Gay Marriage: Prop 8 Trial Rests, and a Key Ruling Awaits

[steve2470]

Gay Marriage: Prop 8 Trial Rests, and a Key Ruling Awaits

The federal trial over gay marriage has rested, and we won't know who won until U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker calls the lawyers back to hear closing arguments and issues his ruling. That is likely to take several weeks. But it's already clear that the verdict itself will be only a beginning, as all sides shift their focus from testimony to the real task of convincing federal appellate judges, and ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court, to rule their way.

What's equally clear now, after nearly three weeks of evidence, is that no matter what happens, the debate over gay marriage will never again be the same.

By bringing this case, legal powerhouses David Boies and Ted Olson — who most famously opposed each other in the Supreme Court over the 2000 presidential election — have managed to make mainstream the notion of gay marriage in a way that not even years of campaigning by gay-rights groups had been able to. That began to be clear almost immediately after the trial began early this month, as Republican stalwarts, from Cindy McCain to Herbert Hoover's granddaughter, began to speak out in favor of gay marriage. "This trial, and Ted's and David's profiles as nationally prominent, mainstream opinion leaders, have made the whole issue mainstream and much less partisan," says Jennifer Pizer, director of Lambda Legal's National Marriage Project and one of the lawyers who warned that the timing of the case could be disastrous. Gay-rights experts still warn that strategy is highly risky given the frosty reception they fear it will receive at the U.S. Supreme Court.

But the trial, win or lose, has put on the dock a series of basic assumptions about what living in America should be like for millions of its citizens. For decades, governments at every level have created one set of rules for heterosexuals in America, and another set for its gays and lesbians. What the challenge to Prop 8 — California's 2008 vote to change its constitution to ban gay marriage — is all about is gathering hard evidence about the roots of that uneven playing field. Both sides see it as a crucial test of whether society can insist that heterosexual unions are worthy of the full sanction of the law in a way that other unions are not.

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