Gay marriage abolished in California referendum
In a defeat for the gay-rights movement, California voters have put a stop to gay marriage, creating uncertainty about the legal status of 18,000 same-sex couples who tied the knot during a four-month window of opportunity opened by the state’s highest court.
Passage of a constitutional amendment against gay marriage – in a state so often at the forefront of liberal social change – elated religious conservatives who had little else to cheer about in the US elections.
Gay activists were disappointed and began looking for battlegrounds elsewhere in the back-and-forth fight to allow gays to wed.
“There’s something deeply wrong with putting the rights of a minority up to a majority vote,” said Evan Wolfson, a gay-rights lawyer who heads a group called Freedom to Marry. “If this were being done to almost any other minority, people would see how un-American this is.”
Legal skirmishing began immediately, with gay-rights groups challenging the newly passed ban in court and vowing to resist any effort to invalidate the same-sex marriages that took place following the state Supreme Court decision in May.
The amendment, which passed with 52% of the vote, overrides that court ruling by defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
Thirty states now have adopted such measures, but the California vote marks the first time a state took away gay marriage after it had been legalised.
Gay-marriage bans also passed in Arizona and Florida, with 57% and 62% support, respectively, while Arkansas voters approved a measure aimed at gays that bars unmarried couples from serving as adoptive or foster parents.
Massachusetts and Connecticut are now the only states to allow same-sex marriage.
Talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, who had her own gay marriage earlier this year, said she was “saddened beyond belief” by the passage of the constitutional amendment.
DeGeneres said the decision detracted from a day where Barack Obama won the US presidency.
She said she had “like millions of Americans, felt like we had taken a giant step toward equality” by electing Mr Obama.
But she said that, with the passage of California’s Proposition Eight, “we took a giant step away”.
DeGeneres wed actress Portia de Rossi in August, following a May state Supreme Court decision legalising same-sex marriage in California – a ruling rendered invalid by the referendum.
She had contributed $100,000 (€78,000) to fight the amendment.
DeGeneres asserted she will “continue to speak out for equality for all of us”.
