California Marriage Amendment: One Year Later

The one year anniversary of the California Marriage Amendment is upon us, and that means lots of mourning, whining, hand-wringing, and finger-pointing by marriage neutering proponents in the media, and we're going to have sore loser demonstrations again. Remember the attempted scolding by certain celebrities?

But for all of the emotional outbursts, the fact is, nobody was harmed by the adoption of the California Marriage Amendment. False assumptions or expectations may have been dampened, to be sure, but aside from the possible political aspirations of certain judges, homosexuality advocates, and Gavin Newsom, who recently dropped out of the race for California Governor, no damage was done.

Well, that's not quite true. In the aftermath, some of the sore losers attacked marriage defenders by pressuring their employers, boycotting their businesses, publicly ridiculing their religious and personal convictions, protesting outside and inside churches, and even getting violent. Some marriage neutering proponents have taken a better approach, and I welcome reasonable discussions with them about the nature of marriage, and the roles of various government entities.

[More after the jump.]

Homosexual individuals and couples have not been, as some of the anti-Amendment media implied was possible, rounded up and sent to internment camps. They have not been told to drink out of different drinking fountains or move to the back of the bus. They have not had missionaries breaking into their homes and destroying their property.

Life has gone on. If two people of the same-sex have sought to have their relationship registered with the state as a domestic partnership, they have been treated, by state law, as though they are spouses. They've been able to have their ceremonies and their lives together and live as they please. Sure, two women can't get a marriage license together in California, because there isn't a groom and thus it isn't marriage. How is that any more of an injustice than someone else not being able to get any other state-issued license because the requirement is not met?

So what is it exactly that people will be protesting?

That we, the people of California, took back what a court improperly took away from us. Remember, when you see the protests and the opinion pieces, and all of the fuss, that these are people who want to deny you your vote. These are people who tried to use a court to force you to do something you didn’t want to do, against your religion, against nature, against history, against your intuition, and when you said "no", a lot of them acted like spoiled brats. Spoiled brats are pitiable, but when they get power, they are dangerous. We were better off not giving them the power over marriage. Contrary to their assertions of being subjected to the tyranny of the majority, what we did was protect ourselves from tyranny by a minority.

Californians did the right thing, despite having the deck stacked against them by the ballot language and by "representatives" who chose to ignore the majority. That is cause for celebration.