California Supreme Court Decides (Gay) Marriage Case

Today the California Supreme Court issued its decision to render unconstitutional the state's scheme which reserves "marriage" for one-man, one-woman unions and allows "domestic partnerships", which include nearly all the same privileges and responsibilities of marriage, for homosexual couples. As I read the Court's decision, these are the key elements to their argument that the state's scheme is unconstitutional:

1. The state's constitution guarantees marriage as a fundamental right.
2. The right to marry is defined as "the substantive right of two adults who share a loving relationship to join together to establish an officially recognized family of their own — and, if the couple chooses, to raise children within that family."
3. Differentiation of terms, even without any substantive difference between "marriage" and "domestic partnerships", "impinges upon a same-sex couple's fundamental interest in having their family relationship accorded the same respect and dignity enjoyed by an opposite-sex couple."
4. The protection of "marriage" as reserved for one-man and one-woman does not serve any compelling state interest and is not necessary to serve such an interest.

I'm not sure how #2 slipped by without reference to "between one man and one woman" since law was on the books in California to define marriage in that way, explicitly for the purpose of emphasizing the one-man, one-woman aspect. The long-standing and often unspoken definition of marriage as referring to a man and a woman is jettisoned because "Tradition alone ... generally has not been viewed as a sufficient justification for perpetuating, without examination, the restriction or denial of a fundamental constitutional right." Then the definition that stands on the books is discarded because it is "unconstitutional". So in the end what we are left with is a "constitutional right" that is grounded neither in the original intention of the writers of the constitution nor in the interpretation of it in legislation approved by voters nor in the teleology of marriage as a generally and fundamentally procreative relationship.

(Aside) I think there is an odd irony here that while homosexual couples care so much about the blessing of the state upon their relationship that they battle in court to win that blessing, many "ordinary" heterosexual couples care so little about anyone's blessing on their relationship that they are increasingly living and sleeping together apart from any formalized commitment or community recognition. (End aside)

What is significant, I think, is not this recent decision; it's not a surprise given the ethos of our age—and especially California. For Christians, the cultural pressure to accommodate the view of marriage of the world around us will be increasingly difficult to resist. How can we respond and engage? I think the "missional" answer is to work toward a redemptive counter-culture that honors and promotes marriage as it ought to be and to offer that as a positive vision to the unregenerate surrounding culture.