Gay Marriage

As if we needed more evidence of America’s political polarization, last week Juan Williams gave the nation a Rorschach test. Williams said he gets scared when people in “Muslim garb” board a plane he’s on, and he promptly got (a) fired by NPR and (b) rewarded by Fox News with a big contract.

Suppose Williams had said something hurtful to gay people instead of to Muslims. Suppose he had said gay men give him the creeps because he fears they’ll make sexual advances. NPR might well have fired him, but would Fox News have chosen that moment to give him a $2-million pat on the back?

Two backlashes are possible as a result of this decision.

I had been planning to spend part of the week in a federal courthouse in Pasadena, where a special broadcast had been arranged so Southern Californians could watch the trial in the legal challenge to Prop 8 without having to go to the courtroom in San Francisco.

U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker, a Republican appointee who is presiding over the trial in the federal legal challenge to Prop 8, has been asking lawyers and witnesses versions of the same question, over and over again. Why is the state involved in sanctioning marriages anyway?

I've just completed a very fast reading of the California Supreme Court decision this morning that upholds the Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriage -- and also upholds the legality of the approximately 18,000 gay couples who got married in the state last year.

Yes, according to Travis Ballie, writing at Daily Kos. He thinks it would be a stronger statement to have voters -- rather than judges -- overturn the Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriage. I tend to agree, since the goal is not simply legal same-sex marriage in California but marriage equality nationwide.

You may have noticed that your blogger has been ignoring the hottest direct democracy story in the country: the controversy over Miss California's remarks in opposition to same-sex marriage (and thus in favor of the Prop 8 ban) in her home state.

In Prop 8-land, people are buzzing about this: The Rev. Rick Warren, the evangelical Southern California pastor who gave the invocation at President Obama's inauguration, told Larry King last week that he didn't campaign for Prop 8, the California initiative ban on same-sex marriage. In fact, he did. In this Politico story, Warren's pr agents try to walk this one back by arguing that Warren was too tired from his Holy Week duties. Apparently, exhaustion makes one more favorable to same-sex marriage.

I was interviewed yesterday for a CBS News "The Early Show" piece on same-sex marriage that appeared this morning. With the recent legalization of such marriages in Iowa (by a unanimous Iowa state supreme court) and in Vermont (by the legislature), there is a sense of momentum around the cause of marriage equality. I'm not that optimistic. The politics even of reversing the federal ban on recognition of such marriages is too dangerous even for a Democratic Congressional majority and a Democratic president who know such a ban is wrong. And some two dozen states have bans on the books.

The California Supreme Court hears the challenges to Prop 8 tomorrow morning. And you may have heard that Cal Channel, which broadcasts government hearings, will show the hearing live on its web site.