Maura Dolans Los Angeles Times article is up – and you can comment if you click through. Much of it appeared in her blog entry, but then we come to the new information.
In other testimony, Helen Zia, 57, a lesbian writer, told the court that marrying her partner transformed the way their families viewed them.Further down comes this...
She said she eventually fell in love with Lia Shigemura and quit a high-powered job to move across the country to be with her. Before marrying, they were domestic partners. She said her domestic partnership with Shigemura was nothing like marriage. Marriage united the families of both women and gave their relationship a name that others understood, she said.
So we're obligated to make sure her family or her partner's makes her feel comfortable and appreciated and that they approve of and understand their relationship? How is that the obligation of the state?
Speaking of that, if something has to be done, why can't we have an education campaign about domestic partnerships instead?
The lack of reporting on the topic indicated to me a lack of testimony on her part describing a single example of how the state of California government treated her any differently when she got a marriage license than it did when she was in a domestic partnership. That would be a little more relevant, though it is constitutional to treat different kinds of voluntary associations differently.
A Proposition 8 lawyer suggested Zia was a gay activist and noted she had once criticized marriage as "patriarchal."
Oops. Well, that was before she "discovered" that there was this long unexercised form of marriage that was groomless, and that there was a "right" to have a state issue a license for it.
That was the only line in that part of the story about the defense.
Associated Press writer Lisa Leff's take is here.
Zia's testimony was intended to show that California's domestic partnership law, which grants same-sex couples the rights of marriage but not the title or the federal benefits, is not an acceptable substitute.
Didn’t work. Federal benefits are not a state matter anyway.
Let me get this straight – no pun intended. If someone gets a degree from UC Riverside or Cal State Dominguez Hills, and some people say "I've never heard of Riverside", or "I've never heard of Dominguez Hills", we're obligated to suddenly change their degree to one from UCLA? Or a "Liberal Arts" degree into a "Physics" degree, for the same reasons?
Brian Raum, a defense lawyer representing sponsors of Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage ballot measure approved in 2008, objected to Zia being called to the witness stand. He argued that her individual experience was irrelevant to the trial's constitutional questions.
He's right.
The article also rehashes the earlier testimony about homosexual parents being no more likely to abuse children in their care than heterosexual parents. It just occurred to me that this assumes that it isn't abusive for children to know that the people raising them are engaging in homosexual behavior. I know that there are a lot of people who think there is nothing wrong with homosexual behavior, but it got me thinking about what these expderts mean by "abuse". For what it is worth, I think it is darn near abusive for unmarried both-sexes couples to carry on a sexual relationship, setting a bad example for the children in the home - especially when it is a series of causal sexual encounters in the home with different people, as in a single parent going from partner to partner.
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