By Sam Martino
Protest signs reading “straight not narrow,” to “gays on strike blow out your own damned hair,” were on proud display in California on Wednesday August 4, 2010. In a landmark ruling Judge Vaughn R. Walker said, “California has no interest in differentiating between same-sex and opposite-sex unions,” and ruled the ban on gay marriage in California unconstitutional. Attorneys on both sides expect the ruling to be appealed, and eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court by 2011.
Chairwoman of The National Organization for Marriage (NOM), who helped fund Proposition 8 said, "Here we have an openly gay federal judge, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, substituting his views for those of the American people and of our Founding Fathers who, I promise you, would be shocked by courts that imagine they have the right to put gay marriage in our Constitution." Throughout this case, there has been much speculation on whether the republican Judge Vaughn is gay which he has neither confirmed nor denied.
Ted Olson, attorney and half of the dynamic duo who teamed up with David Boies, to take on this case against Prop 8 said, “If there was ever a trial in the history of our country that the American People should have seen, it was this one.”
When speaking to a crowd of over 300 in San Francisco, David Boies remembered a time when gays were openly and publicly discriminated against. Mr. Boies said, “As you move toward greater equality, people who have to abandon decisions and positions they took before. I’m very conscious of the fact that we’re going to be arguing this to judges that are of my generation.” He went on to say, “You had laws prohibiting gays and lesbians from various employments forcing employers to discriminate. That was the culture in which those of us of a certain age group. And now you have to ask judges to put those cultural influences aside.”
