( – promoted by Be_Devine)
UPDATE by Brian: You can find the decision here if the court's site isn't working for you.
Building off the earlier open thread – In a 6-1 decision, the California Supreme Court upheld the validity of Prop 8. It held that a bare majority of California's voters has the right to single out an unpopular group and strip them of fundamental rights.
The only justice on the right side of history is Justice Moreno.
The Court held that a constitutional revision occurs only when it makes “far reaching changes in the nature of our basic governmental plan.” Anything else is an amendment an can be passed by a bare majority. The court held that the effect of Prop 8 is “only” one of nomenclature, and thus it does not make any changes to the nature of our government plan.
Justice Werdegar was the only justice in the majority who is intellectually honest enough to call a spade a spade. She didn't hide behind the majority's false argument that California's law on revision/amendment distinction has always supported the decision to uphold Prop 8. Instead, she wrote her own concurring opinion specifically to point out what the majority hides: that the California Supreme Court had to make new law in order to reach its result of upholding Prop 8:
until today the court has gone only so far as to say that “a qualitative revision includes one that involves a change in the basic plan of California government, i.e., a change in its fundamental structure or the foundational powers of its branches.” (Legislature v. Eu, supra, at p. 509, italics added.) Today, the majority changes “includes” to “is,” thus foreclosing other possibilities.
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The history of our California Constitution belies any suggestion that the drafters envisioned or would have approved a rule, such as that announced today, that affords governmental structure and organization more protection from casual amendment than civil liberties.
This is judicial activism at its worst. Today, the Supreme Court significantly narrowed the definition of what is a “revision” that has been California law since the 1894 case of Livermore v. Waite. They invented a new definition only because it would suit the result that they wanted. And the result that the Court wanted so much that they were willing to create new law is to strip a previously protected minority of its fundamental civil rights.
Today is a sad, sad day in California's history.
They legislated from the bench regarding the scope of revision and amendment, and made it possible to reach their preferred outcome by deciding out of thin air that the state will continue to recognize previous marriages, in contradiction of the plain wording of Prop 8. This allowed them to deal with the violence to civil rights by pretending it is purely a prospective change of nomenclature, rather than a direct attack on people’s lives and equality.
The wording of the “doesn’t apply to existing marriages” section is particularly telling — the court says over and over and over that its finding on this is clear and obvious — which is what you say when it is neither clear nor obvious. But cutting the existing marriages out of the equation was the only way they could reach the outcome they preferred about the validity of Prop 8 overall.
Or is that a thing only conservatives do?
Mobile vulgus, for all you Latin fans.
a Constitutional Convention to fix the system. Anyone knows if that’s a possibility?