By Elizabeth Gill, ACLU of Northern California at 8:29pm
Today's decision doesn’t decide marriage for everyone. But we should take the momentum and work towards marriage in other states, like New Jersey, Maine, Washington and Maryland.
By Elizabeth Gill, ACLU of Northern California at 1:45pm
Seth Walsh was a sweet, intelligent boy who loved his family and did well in school. He was also gay. And for this, he endured years of relentless bullying and verbal abuse at his Tehachapi, California, school. On September 19, 2010, Seth Walsh hanged himself from a plum tree in the family's backyard. He was on life support for nine days before he died on September 28. He was only 13 years old.
Wendy Walsh, Seth's mother, teamed up with the ACLU to help make a difference in the lives of LGBT youth facing harassment. "Schools need to take harassment and bullying seriously when parents or students tell them about it, and when they see it in the halls," she told the ACLU.
By Elizabeth Gill, ACLU of Northern California at 10:45am
Yesterday’s landmark decision in the Prop. 8 case is a huge victory for LGBT Americans. In Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Judge Vaughn R. Walker of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco ruled that Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that excluded same-sex couples from marriage in the state, is unconstitutional. The ruling holds for the first time that the due process clause of the United States Constitution guarantees same-sex couples the freedom to marry, and that denying same-sex couples this freedom also violates the equal protection clause.
By Elizabeth Gill, ACLU of Northern California at 6:09pm
A year and a day after oral arguments in In re Marriage Cases, March 5, 2009, the California Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Strauss v. Horton. That case — brought by the ACLU, NCLR, Lambda Legal and others and urging the Court to invalidate Prop.osition 8 — is a completely different case than the Marriage Cases. In it, we're arguing that because Prop.. 8 selectively takes away a fundamental right, the right to marry, from a single, disfavored minority, gay and lesbian Californians, it so undermines the equality guarantee in our state constitution as to result in a change to the very structure of government. Before Prop.. 8, we had a government in which the rights of minorities were protected from the whim of the majority; if Prop.. 8 is upheld, we won't have that kind of government anymore.
