Yesterday afternoon, the Ninth Circuit Court asked the Supreme Court of California to clarify whether the proponents of Prop. 8 have standing to appeal Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling overturning the measure, which bans marriage between same-sex couples. Both the former and current governor of the state have refused to defend it. As Igor Volsky notes, the Ninth Circuit also decided that one of the counties supporting Prop. 8 did not have standing.
This doesn't mean anything for the ultimate result, but Freedom to Marry Executive Director Evan Wolfson said that "the delay is lamentable, because it means couples continue to be excluded from marriage on the basis of a proposition that should never have been put up to a vote in the first place." Bmaz has a grim estimate of how long this will take to get resolved, writing, "Six months would be a miracle, a year is far more likely."
Proponents of Prop. 8 have a basic problem here, which is that it's actually difficult for them to prove that they are in some way harmed by same-sex couples being allowed to marry. Even if they somehow establish standing, they have to then prove that there's a government interest in preventing same-sex couples from marrying, which for obvious reasons didn't go well last time around. It's easier to get an electoral majority to establish discriminatory policies than it is to prove in a court of law that such discrimination is justified.
Wolfson noted a sad irony about the difficulty of Prop. 8 supporters to establish any actual harm being done to them in order to support this case while the injury to same-sex couples prohibited from marrying is so obvious.
"Every day that people are denied the freedom to marry is a real injury to people. People have made a commitment for life, and they want that commitment under the law, they want to celebrate it with their loved ones, they want to have the protection that marriage affords, and every day that couples are denied the right to marry is a real injury," Wolfson said. "In contrast, the anti-gay forces behind the ballot measure have been unable to show any injury to anyone by having gay people marry."
