California Gay Marriage Ban Spawns Spate of Legal Actions

The hotly debated, much reported on and continually contentious California Proposition 8 ballot measure, perhaps the second most popular story coming out of Tuesday’s elections, promises to keep fomenting passionate emotions, debate and even legal action in the coming days. Protestors stood 2,000-strong outside a Mormon temple in Los Angeles yesterday to protest the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ involvement in helping to pass Proposition 8, the ballot measure that would add a California constitutional ban on gay marriage. The church apparently encouraged members of its congregation to give million of dollars to pass the proposition, most of which was spent on TV ads and mailings in support of the anti-gay marriage measure.

Now, various gay and lesbian groups are seeking to overturn the measure, and questions have arisen about the legality of 18,000 same-sex marriages that were performed in the state of California over the past several months. Among the efforts of the gay community to overturn the proposition are ongoing protests like the one yesterday. Cody Krebs, a 27 year old gay man, was at the protest in L.A. and noted, "It’s important to come out like this because it gets the gay community into the public eye. I feel like this has started a lot of conversations that had to get started." Signs at the rally indicated that many protestors liken the demonstrations to those of the 1960s civil rights protests, with some reading "What do we want" Equal Rights" and "I didn’t vote against your marriage."

Various groups have filed suit in their attempts at overturning Proposition 8, and it remains to be seen whether those past same-sex marriages will be nullified. The amendment to California’s constitution does not explicitly state whether the law is retroactive. Legal experts point out that without explicit language, laws are typically not applied retroactively. According to Stanford University law professor Jane Schacter, "Otherwise, a Pandora’s Box of chaos is opened." Schacter went on to say that the issue of retroactivity "is not a slam dunk." With or without the ban in place, a 2003 California law generally conveys to those registered as domestic partners the rights typically assigned only under marriage. Among them are the state rights as they apply to taxes, estate planning and medical decisions, and the new amendment does not overturn that existing law.