A California judge - a Republican appointee - has overturned that state's voters' decision in 2008 to go against same-sex marriage. At other times I might have fretted about the backlash and so on. Today I say to hell with the backlash.
This is the right decision; the civil rights of gay people in California were being violated, period. It's great and historic and moves us closer to making gay marriage legal across the country. People freaked out about this should consult Iowa, where legal gay marriage has had absolutely no impact whatsoever on straight people's marriages.
Marc Ambinder has an informative post on Judge Vaughn Walker's 13 findings of fact that will form the basis of future legal arguments as this case heads to the ninth circuit, in San Francisco, and then to the Supreme Court.
I usually look at these things politically, thinking about their impact in November. But today I don't even care. Let it have whatever impact it's going to have in November. If it fires up the wingers, so be it. This is history moving in the right direction.
On a day when Republicans are trying to declare that some people born here shouldn't be citizens, when a poll comes out showing (as I just saw on TV) that only 42% of Americans are now certain that the president was born in this country, and when some conservatives are trying to say that Michelle Obama's attempt to have admirers sign an electronic birthday card for her husband smacks of Stalinism, one piece of good, decent, rational, fact-based, non-hysterical decision-making, by someone who might well even be a Republican, is to be celebrated.
