Replies

"The majority refers to the race cases, from which our equal protection jurisprudence has evolved. The analogy does not hold. The civil rights cases banning racial discrimination were based on duly enacted amendments to the United States Constitution, proposed by Congress and ratified by the people through the states. To our nation’s great shame, many individuals and governmental entities obdurately refused to follow these constitutional imperatives for nearly a century. By overturning Jim Crow and other segregation laws, the courts properly and courageously held the people accountable to their own constitutional mandates. Here the situation is quite different. In less than a decade, through the democratic process, same-sex couples have been given the equal legal rights to which they are entitled.

In Perez v. Sharp (1948) 32 Cal.2d 711, we struck down a law prohibiting interracial marriages. The majority places great reliance on the Perez court’s statement that “the right to marry is the right to join in marriage with the person of one’s choice.” (Id. at p. 715.) However, Perez and the many other cases establishing the fundamental right to marry were all based on the common understanding of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. (See maj. opn., ante, at pp. 54-63.) The majority recognizes this, as it must. (Id. at p. 66.) Because those cases involved the traditional definition of marriage, they do not support the majority’s analysis. The question here is whether the meaning of the term as it was used in those cases must be changed." Justice Corrigan

She writes better than I do and hopefully you will understand that your analogy fails constitutionally.