California & gay marriage

It's a combination built for blog traffic. I stopped blogging at Vote for Judges a couple of months ago, but, this week especially, this post is pulling in a lot of Google visitors. (By the way, if you're interested in judicial stuff, there are 250+ posts over there that involved lots of research.)

To recap:

1. In 2000, California voters, by initiative, define marriage to be a union of one man and one woman. This was essentially an endorsement of existing state law.

2. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom proceeds to issue marriage licenses to 4,000 gay couples.

3. California Supreme Court nullifies the marriages, ruling that Newsom violated state law.

4. In 2004, state district court judge rules the law unconstitutional. That's on appeal in the state courts.

5. For no other reason, apparently, than to embarrass Gov. Schwarzenegger, state's Democratic Legislature passes gay marriage bill it has repeatedly rejected in the past.

6. Gov. S, citing No. 1, vetoes bill.

Now it's up to the courts to figure out: Who's supreme, the Legislature or the people it serves? The way that sentence is constructed, the answer's obvious. The court may construct it otherwise.

As long as the court picks one or the other, the democratic process will be preserved. One party will be unhappy, but it will have recourse through the initiative process.

If the court picks neither and imposes its own solution, then the justices may eventually go away unhappy. They're subject to retention elections in California, and the voters there tend not to appreciate referendum nullification.