Republican San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders testified at trial in San Francisco Jan. 19 in the case seeking to overturn Proposition 8 as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.
Afterward, Sanders and his openly lesbian daughter Lisa met with reporters at the Phillip Burton Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse.
“I think denying marriage equality is just as wrong as telling blacks that they couldn’t use white-only drinking fountains,” Sanders said. “It’s government action that’s founded in prejudice. The first step towards equality in society is equality under the law.”
“So, I’m proud to say that my daughter Lisa got married to her wife Meaghan in Vermont last month,” the mayor said. “I’m very proud of both of them and I only wish that she could be recognized as equal under California law. Hopefully the court will do the right thing so that loving couples like Lisa and Meaghan don’t have to travel 3,000 miles to get their marriage license — away from family, away from friends and away from co-workers.”
Prop 8, passed by voters in November 2008, amended California’s constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage just 4 1/2 months after it became legal.
Lisa Sanders told reporters she is “very proud of my father for what he has done to contribute to the movement of equal rights.”
“My dad is a Republican and everyone told my dad during his re-election campaign if he signed the resolution to support marriage equality that he’d probably be a one-term mayor,” she said. “I even told him it’d be OK with me if he vetoed the resolution. I told him it was more important that he be mayor of San Diego. But ultimately he realized the support of marriage equality was consistent with his core values, which included treating every community with the same respect and dignity. Yes, it did hurt his campaign at first, but at the end, the people of San Diego realized what I had always knew — nobody could be a better mayor than my father and nobody could be a better father.”
In other trial news, ProtectMarriage.com sued the Courage Campaign on Jan. 20 over the logo on Courage’s Prop8TrialTracker.com Web site. The logo parodies Protect Marriage’s logo by gaying it up. See tinyurl.com/logosgate.
Sacramento U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton rejected ProtectMarriage’s demand for a temporary order to banish the logo from the Internet. He said, “(P)laintiff is unlikely to overcome the conclusion that defendant’s use of the mark is protected under the First Amendment, in that the use is relevant to an expressive parody and the use is not explicitly misleading.”
Back in San Francisco, the trial was continuing as this report was filed. Famous lawyers Ted Olson and David Boies hope to convince Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker that Prop 8 violates the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of due process and equal protection under the law.
On Jan. 22, Walker announced that closing arguments in the trial will be delayed for two weeks after the completion of testimony, which means the trial will wrap up, at the earliest, around Feb. 9.
The lawsuit, which likely will end up before the U.S. Supreme Court, could lead to the legalization of same-sex marriage in all 50 states. Conversely, it also could possibly stall the movement for same-sex marriage for a generation, should the Supreme Court uphold Prop 8.
Walker had wanted to beam video of the trial to other federal courthouses and post it on YouTube, but the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, put the kibosh on that idea Jan. 13, saying officials in the federal courts’ 9th Circuit hadn’t followed proper procedure in lifting the ban on cameras in federal courts.
Olson and Boies strongly supported broadcasting the trial. The pro-Prop-8 side vociferously opposed the plan, ultimately filing an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to stop it. They argued, among other things, that their witnesses could face nasty retaliation from militant, if not violent, homosexuals who saw the video feed.
Gay activists and commentators suggested that Prop 8 defenders were horrified at the idea of the trial being broadcast because they know that their anti-gay rhetoric, which is being analyzed in detail at the trial, is hateful, false and, when exposed in full, so unpalatable that it could turn the public against them.
Information introduced during the trial on Jan. 13, for example, revealed that one of the individuals who chose to be an official defendant in the case, Hak-Shing William Tam, wrote a letter to voters during the Prop 8 campaign saying that once gays have the right to marry, they will pursue legalization of pedophilia.
“On their agenda list is: legalize having sex with children,” the letter said. It continued, “If Proposition 8 loses, one by one other states would fall into Satan’s hand.”
Appearing on the witness stand Jan. 21, Tam added: “I believe that if the term ‘marriage’ can be used beyond one man and one woman, then any two person of any age or of any relationships can use the same argument and come and ask for the term ‘marriage.’ That would lead to incest. That would lead to polygamy. I mean, if … this is a civil right, what would prevent the other groups not to use the same argument and come and ask for the name ‘marriage’?”
One exchange between Boies and Tam went like this, according to the transcript posted online by plaintiffs’ attorneys:
Boies: You are saying here that after same-sex marriage was legalized, the Netherlands legalized incest and polygamy. …
Tam: Yeah, look at the date. It’s — polygamy happens afterwards.
Boies: Who told you that, sir? Where did you get that idea?
Tam: It’s in the Internet.
Boies: In the Internet?
Tam: Yeah.
Boies: Somewhere out in the Internet it says that the Netherlands legalized incest and polygamy in 2005?
Tam: Frankly, I did not write this, all right? Polygamy was legalized in 2005. Another person in the organization found it and he showed me that.
Boies: And you just put it out there to convince voters to vote for Proposition 8?
Tam: Well, I — I look at the document and I think that was true.
(The exchange continues on page 1957 of the trial transcript, which is online at tinyurl.com/prop8day8. The Netherlands does not allow polygamous marriages. Along with several other countries, the Netherlands does not prosecute incestuous relations between adults.)
Meanwhile, some pro-same-sex-marriage activists, commentators and analysts expressed alarm — and even gloom — over the Supreme Court’s ruling to ban broadcasting of the trial. They fear that the 5-4 decision was an omen of how the court would rule on same-sex marriage itself.
The anti-same-sex-marriage side also objected to the playing in court of their successfully alarmist TV ads from the Prop 8 campaign, which suggested that gay marriage could lead to schoolchildren being taught inappropriate, bad or wrong things.
Many analysts believe the gay-marriage-will-harm-your-kids TV ads may have tipped the balance against same-sex marriage in the minds of voters both in California and, more recently, Maine, where some of the California ads were recycled.
The Prop 8 trial is being live-blogged, tweeted and analyzed to within an inch of its life by an army of bloggers, activists and news reporters. Prop8TrialTracker.com is a good place to start. The San Jose Mercury News also has a good live-blog of the case at mercurynews.com.
By Rex Wockner
