the war is not over.
With many protests and rallies planned for today and the weekend, I thought I'd share this from OneStruggleOneFight.com, I tend to agree with it quite a bit:
Why Civil Disobedience?
There are no more elegant defenses of civil disobedience than King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, a letter written in response to white clergymen asking King and the Civil Rights Movement to wait and be patient for their hopes to be realized.
In his eloquent rebuttal, he wrote of the impossibility of such patience, when "'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never'" and that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." Civil disobedience, he explains, is a way of bringing about that justice by "creat[ing] such a crisis and foster[ing] such a tension...[that] it can no longer be ignored."
The long history of discrimination against LGBTQ people, a history that promotes gay bashing, bullying, suicide, and lives of shame and desperation, has made civil disobedience a fact of our existence. In countries and societies that outlaw homosexuality, simply living day to day is an act of civil disobedience. In the United States, the same applies to any LGBTQ person who seeks to join the military, provide benefits for a partner, wed, or donate blood. And until the Supreme Court intervened in 2003, homosexual sex was an illegal, jailable offense. To this day it is legal to be fired, denied housing, ousted from committees and political office, and denied the right to adopt children simply because of who we are.
In the midst of such a struggle, it is time to act. There are calls for patience and separate institutions while our right to live lives of dignity and equality is further diminished with every popular election. The failure of many, though not all, communities, states, and the federal government to recognize the civil rights of LGBTQ people calls for an outcry loud enough to have our voices heard and our needs made manifest.