Prop 8 Closing Arguments: Opponents try to Revoke the rest of CA Gay Marriages

The end game is going down today in San Fran. Folks are gathering around the courthouse, ready to support either side.

However, our opponents have stooped to a new low. They have submitted a request to revoke the other 18,000 gay marriages recognized in the state.

Such an order would honor "the expressed will of the people," backers of the November 2008 ballot measure said Tuesday in their final written filing before Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker.

Andrew Pugno, an attorney for Prop. 8's backers, said in an interview that the sponsors aren't asking Walker to nullify the 18,000 marriages, but only to rule that government agencies, courts and businesses no longer have to recognize the couples as married.

Lawyers for two same-sex couples who sued to overturn Prop. 8, on the other hand, are asking Walker to lift the marriage ban permanently. The measure violates the constitutional guarantee of equality, they argued, and must be struck down "regardless of its level of public support."

Walker heard 12 days of testimony in his San Francisco courtroom in January in the nation's first federal court trial on the constitutionality of a law defining marriage as a male-female union. Among those who took the stand were the plaintiff couples - two women from Berkeley and two men from Burbank - and a parade of academic witnesses who testified about the history and meaning of marriage and the status of gays and lesbians in society.

The judge has scheduled closing arguments to last all day today. His ruling, which could be weeks away, will be the first round in a battle likely to reach the U.S. Supreme Court within two years.

I'll keep y'all posted throughout the day.

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Interesting Quote: Maggie Gallagher

This is the trial that should never have happened. Hundreds of thousands of Californians contributed blood, sweat, tears and treasures to exercize their core civil rights to respond to the California State Supreme Court decision overturning marriage. That's what that decision did: it didn't expand marriage to more people, it abolished the core idea of what marriage is--the union of male and female--and replaced it with a new judicial definition of marriage, ungrounded in the natural order, in our history, or in our constitution.

So the people responded to this judicial intrusion in the way their constitution guaranteed them the right to do: by collecting hundreds of thousands of signatures to put the issue before the people in November 2008. I was part of that effort. Brian Brown, NOM's president, who is a native Californian, played an even more pivotal role. They told us the effort would be doomed to fail: it was too many signatures, too much money, too little time, and besides we were told "the culture has changed and you'll lose at the ballot box."

But we didn't. None of that turned out to be true. More than 7 million Californians, in one of the most liberal states in the country, came together to affirm, once again, that they believe marriage is the union of husband and wife and should not be changed

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NOM's sacred cow's post as she goes to the closing arguments of the Perry v. Schwarzenegger case

Prop 8 Closing Arguments may be on TV

We may get to see the closing arguments of the Prop 8 case.

The Bay Area's federal judges are again proposing to allow cameras in their courtrooms, a plan that could lead to telecasting of closing arguments in a suit challenging California's ban on same-sex marriage.

If his court approves the new rule next week, Walker could allow camera coverage of the arguments along the lines of his previous order, subject to approval by Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Telecasting lawyers' arguments, without witness testimony, might pass muster with the Supreme Court, which hasn't objected to televised hearings of arguments before the Ninth Circuit.

Prop. 8's sponsors, who opposed telecasting the trial, won't say whether they would challenge the airing of final arguments.

This would be good to see and hear these arguments. I hope this new plan works out.

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