Proposition 8, DoMA and the Supreme Court : “The End of the Beginning” of the Struggle for Marriage Equality

by Mark Gabrish Conlan / Zenger’s Newsmagazine

 First, the good news: the United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear the constitutional challenge to Proposition 8, the voter-approved initiative that abruptly stopped California’s four and one-half month experience of marriage equality in November 2008.

Now, the bad news: the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the constitutional challenge to Proposition 8.

It’s good news in the sense that we’re finally going to get an answer as to whether a state has the constitutional right to define marriage either to include or exclude same-sex couples. It’s bad news in the sense that the answer we’re going to get is hardly likely to be the one we want — especially those of us who, like my husband Charles and I, took advantage of the 4 ½-month “window” between the effective date of the California Supreme Court’s decision allowing same-sex marriage and the passage of Proposition 8 to get married. Since then we, and the estimated 18,000 other same-sex couples who got married in California when it was blessedly legal, have been in the truly weird position of actually having the “special rights” opponents of Queer equality always accuse us of seeking, since we can be married but other couples — including ones who’ve been together longer than we have — can’t.

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