California's Prop 8 (gay marriage ban) ruled unconstitutional

http://www.scribd.com/doc/35374462/Prop-8-Ruling-FINAL

by zain • 16 years ago

179 189 16 years ago

scribd.com

fuzz579• 16 years ago

How long 'til it gets to the supreme court?

Marticus• 16 years ago

Probably soon, but still a step in the right direction.

mattlanger• 16 years ago

Heads next to the Ninth Circuit, which will doubtlessly uphold the ruling. Then it'll be on to the SCOTUS, which is a very different court from the '03 bench that ruled on Lawrence v. Texas.

Locke16897• 16 years ago

Not necessarily. SCOTUS is very particular about the cases it submits cert for. The 9th cir. may stand, although it's liberal reputation won't help when it comes to the modern conservative court.

erikpukinskis2• 16 years ago

Why would the SCOTUS want to get involved? Are they in the business of deciding whether state supreme courts are correctly interpreting their state constitutions?

caryme• 16 years ago

Proposition 8 "fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples..."

chc5• 16 years ago

Although I don't disagree with that statement, I don't see how it advances a legal basis for reversing the amendment.

anonymouslambda2• 16 years ago

This is the legal basis for the decision: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_basis_review

yummyfajitas15• 16 years ago

I'd be curious to see if the courts will apply that same argument to other laws.

For instance, will/should the courts eliminate all marriage benefits on the grounds that marital subsidies simply enshrine into law the notion that couples are superior to singles?

I'd also be curious to see if gay marriage supporters believe the courts made the correct decision, and if they would apply the same logic to other situations.

gcheong3• 16 years ago

I'd be all for it - in the subsidy case anyway. And I'm married.

kjksf11• 16 years ago

You're using very simplistic and very wrong definition of what equality and discrimination is.

For example, denying gay marriage discriminates against gays by denying a specific, identifiable group (gays) the right to marry that is given to everyone else.

You're trying to claim that the same logic applies to e.g. laws against smoking which, in your naive interpretation, "discriminate" against smokers. The crucial and not so subtle difference is that law against smoking bans a behavior. It would be discrimination if we had laws that prohibits smokers to marry.

So yes, the courts made the right decision I do want the courts to apply constitution in the future to abolish laws that violate mine and yours constitutional rights, equality being among them.

Using your reasoning serial killers are a minority and laws against killing are discrimination.

mynameishere2• 16 years ago

At propagating the species, they are quite a bit superior. Anyway.

Chinese historians 200 years from now will scratch their heads over this sequence in the fall of the West.

catch23• 16 years ago

It's hard to say though... given that being gay is most likely in the genes, which obviously come from a heterosexual creation. So if the gay population will always have a 10% yield in the gene pool, I don't think natural selection will have any kind of effect.

gigafemtonano• 16 years ago

I don't get scribd. Why wouldn't you link to the government website hosting this PDF or to a press report conveying this information? My eyes are bleeding from all the ads...

jorgeortiz85• 16 years ago

Right now it's throwing "500: Internal Server Error"

mcn• 16 years ago

I had the same reaction, except that I found a bar that moves to be even more distracting than the adds.

Hitting full screen (in the middle of the bottom bar) and turning off autohide (move the right toggle up) made it usable for me.

seldo3• 16 years ago

I know this isn't really hacker news, but as a gay hacker, I beg you not to flag this story :-)

CapitalistCartr• 16 years ago

I am an ardent supporter and promoter of freedom, civil liberty. I've found that most computer geeks are, way out of proportion to the population at large.

derefr3• 16 years ago

Why not? Not to sound mean, but there are plenty of places online where people could discuss this news; why does HN have to be one of them? Does this community have unique insights into Californian law or gay rights that other communities don't? Does this same news item really need to appear on every online social news site, everywhere, no matter the focus?

I guess it's possible that there are people who only read HN, and don't have any other news source whatsoever, and that those people would otherwise miss out on this bit of news—but then, I think those people have chosen to filter out other news sources for a reason :)

Edit: I'm just asking for a justification here—if it explicitly isn't Hacker News, what made you want to post it?

HeyLaughingBoy• 16 years ago

Much like Slashdot announcing the start of the Iraq invasion, some things are important enough to be visible elsewhere.

Restricting the rights of anyone in our country affects all of us who live here.

famousactress• 16 years ago

He didn't post it. Also, it bumped 'Depression Era Color Photos' out of the number two spot. Doesn't seem very 'HN' either, but I think that's what the up-voting is for.

seldo3• 16 years ago

Statistically speaking, somewhere between 4% and 8% of the HN population will be very interested in this news. I'll bet that's a bigger percentage than actually care about Erlang, and we're always hearing about that :-)

But seriously, there is no reason, other than it being a really nice piece of news that, as a member of a community, I would like to share with the rest of that community.

(And to clarify: I didn't post it, I just voted it up :-) )

thingie5• 16 years ago

Are there? Would you really want to discuss this on some general news site?

Locke16897• 16 years ago

I think it may be HN material if you actually read the brief. Very interesting (if you can spare the time to read ~130 pages), especially the back and forth in the "expert" testimony (the opposing council's expert was eventually deemed to be unqualified to offer any relevant testimony and mostly selectively quoted texts during trial).

afterburner3• 16 years ago

The system works!

shotmaker5• 16 years ago

no it didn't. The people lost.

ed• 16 years ago

Fuck that. the people have no right to vote on individual freedoms

thingie5• 16 years ago

…a right to discriminate a minority just because they want to. Shocking.

rewind2• 16 years ago

He's getting downvoted, but he's right. The majority voted for this, but the majority didn't get what they voted for. "The System" DID NOT work for the majority in this case (although for the record, I'm very happy with the outcome).

jarin• 16 years ago

You're making an argument based on popular vote, but black people and white people wouldn't be able to intermarry either if our system was entirely based on the will of the masses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

erikpukinskis2• 16 years ago

"The system" is a constitutional democracy. That means the constitution trumps all other laws, including laws created by narrow margins in voter referenda. It is exceedingly difficult to change the constitution on purpose.

The founders of this country very definitely architected our system of government such that laws like Prop 8 would not stand up in court.

If you want to live in a pure democracy, try to get congress to repeal the Constitution.

illumin8• 16 years ago

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat for dinner. You seem to think we live in one, but actually, we live in a constitutional republic.

MartinCron4• 16 years ago

Let's put a minority rights issue up to majority vote. What could possibly go wrong?

pjscott• 16 years ago

The people who are actually affected by it won.

tome2• 16 years ago

Are there any non-religious anti-gay-marriage arguments?

icarus_drowning• 16 years ago

I haven't found many. A vast majority are "natural law" arguments, which I think are exceedingly weak.

A better approach (from a conservative/libertarian side) is to just ask the question why government is defining marriage in the first place.

eli3• 16 years ago

I'm totally with you there.

I was really surprised that to get married in New York, the officiant pretty much has to be a judge, the town clerk, or a religious representative of an "official" religion with an established place of worship. Seems awfully unfair that atheists have fewer options than members of popular religions. What possible interest does the state have in vetting wedding officiants anyway?

dieterrams2• 16 years ago

I disagree that this is a "conservative/libertarian" question, but I agree that this is the better question to ask.

chc5• 16 years ago

None with much plausibility. There are a lot of secular anti-gay-marriage arguments put forth by religious people, but they are, without fail, far less rational than the religious arguments.

rubashov3• 16 years ago

You don't have to be religious to notice that exclusively vanilla heterosexual marriage has been common to all advanced societies. There are plenty of other models, but any culture that rose to power picked the one.

It seems to me perfectly reasonable to assert that there will be unknown consequences to screwing with a system that has worked reasonably well.

The last time marriage was tinkered with back in the 60s, no fault divorce and alimony as normal were tacked on. Infidelity was also decriminalized. I find it very easy to believe millions of broken homes and fatherless children were a direct consequence. The social consequences in lower socio-economic strata have been severe in a way that educated people generally don't comprehend.

In conclusion, the conservative impulse to "conserve" social institutions that have a long track record of success is not fundamentally religious. It comes from the same place as environmentalism: don't go screwing with complex systems you probably don't fully understand.

defen• 16 years ago

We (culturally) have thousands of years of social and legal experience with heterosexual marriage. It's a very complex institution. Making a radical change to it may have unintended consequences.

lmkg• 16 years ago

My view is that allowing gay marriage is itself a consequence (probably unintended but still welcome) of other radical changes to the institution of marriage in Western society in the last century or two. Such changes include the view of a marriage as a personal unit rather than an economic one united by love rather than mutual economic and social benefit, and the general increase of women's rights and convergence of gender roles (for example, women can own property, and are not treated as being property themselves). The whole "soulmate" thing is a relatively recent idea, but is the current ideal for marriage.

We have thousand of years of experience with a variety of institutions that share the name "marriage" but aren't very similar to each other. The current institution that bears that name has arguably only been around for about forty years, most recently being re-written by the sexual revolution and the increasing social acceptance of divorcing and re-marrying. Considering how flexible we as a society have become with respect to gender roles, this change is hardly "radical" by comparison.

Legion• 16 years ago

I really hope nobody tries to use the internet to promote that argument.

jwhitlark2• 16 years ago

No, actually we don't. Marriage throughout history had very different social and legal rules. Inheritance rules, power, authority, and care-taking of children are elements that have changed radically over the years.

It would be accurate to say we've had experience with many different kinds of heterosexual marriage, but once you're lumping in, say, 16th century English marriage laws and customs with 21st century Californian ones, gender starts to look like a minor detail.

We talk about "marriage" as if it's a simple, single idea, but historically, it's been applied to a wide range activities.

GiraffeNecktie3• 16 years ago

Where is the radical change? Allowing a tiny sliver of the population to enjoy the same privileges and responsibilities as the rest of us?

Let's be clear here: compulsory gay marriage would be radical. Allowing gay people to marry is not.

shotmaker5• 16 years ago

1. The people voted and agreed on California's definition of marriage to be one man and one women. The people's vote should count not over turned by 1 gay judge.

shotmaker5• 16 years ago

down vote all you want. If you want to know some of the reasons people oppose this look at this http://www.massresistance.org/

There is an agenda there...

cninja4• 16 years ago

The main one I have heard is the slippery slope argument. If marriage is redefined as something other than a legal union between a man and a woman, where does definition of marriage come from?

In other words, if someone is for gay marriage, then on what grounds can they forbid polygamous or incestuous relationships or incestuous relationships?

Of course, this assumes that these other less popular alternative lifestyles should be forbidden as well.

axod7• 16 years ago

don't forget bestiality. If a man and a consenting horse wish to get married who are we to deny them that right!

brianwillis• 16 years ago

Marriage has evolved over time. If it didn't, then it probably wouldn't be around any more.

Examples: -Inter-racial marriage was once illegal in the US. Now it's not.

-Marriage was used as a tool to forge alliances between royal families in Europe. Now it's not.

-In Europe, it was once common for a bride's family to pay a dowry as a part of the marriage agreement. Now it's not.

My point is that elements of our collective cultures evolve all the time. The concept of marriage exists to serve culture that it's a part of, not the other way around.

Jun82• 16 years ago

Exactly. This would be one of main arguments against the typical "it's a consensual adult thing, what is it to you!" argument for gay marriage. In fact, to many people, a polygamous relationship between a man and many wives would be more "natural"than gay marriage (e.g. some Muslim countries, where gayness may be punishable by death by Sharia law allows more than one wife).

Same logic applies to incestuous marriage, although this would be more extreme since there are very strong taboos against it (not throughout all history, though, e.g. in Ancient Egypt pharaohs mostly married their sisters).

kjksf11• 16 years ago

It's about discrimination, there's no slope.

It's discrimination because non-gays can marry and gays cannot.

This does not apply to polygamous or incestuous relationships. Those are not recognized by law, but they are denied to everyone equally.

Also, "union between a man and a woman" does cover incest so clearly that's not the definition used by courts when deciding who can marry. Your premise is flawed and even if it wasn't, you're just trying to confound completely separate issues.

Again, it's about discrimination.

jberryman2• 16 years ago

Well I can see the idea of a gay couple raising a child sounding like a strange and dangerous idea to someone who hasn't been exposed to it, religious or not. For example: couldn't this lead to children being confused about their own sexual identity?

But one of the reasons for this ruling was that it was shown in the court-room that children do as well when raised by a same-sex couple as by a heterosexual one. It then follows that recognizing those couples would be even better for those families.

MartinCron4• 16 years ago

We live in a hetero-normative society. Hetero couples are everywhere in media and popular culture. I'm pretty sure that kids being raised by same-sex parents can see that different people have different sexual orientations and work that out.

I'm sure it's harder for young gay people to have straight parents than for young straight people to have gay parents, yet nobody ever worries about that scenario.

yummyfajitas15• 16 years ago

I'm against gay marriage and my reasons are completely non-religious.

Currently, marriage consists of a default package of contractual rights given from one partner to another (e.g. default will, medical proxy) and I have no problem extending this to gays. In fact, this part of marriage can already be pieced together with a few legal documents.

Marriage also consists of laws which force single people to subsidize married couples, for instance the non-working spouse of a worker gets SS benefits that neither spouse paid for. Gay marriage supporters are in the unique position of thinking about this issue and recognizing the unfairness of it. But rather than advocating for fairness, they simply want to be allowed to join the favored class. I'll draw an analogy to the civil rights: think of an Asian American in 1960 saying "I'm not against Jim Crow, I just want Asians to be classified as White rather than Colored."

As a single person, I'm in the same boat as gay couples. Gay marriage supporters want to throw me overboard in order to join the favored group, forcing me to subsidize a slightly larger group of people. Why should I do anything but oppose that?

Marriage fairness (i.e., no subsidies), I'll get behind. Gay marriage, no.

[edit: I thought my last line was clear enough, but from the responses it apparently was not. I favor ending marriage, or at least ending the subsidies for it. I also favor ending the penalties for it, which apply in certain circumstances.]

madair2• 16 years ago

Regarding the social security benefits...in actuality married people in the U.S. pay what's euphemistically called the Marriage Tax, because the rules as codified actually require married people to pay more than if they filed separately.

Regarding the rest of your arguments, I suppose they work assuming an extremely weak social contract. Or at least, in my opinion it would require a very weak one. It's hard question to test in relation to marriage since marriage is a legally sanctioned relationship in all countries, but i am most certainly not well read on this topic.

kenjackson2• 16 years ago

The problem with this argument is that I'd like to see data that single people subsidize married people. I suspect it is that wealthier married people subsidize everyone else.

But again, maybe you actually have the data that shows that single people subsidize married people.

One way to handle this is to separate out the economy into single vs married economies. Effectively different tax pools. Although I suspect the burden of single parent households on the single tax pool would be pretty weighty... especially if you get rid of child credits.

BRadmin• 16 years ago

Based on that argument I'm not quite sure how you can oppose gay marriage. It would appear you would have to rally against marriage subsidies, or at least marriage as a whole, etc. - because singling out a facet of the group (or a facet wanting to be part of that group) you have reason to dislike strikes me as discriminatory.

kjksf11• 16 years ago

So would you be against gay marriage if marriage didn't have the side-effect of favoring married couples over singles (or so you claim)?

If yes, then you would have to amend your reasons for being against gay marriage.

If no, then first you're not really against gay marriage, just against marriage in general. But by opposing just gay marriage you're being selective which is discrimination i.e. you want to deny gay couples the same rights that are given to non-gays. Whether you like those rights or not is irrelevant - they're already given and accepted by society.

jetsnoc• 16 years ago

Since you do not want to subsidize a favored class wouldn't it be more accurate to say you're /against marriage/?

bmm6o3• 16 years ago

> I'll draw an analogy to the civil rights [...]

Who are you in this analogy? The only thing I can come up with is not flattering.

gcheong3• 16 years ago

The problem with your argument is that you can join the "favored class" at any time so one could find that only gay singe people eventually subsidize all heterosexual marriages. So why not let gay people get married and if it gets to the point that the subsidies are so onerous then one would think single people - gay or straight - would be coming out of the woodwork to change that particular part of the law. You can't change everything at once and I think this is much more important from a non-religious ethical standpoint than any economic reason.

tzs3• 16 years ago

    As a single person, I'm in the same boat as gay couples.
    Gay marriage supporters want to throw me overboard in
    order to join the favored group, forcing me to subsidize
    a slightly larger group of people. Why should I do
    anything but oppose that?

Assuming you are straight, your being out of the favored group is your choice. At any time, you are allowed to go out and find someone who you find sexually and romantically attractive and who finds you the same, and marry them, thus getting the benefits of the subsidies you listed.

Gays aren't given this option. If they want the subsidies, they have to marry someone they aren't attracted to.

OpieCunningham2• 16 years ago

How about if we take it one step at a time?

First, remove the discrimination against one of, if not the most discriminated upon groups, gay people.

Second, remove subsidized marriage.

Since the second is a much larger hill to climb, let's be decent human beings and support the first in the interim.

mynameishere2• 16 years ago

The practical purpose of marriage is to give protections to the woman who bears a greater liability in childbearing. This doesn't apply to gay "marriage", except in contrived cases. I'm actually yet to hear an argument in the favor of gay marriage that doesn't do one of the following:

1. Torture the definition of "equal". As if a law specifically designed to cover a specific relationship between a "man and a woman" is somehow invalid, whereas laws that cover specific relationships between a "lawyer and client" or "doctor and patient" or "parent and child" or "employer and employee" or "clergyman and worshipper" or 1000s and 1000s of others are never considered unconstitution.

2. Appeal to emotion. Ie, domestic partners can't automatically visit each other in the hospital when one is incapacitated, etc.

MartinCron4• 16 years ago

The practical purpose of marriage is to give protections to the woman who bears a greater liability in childbearing.

That is maybe one practical purpose of marriage, but it's not the legal basis, and there's a lot more to it from a societal perspective.

I think the lawyer/client and doctor/patient argument is interesting, but feels a little hollow, because people are in a position to choose to become doctors, lawyers, clients, and patients freely. There is no inherent discrimination in those relationships. Would you expect a special class of legal relationships between a black man and a white woman? I wouldn't.

axod7• 16 years ago

If I could upvote this 100 times, I would. Well put.

Niten3• 16 years ago

> The practical purpose of marriage is to give protections to the woman who bears a greater liability in childbearing.

[citation needed]

Accepting that for the sake of argument — suppose I'm sterile, then. Or I just don't plan on having any kids. Do I still have a right to all the benefits that heterosexual couples obtain from legally recognized marriage? If so, then on what basis are those rights granted to me, but not to my gay neighbors next door? (I'm seriously curious whether you'll say no, sterile couples don't deserve those rights, or whether you'll just engage in more special pleading toward the prescribed end of denying marriage rights to gay couples.)

But back in reality, those of my friends who've gotten married already had many reasons for doing so, and "giving protections to the woman who bears a greater liability in childbearing" certainly wasn't at the top of their lists.

And dismissing discussion of crucial benefits such as the right to visit your husband or wife in the hospital as "appeals to emotion" is nothing short of absurd.

tzs3• 16 years ago

> The practical purpose of marriage is to give protections to the woman who bears a greater liability in childbearing.

Got a cite for that? If protection of childbearing women were such a great concern, wouldn't we expect societies to have historically provided much more protection to children born by non-married women, too? Yet historically when the Lord diddled the maid, neither the maid nor her bastard received any protection at all. Why single out married women to receive protection?

It seems far more likely to me that marriage was to provide a stable framework upon which to build a predictable system of inheritance of land. When the Lord dies, you really want to have a clear transfer of ownership, for the good of the estate and the commoners who depend on it.

madair2• 16 years ago

There are rational arguments, mostly coming from evolutionary psychology and similar domains. The arguments tend to fall apart under rational scrutiny when used to shape human behavior rather than simply explain it.

A couple recent articles by Robin Hanson about polygamy cover similar terrain in interesting ways. The arguments, particularly in the second article, more or less break it down to the problems of utilitarianism.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/polygamy-hypocrisy.htm...

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/hypergamy-and-polygamy...

axod7• 16 years ago

I'm against gay marriage for non-religious reasons. Civil partnerships fine, have the same rights and freedoms as married couples, just call it a civil partnership instead.

But IMHO this isn't hacker news and will pretty quickly get nasty.

edit: Also for same reasons as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1576226

kjksf11• 16 years ago

From what you wrote you're against gay marriage for no reason at all. You stated a preference for how things should be, not a reason for that preference.

And you seem strangely preoccupied with semantics. If marriage and civil partnership meant the same thing, what would be the point of having a distinction?

lutorm• 16 years ago

Civil partnerships do not have the same rights. The federal government does not recognize them and as a consequence gay/lesbian people are not able to sponsor their partners for permanent residency. I know some international gay couples who can't live in the US due to this.

Jun82• 16 years ago

First of all, religious arguments against or for anything should be irrelevant in civil arguments, it's a question of human rights. For example, the recent discussions on wearing burqas does center on whether their use is religiously dictated or not but rather the trade-offs of the rights between wearers and society at large.

This trade-off point is my main counter argument. Specifically, this means that gay marriage can have drawbacks for the society, e.g. (i) as others point out, the same logic (consenting adults, personal rights, etc.) can be used to argue for polygamy and other forms of relationships that are outside current society's norms; (ii) it may have adverse affects on the couples children.

kjksf11• 16 years ago

You're missing the main point: it's about discrimination.

A law that would forbid wearing a burqa as a societal trade-off would apply to everyone equally hence it wouldn't be discrimination. Even though it would affect the most people of a certain religion, it would also apply to secular burqa wearers.

The main issue with a law that forbids gays to marry, and the reason it's discrimination, is that it denies them a right that everyone else has.

Whether polygamy is legal or not has nothing to do with it. The law forbids a specific behavior (polygamy) and it applies to everyone so is not discriminatory. Constitutionally, it's in the same league as a law that forbids smoking in public places or, for that matter, killing people.

So you're left with only one potential argument: that gay marriage causes specific, societal harm that is not caused by non-gay marriage. I would like to see a solid proof of that. "It may have" is not one.

qhoxie• 16 years ago

Anyone seeing 500 errors - S3 has all but died in the last few minutes. We are working with them to get things back up and running.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

http://status.aws.amazon.com/

jblochjohnson• 16 years ago

What makes Hacker News cool is that the link is to the actual ruling, which is far more interesting than the articles about this I've seen so far. If you just glanced at the headline, I suggest you dig in...

redstripe• 16 years ago

Excellent news. I think gay people deserve the right to be just as miserable as us straight people.

gcb• 16 years ago

i wonder if the mormons try to get polygamy going amidst all that gay marriage talk

that would be interesting.

cynest• 16 years ago

Only a subset of mormons (fundamentalist LDS). Also, I doubt they'd want to legally marry their wives: single mothers collect more benefits.

cj• 16 years ago

How did this leave the front page so quickly? Hm...

adammichaelc• 16 years ago

I am likely a minority voice on HN on this topic and with so many strong feelings about this I will likely be down-voted for these arguments, but in the spirit of bringing out another side to the debate so that a full discussion can happen, I'd like to bring up a few thoughts against the court-ruling.

I rarely hear about how state-approved same-sex marriage will impact freedom of religion. Personal feelings aside, religous groups should have the freedom to practice their religion according to their conscience. They each have a right to preach their interpretation of right and wrong, and shouldn't be forced into the current policially correct view.

For example, I could see a pastor or rabbi or other religous leader feeling uncomfortable about marrying 2 people of the same sex, and then being sued for a civil rights violation with the full force of the state to back up the couple's lawsuit.

Another example that comes to mind is religous colleges that offer married student housing being forced to let a same-sex couple live in the housing; in this situation the school could be sued for discrimination and potentially lose tax-exempt status unless they comply.

These 2 examples are compelling to me because they are realistic scenarios post-today's ruling and they represent a power-grab by the government over a religion's conscience-driven decisions about what is right and wrong. We shouldn't hand over these religious decisions to bureaucrats.

It seems that by officially sanctioning same-sex marriage, we are heading towards a collision course between church and state, which is troubling from a religious-freedom perspective. In an ideal world, marriage wouldn't be a state-driven issue at all, but left to the religions themselves to define. Obviously this isn't an option; at the very least we should be careful about how much more power we want to give the government about our individual conscience-driven religous choices.

brandon4• 16 years ago

Fact 19 from the findings of the court, emphasis mine:

"Marriage in the United States has always been a civil matter. Civil authorities may permit religious leaders to solemnize marriages but not to determine who may enter or leave a civil marriage. Religious leaders may determine independently whether to recognize a civil marriage or divorce but that recognition or lack thereof has no effect on the relationship under state law."

How this fits in with college housing, for example, I could not say. I will say, though, that the situation you're describing sounds awful discriminatory.

ubernostrum4• 16 years ago

No religious organization is being forced to recognize same-sex marriage. No religious organization will be required to endorse same-sex marriage. The case is solely concerned with the question of whether the state of California in its capacity as a state of the United States has grounds to refuse such recognition. And, under the 14th Amendment, it does not. That's the whole thing.

As to college housing and other situations, the real question is whether such colleges accept government funding. That puts you in the same situation as accepting any funding: the entity providing the funds has the right to attach conditions, and you have the right to accept or refuse (and if you refuse, you don't get the money). And the US government and state governments are constitutionally barred from providing funding to any entity which engages in certain types of discrimination, so that's the condition attached to the funding.

California's Prop 8 (gay marriage ban) ruled unconstitutional

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