The California Supreme Court appears overwhelmingly likely to split the baby on the legal challenge to Prop 8, upholding Prop 8 but also ruling the same-sex marriages that took place prior to the California electorate's disgraceful display would remain legal. Even some of the Court's majority in the ruling granting same-sex marriage rights that the Court overturned were highly skeptical of the arguments that Prop 8 was illegal, while even the Court's most conservative member seemed to suggest that marriages that took place while same-sex marriage was legal could not be nullified. While it's dismaying from a policy perspective, I can't argue with this likely outcome. Not because I think that overturning Prop 8 would produce some massive backlash, but because (unlike the Court's prior same-sex marriage decision) the legal grounds for invalidating Prop 8 are very weak. Allowing rights-stripping constitutional amendments via bare majority initiatives is a really bad system, but it's the system that California has. Until there's a federally recognized right to same-sex marriage there really isn't a legal remedy to Prop 8. Advocates for same-sex marriage need to get to work and get the thing overturned through the ballot box as soon as possible. --Scott Lemieux
