Friday, August 09, 2013

Calif. Prop. 8 still on the books

The California Family Code still says:
308.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.
This is from California Proposition 8, as passed by 7 million voters in 2008. It is also in the California constitution, art. 1, sec. 7.5.

I do not see how this can change legally without another initiative amending the constitution, or an appeals court decision declaring the sentence unconstitutional. Neither of these seems likely anytime soon.

And yet California is issuing same-sex marriage licenses. Are we a nation of laws or not?

One of my readers commented:
Same-sex marriage would probably have passed in California in 2012, not even 2014. I asked state Senator Joe Simitian last year if we call ourselves Democrats why not have the state legislature put it on the ballot last year. He sat the LGBT groups wanted a Supreme Court ruling rather than a vote of the people. Now based on the reasoning in the Court's opinion, we got neither.
How many other statutes get ignored? We have laws against discriminating between men and woman. We have laws favoring joint custody. We have laws against a judge delegating a decision to a psychologist or other non-judge. We have laws requiring experts to follow generally accepted published wisdom.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"Are we a nation of laws or not?"

Sure we are, just as we're the "home of the free" - with the world's largest prison population per capita; and the "land of the brave" - when blatant violations of our Constitutional rights occur daily for decades and even when these violations are exposed (e.g. the family court and Title IV D machinery) nothing is done about it.