Gay Marriage

This initiative measure is submitted to the people in accordance with the
provisions of Article II, Section 8, of the California Constitution.
This initiative measure expressly amends the California Constitution by
adding a section thereto; therefore, new provisions proposed to be added are
printed in italic type to indicate that they are new.
SECTION 1. Title
This measure shall be known and may be cited as the “California Marriage
Protection Act.”
SECTION 2. Section 7.5 is added to Article I of the California Constitution,
to read:
SEC. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized
in California.

First, we must determine the nature and scope of the “right to marry” — a
right that past cases establish as one of the fundamental constitutional rights
embodied in the California Constitution. Although, as an historical matter, civil
marriage and the rights associated with it traditionally have been afforded only to
opposite-sex couples, this court’s landmark decision 60 years ago in Perez v.
Sharp (1948) 32 Cal.2d 7114 — which found that California’s statutory provisions
prohibiting interracial marriages were inconsistent with the fundamental
constitutional right to marry, notwithstanding the circumstance that statutory
prohibitions on interracial marriage had existed since the founding of the state...


These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the
opportunity of an individual to establish — with the person with whom the
individual has chosen to share his or her life — an officially recognized and
protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage.
As past cases establish, the substantive right of two adults who share a loving
relationship to join together to establish an officially recognized family of their
own — and, if the couple chooses, to raise children within that family —
constitutes a vitally important attribute of the fundamental interest in liberty and
personal autonomy that the California Constitution secures to all persons for the
benefit of both the individual and society.

Although our state Constitution does not contain any explicit reference to a
“right to marry,” past California cases establish beyond question that the right to
marry is a fundamental right whose protection is guaranteed to all persons by the
California Constitution.

I encourage you to at least skim through parts of the decision. it's interesting stuff.

I cannot join this exercise in legal jujitsu, by which the Legislature’s own
weight is used against it to create a constitutional right from whole cloth, defeat
the People’s will, and invalidate a statute otherwise immune from legislative
interference. Though the majority insists otherwise, its pronouncement seriously
oversteps the judicial power.

The majority has violated these principles. It simply does not have the right
to erase, then recast, the age-old definition of marriage, as virtually all societies
have understood it, in order to satisfy its own contemporary notions of equality
and justice.

I would avoid these difficulties by confirming clearly that there is no
constitutional right to same-sex marriage. That is because marriage is, as it always
has been, the right of a woman and an unrelated man to marry each other.

First, it is certainly reasonable for the Legislature, having granted same-sex
couples all substantive marital rights within its power, to assign those rights a
name other than marriage. After all, an initiative statute adopted by a 61.4 percent
popular vote, and constitutionally immune from repeal by the Legislature, defines
marriage as a union of partners of the opposite sex.

In fact, I voted no on proposition 8. You wanted the logical argument, so I gave it to you.