A perfect San Francisco dayThe superlatives are flowing in San Francisco today. “What a wonderful, wonderful day,” was how City Attorney Dennis Herrera opened the giddy press conference in City Hall today, a love fest event discussing and celebrating this morning’s California Supreme Court ruling legalizing same sex marriage.
“What a day for San Francisco!” beamed a jubilant Mayor Gavin Newsom, whose decision to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples in 2004 set off the legal struggle that resulted in the most important civil rights ruling in a generation. He told a large, smiling crowd how proud he was of this city, its values, and its courage to push hard for meaningful sociopolitical change.
“At the end of the day, that’s what I’m so proud of, San Francisco and the values we affirm,” Newsom said. “This is a great day for California, a great day for America, and a great day for the constitution.”
It was also a just plain great day, with hot weather contributing to a record-breaking Bike to Work Day. During the morning commute, a city survey counted twice as many bicycles as cars on Market Street, a 30 percent increase from the number of bicyclists last year.
Today is just one of those days when you fall in love with San Francisco all over again, when it feels like we have the power to really lead the rest of this troubled country in a new direction.
Of course, we don’t get days like this very often. As I discussed in this week’s cover story, there’s still a court injunction against new bike projects in San Francisco and the kumbaya moment at City Hall today will likely devolve into nasty budget fights in just a couple weeks.
(Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin joked with me at the event that perhaps the city ought to increase the cost of marriage licenses, using the flood of same sex couples expected to get hitched once the ruling takes effect in 30 days to help close the budget deficit).
Even the celebration of the gay marriage ruling will pretty quickly morph into a big political fight to defend it against a November ballot measure that would amend the constitution to ban same sex marriage.
“Celebrate today, but get ready for the fight afterward,” Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California, said at the press conference. “We are going to kick the right wing butt out of our state once and for all.”
Terry Stewart, the deputy city attorney who argued and won the case, said the ruling is a remarkable testament to generations worth of legal work on civil rights issues and to a court that defied right wing attacks on the independence of the judiciary to arrive at a controversial ruling that was well supported by caselaw.
“We all need to get involved with defending this judiciary, the California judiciary, against partisan attacks,” Stewart said.
Yet today is mostly about basking in this historic decision and the warm sunshine (and people can do both at the same time today during a rally at 5 p.m. at the LGBT Center on Market Street near Octavia).
Herrera said how proud he was of the city, of “the courageousness of the California Supreme Court, and “of Mayor Gavin Newsom for his bold and principled leadership.” Even though Herrera and his office did most of the heavy lifting on this victory (and was recognized for that by a new San Francisco Magazine article), Newsom drew the loudest applause at City Hall and is definitely the man of the hour.
Admirably, Newsom tried to refract that spotlight onto everyone assembled there: “This is a day about real people and their lives,” he said, later adding, “It’s about human dignity. It’s about human rights. It’s about time.”
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Comments (1)
On the evening of a historical day in San Francisco, I watched an interview on the local news in which a Bay Area woman said she disagreed with the recent ruling by the California Supreme Court to legalize gay marriage. She said that marriage is sacred and should only exist between a man and a woman, as her religion states. Over and over I hear the argument that legalizing a union between homosexual individuals would degrade marriage and render an unholy partnership, an act of irreverence. I for one am exhausted and bored with this unfounded argument, as it holds no validity based on the separation of church and state. And just for the sake of argument, how can homosexual unions possibly degrade marriage when there is already a 50% divorce rate in this country? What's funny is that the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the highest divorce rates are found in the bible belt states, the same areas where conservatives preach that homosexuality and liberal views destroy family values. What’s even more interesting is that the conservative Christian religions have a higher divorce rate than Atheists and Agnostics. Religion is therefore not a credible predictor of the sacredness of unions. Yet conservative Christian groups are the most vocal in telling us how we should live our lives.
We as a people need to hold our journalists and newspapers accountable for having done an inexcusably poor job of representing this matter for what it is: a struggle on behalf of the gay community to overcome intolerance and civil rights violations. Our founding fathers constructed a secular government based on equality for all people. Why do we now allow biblical terminology to define who is entitled to basic legal rights? I would like to conclude by offering a suggestion to those who think marriage is an exclusive right. Is it really the labels that we place upon each other- race, religion, class, sexual orientation - what defines whether our love for each other is sacred? Or is it our capacity as human beings to love and appreciate longevity. I think we owe it to ourselves and others to recognize and question the personal and religious dogma we each attach to marriage. Let’s finally allow everyone the freedom they are entitled to...the freedom to decide what marriage means to them.
Posted by Nikoo Kasmai | May 17, 2008 06:27 PM