Prof. Rosenberg brought up same-sex marriage and CA in our seminar. I cringed.

In the season 5 premier of The Hills (amazing, btw!), Heidi's mom tries to convince Heidi that Spencer is actually an asshole by ambushing her with an ex-boyfriend and attempting to reunite them in an embarrassingly obvious and tactless way. I hope it was in jest, but the failed match-making was interesting because it only seemed to reinforce Heidi's strange notion that Spencer is the man of her dreams. What is it about getting overwhelmed with one set of information that makes us bolt in the opposite direction?

Last Tuesday, Vermont's legislature overrode the governor's veto on a bill that allowed gays to marry. As a resident of California and a "bleeding-heart liberal", I was deeply mortified by this. Of course I'm happy for Vermont--clearly Vermont has a better grasp on equality and civil rights than California, and I'm glad that gays in Vermont now have the same basic right to marriage--but California. We're the Golden State! we've got San Francisco! and Hollywood!

And Prop 8. Prior to the election, many friends reassured me that Californians would never pass Prop 8. No way would one of the most liberal states in the country take away the right to marry from gays. But we did. Why? I still don't quite understand, but I'm beginning to think that it's because gay rights is such an issue in California. Its very prominence galvanizes the opposition. The fact that many of us support the right of gays to marry gives conservatives something to rally around. Gays and gay-rights are a part of the Californian culture. People are constantly forced to face it--and they think about it without actually thinking about it. Many people (apparently more than half of California) see it as something foreign and strange and automatically reject it. They don't understand that the point of the law is to filter out these prejudices, to erase class and race and religion and every other distinction on which discrimination is based.

In Federalist 78, Hamilton argues that it is the role of judges "to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the ill effects [of] ill humors, which the arts of designing men, or the influence of particular conjunctures, sometimes disseminate among the people themselves, and which...have a tendency...to occasion dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community." For a while I considered writing to the California Supreme Court to remind them of Hamilton's words. I wanted them to tell them that they had at least one supporter who recognized that they were doing the very thing that our Founders thought they should be doing. They did the right thing, and for some reason it angered Californians so much that we passed a proposition to shut them up.

The worst part about all this is that it is unlikely that the California Supreme Court will overturn Prop 8. Doing so would set a precedent that would make propositions practically meaningless, but it is mind-numbingly unfair that such a basic right will be sacrificed in the name of legal continuity.

If California's highest court backs down and does the unjust thing (upholding Prop 8), I will start a new initiative in the next election cycle. I will propose another Prop 8, again to protect marriage, but this time to make divorce unconstitutional. If there are people who are shameless enough to ban gay marriage to "protect the sacred institution of marriage", let's help them really protect marriage. California has stopped reporting its divorce rates, but I'm pretty sure there are more straight people wanting to get divorced than there are gay people wanting to get married. It seems to me that the real and more pressing assault on the sanctity of marriage is straight people thinking of marriage as a disposable commodity, not gay people in love.