We need to do all we can to help those in California pass this amendment to ban Gay Marriage…consider making a contribution…Jeffrey Bell has the why…
Second, on California’s immediate future as a national Mecca and pilot project for same-sex marriage: When the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2003, the state already had a residency requirement on the books effectively prohibiting couples from coming to Massachusetts to marry. California puts up no such barrier.
The fact that a state constitutional amendment may end same-sex marriage in California if passed by state voters on November 4–the first polling since the decision indicates the amendment has roughly a 3-2 lead–makes couples more rather than less likely to jam into California’s wedding venues in the weeks and months before the election. That is because passage of the amendment would bring an abrupt end to same-sex weddings in California without in any way invalidating the marriages performed during the four-month window between mid-June and early November. In these four-plus months, same-sex marriages performed in California will have the force of law thanks to the state’s Supreme Court, and even after a voter reversal, should it occur, California officials may have no ground for regarding the couples married during the window as anything other than legally married.
This should in turn prompt the long-awaited challenge in federal courts to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) of 1996, passed overwhelmingly by Congress and signed into law by President Clinton. The purpose of DOMA was to enable states favoring traditional marriage to avoid the consequences of the Full Faith and Credit provision in the Constitution. This provision allows beneficiaries of one state’s laws to go to another state without forfeiting those benefits. Many legal observers believe DOMA is unlikely to survive court challenge, given the mind-set of the federal judiciary and the existence, thanks to the judges in California, of newly “married” couples in most other states with clear standing to sue.
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