Divorced by Voters?

Article Tools

Print friendly
E-mail story
Tip Us Off
iPod friendly
Comments

Bookmark This

del.icio.us.
Digg!
furl
google
newsvine
reddit
technorati
Facebook
Yahoo!

Have you ever asked a couple why they decided to get married and one of them says, “Well, it was either get married or break up, so we decided to get married”?

But what if you decided to wed, only to have voters break you up?

Such is the situation facing the 18,000 couples who tied the knot following the California Supreme Court’s May 2008 decision that ruled same-sex couples should be granted the right to marry. But Proposition 8, which amended the state’s constitution to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman, passed 52 to 48 percent in November’s election, thus eliminating the rights granted by the court.

Gay Girl / Straight World

“It’s hard to keep your chin up when a vote like that happens,” explained Lauren Wyeth, a Santa Barbara-based marriage and family therapist who last year wed her partner of 20 years, Allison. “For nearly six months, I’d been feeling like a bona fide, full-fledged citizen, but Prop. 8 took the wind right out of me.”

In the months since the election, it’s been headline after headline documenting every twitch and breath of the pro and con sides of the campaign. There have been protests and rallies by the No on 8 coalition, most notably in Silver Lake and San Diego, which drew crowds of 12,500 and 10,000, respectively; and boycotts of businesses whose employees donated to the Yes on 8 effort. In Santa Barbara, an open mike candlelight vigil was held the Friday after the election, where community members expressed their frustration with the overall results yet their satisfaction that the initiative failed in Santa Barbara County (53 to 47 percent), the only county south of Monterey to vote down Prop. 8.

What does this all mean for the people who married before Prop. 8 passed? According to Santa Barbara-based lawyer Nicole Champion of Brown & Champion LLP, whose practice focuses on marital/domestic partnership dissolution and its various legal ramifications, the status of those marriages is in legal limbo. Referring to the March 5 court date for oral arguments on the legality of Prop. 8, Champion said, “The California Supreme Court will either conclude that those marriages are valid, in which case they will be treated under California law as any other marriage, or the court could invalidate them, which will create a legal quagmire for the couples that married.”

Champion has been speaking with Pacific Pride Foundation’s Executive Director David Selberg to S.B. groups whose members voted in favor of the measure. “What we’ve found is many of those voting ‘yes’ did not realize their vote took away rights from other individuals,” Champion said. “Their focus was on the traditional biblical definition of marriage, rather than the legal rights and obligations that go along with a civil marriage.”

Pacific Pride also has formed the Strategic Alliance for Marriage Equality (SAME), whose goal “is to motivate and promote local activism in the effort to achieve marriage equality at a local, state, and national level.” SAME hosted an informational town hall meeting in early January, and sent delegates to the Equality Summit in Los Angeles, where Prop. 8 opponents met to make plans to repeal the initiative.

If the state’s Supreme Court upholds Prop. 8, “The battle is far from over,” said Champion, who is also on Pacific Pride’s Board of Directors. “From a civil rights perspective, upholding Prop. 8 sends a message to those groups who choose to discriminate: If they have enough money and are effective at misinforming the public, they can take away rights from minority groups by a majority vote of the electorate.” Furthermore, according to Champion, “If the court upholds the validity of Prop. 8, the next step will be a ballot initiative amending or revising the constitution” to repeal the same-sex marriage ban.

Last June, after a whirlwind month of planning their wedding, Lauren and Allison stood together in front of their family and friends and exchanged their vows. “There was a huge feeling of relief at finally being recognized as a married couple in the eyes of the law,” Lauren said. “We wanted to get married because of our love for one another, and because we wanted to make a public acknowledgement of our commitment to each other.”

It’d be a shame to break that up.

Related Links

• More Gay Girl/Straight World columns
• More on Prop 8

Comments

Discussion Guidelines

Currently:
Clear Sky
Temperature:
50.0°
Wind:
3 NW