The first full trial on gay people’s freedom to marry, complete with evidence and cross examination of witnesses, prominent lawyers squaring off over a state’s discrimination, experts testifying on the history of marriage and the well-being of children, concerns and debate over timing, and television coverage of the trial spurring national conversations….
Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Ted Olson’s current challenge to California’s discriminatory Prop 8? No, the first was Hawaii’s historic Baehr v. Miike, which launched the ongoing national — indeed, international — movement to end exclusion from marriage. The groundbreaking 1996 trial in Honolulu featured weeks of testimony, all covered on Court TV, followed by months of legal argument, briefing, and deliberation, and then the tectonic ruling by the highly respected Judge Kevin Chang, based on the evidence and argument, in favor of the freedom to marry.
What’s striking in the California courtroom now is how the anti-gay forces, 14 years and tens of millions of dollars later, have come up with nothing to alter Judge Chang’s finding of no “sufficient credible evidence that demonstrates that the public interest in the well-being of children and families, or the optimal development of children would be adversely affected by same-sex marriage. Nor has the opposition demonstrated how same-sex marriage would adversely affect the public fisc, the state interest in assuring recognition of Hawaii marriages in other states, the institution of marriage, or any other important public or governmental interest.”
In the first days of the Perry trial before Chief District Judge Vaughn Walker, a Reagan and Bush appointee to the federal bench, America heard compelling testimony from historians George Chauncey and Nancy Cott, relating how the history of gay people’s exclusion from marriage parallels other denials and discrimination within marriage that we as a society moved to change. Another expert testified about how same-sex and different sex couples function, while yet another reviewed the clear and unrefuted evidence on the fitness of gay parents and the successful outcomes we see in the children they are raising.
The presentations, cross-examination, and bottom-line conclusions all uncannily echoed what unfolded in the Hawaii courtroom in 1996, when national experts in adoption and child-raising and other authorities testified and submitted briefs to enable the judge to assess the justifications put forward for denying gay people the freedom to marry. As in Judge Walker’s courtroom today, the anti-gay side in Baehr tried to suggest that same-sex couples and their families are somehow less qualified, less committed, and less entitled to equality under the law. As in Hawaii, the anti-gay side in Perry is invoking conjecture and diversionary claims, and proposing that the judge uphold marriage discrimination based on speculations and double-standards. In Perry, witnesses for the anti-gay side are reported to be dropping out, or making concessions that support the pro-marriage side; in Hawaii, too, as they learned more about the kind of assertions being made to defend marriage discrimination, some of the opposition experts withdrew or gave testimony that actually supported our case for the freedom to marry.
To read more, please go to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evan-wolfson/14-years-after-hawaii-new_b_431068.html
