No Stay In CA

Published Jun 04 2008, 04:46 PM by David S. Bernstein

As expected, the California Supreme Court has denied an attempt to stay implementation of its gay-marriage ruling, meaning that same-sex marriages will commence on June 17th. (That's less than two weeks to shop!) It gave no particular explanation, but it was pretty clear from the start that the parties bringing the motion to stay had no standing to do so -- and that the four justices with the majority were unlikely to buy the idea of chaos ensuing from a few months of gay marriage that might be undone by a November ballot initiative.

There's an interesting parallel, BTW, with what happened in Massachusetts. In both cases, anti-gay-marriage forces argued that the court's decision should be stayed until pending citizen initiatives had the chance to play out. In both cases, that motion for a stay would properly be brought by the state Attorney General. In both cases, the state AG (Tom Reilly here, Jerry Brown there) had personally, publicly opposed gay marriage -- and in both cases, they nevertheless announced that they would honor the court's decision and not ask for a stay.

Of course, here in Massachusetts our Governor-cum-Presidential-candidate tried to order the AG to do it, and then joined the motion for a stay in his role as "private citizen." In California, their Governor-procluded-from-Presidency said fine, go get gay married then.