Our View: Marriage ruling a win for fairness

The California Supreme Court decided Thursday that California's laws defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman violate the state constitution and that same-sex couples must be allowed to enter into legally recognized marriages. The decision is bound to be controversial — and is likely to be contested at the ballot box in November — but it is eminently defensible.

As a practical matter, this decision will have only a limited impact on the legal status of same-sex couples. In 1999 the state Legislature established a domestic-partner registry and conferred many of the legal rights and obligations accruing to married partners to cohabiting same-sex couples. Since then the Legislature has gradually expanded the legal privileges of domestic partners until they are virtually the same as married couples have, including the right to file joint state tax returns.

However, in 2000 California voters enacted a 14-word initiative: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." With its decision Thursday the Supreme Court declared this provision to be unconstitutional and, therefore, invalid.

The 2000 initiative was a statutory initiative, that is, it put a law in place rather than amending the state constitution. Opponents of same-sex marriage have collected signatures for a similar provision that would amend the constitution to permit recognition only of opposite-sex marriages. If it qualifies and passes, it would reverse this decision.

This marriage decision is a departure from tradition, but the high court recalled an earlier decision that also represented such a departure. California had laws prohibiting interracial marriage from before it was a state. Yet in 1948, in its Perez decision, the California Supreme Court decided that such laws were invalid because the right to marry is a fundamental individual right, and that prohibiting people of different races to marry violates this right and violates the principle of equal protection of the laws.

The issues in the current case are not identical, but close enough that this decision is justified as well. Prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying, even though they can have most of the privileges of marriage, is an act of discrimination that is not countenanced under California's constitution.

In our view, the state should have little or no role in defining or regulating so intimate a relationship as marriage. People should be free to call their relationship a marriage if it is loving and committed, and churches should be free to decide whether or not to bless such relationships.

Given the reality that the state has inserted itself into so many aspects of our private lives, however, and that it treats married couples differently from those who are simply cohabiting, this decision was virtually inevitable as an expression of simple fairness.