As gay marriage heads back to court, political proponents are split

Lawyers aiming to overturn California’s ban on same-sex marriage will make their closing arguments on June 16. But some gay-rights supporters have not waited for the outcome of the legal battle over 2008’s Proposition 8. Instead they launched an ambitious, though unsuccessful, political push-back this year. 

Two nonprofit groups — Restore Equality 2010 and Love Honor Cherish — attempted to get the matter back on the ballot this November. But for a number of reasons, they failed to get enough valid signatures by the April deadline.

Since the passage of Proposition 8 in 2008, there has been a substantial divide among gay-rights groups over whether to concentrate efforts and resources on working at the ballot box to defeat Proposition 8 in 2010 or in 2012. Equality California, one of the most prominent groups challenging Proposition 8, decided to concentrate its efforts on 2012, and most organizations followed its lead. Restore Equality 2010 and Love Honor Cherish did not.

“We ran this campaign without the support of any major party, without the support of the largest gay organizations in the state, without the support of many of the smaller gay organizations in the state and the regional organizations,” said Ian Hart, a regional representative of Restore Equality 2010. “But we were committed to this fight because we knew it was the right thing to do, and it was the right time to do it, frankly. In the end, that effort wasn’t enough.”

They had hoped to harness the outrage that happened after voters approved Proposition 8. “There was a reason that the reaction to the Proposition 8 decision was unprecedented,” Hart said. “People were taking to the streets with a sort of fervor and a spontaneity that we haven’t seen in California in decades. We can’t predict that happening again, and we simply can’t create that fervor. So when you have an opportunity like that, you have to take advantage of it.”

Conservatives cite public opinion

Jim Campbell, litigation staff counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, a nonprofit group that provides legal backing for cases involving religious freedom and is defending Proposition 8, said failure to get enough signatures for the measure was not unexpected.

“It’s not surprising, given that the people of California, just a little more than a year and a half ago, enacted a constitutional amendment defending marriage as a union of one man and one woman,” he said. But Campbell also said it did not mean there was any lack of political influence by same-sex marriage supporters: “It merely shows that those organizations that are advocating to change marriage were not all committed to this signature-gathering effort.”

Testimony in the court challenge, Perry v. Schwarzenegger, ended in January in the San Francisco federal courtroom of Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker. The federal lawsuit claims that Prop. 8, which states that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California, violates provisions of the U.S. Constitution, including equal protection under the law.

Democratic ‘stonewalling’

Hart said that if restoring marriage rights requires another election fight, they have to do a better job of getting the support of politicians in Sacramento. “We were totally rebuffed by Sacramento,” he said. “The Sacramento Democrats stonewalled us.”

Asked if California Democrats could have done more, Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, said, “I believe the California Democratic Party was the first in the country to pass a resolution in support of marriage equality. You can’t rewrite history. Beyond that, an attempt to repeal Prop. 8 in 2010 was attempted and did not catch on. At this point, it would make more sense to focus our collective energies on doing the necessary work so we can succeed in 2012.”