The California Marriage Ruling

There’s great news from California. Their Supreme court invalidated the Defense of Marriage law there. I should email links from the numerous articles to Rep. Brien since he’s trying to sneak a DOMA law into Rhode Island.

What encourages me about this is that we now have two jurisdictions in which the courts have acted to protect a minority from a majority. The foes in California will certainly try to get a constitutional amendment put in place but people realize those for what they are, writing discrimination into a constitution.

But since there’s now case law we’re going to see other jurisdictions go the way of California and Massachusetts. One of those could very well be Rhode Island. My cousin Tom Seymour wrote a wonderful memorandum of support that includes all the citations for the RI Consitution, U.S. Constitution and relevant case law. That was submitted to the entire Judiciary Committee during the hearing on Marriage Equality/Divorce Equality last week.

It’s now common knowledge that we have the support necessary to clear the Judiciary Committee, but Speaker William Murphy is the brick wall.

So I’ll email the memo to him too. After all his next in charge is a gay man, and I happen to know the 3rd down is too. He’s got to understand that it’s rolling along and even his brick wall won’t stop it.

And here’s a video of the celebrations in San Francisco. What was most poignant was the fact when he asked the couple what they’d be doing differently tomorrow. Their answer was they’d been together 23 years, the only difference now being that their relationship would be validated and recognized.

Here in RI we already have ENDA protections, and most of the Fortune 1000 have domestic partner benefits. But we still need a federal ENDA, and I’d ultimately like to see federal marriage equality too.