Bill Duncan, director of the Marriage Law Foundation, offered a brief analysis of Judge Walker’s ruling on NRO’s The Corner earlier this evening:
The court’s legal premise is pretty novel. Judge Walker rules that laws reflecting the understanding of marriage as the union of a man and a woman violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s due-process and equal-protection clauses. That is to say, he believes Proposition 8 took away a fundamental right and singled out a protected class for unfair treatment. The bottom-line conclusion in support of both legal theories is that California voters could have had no motive in supporting Proposition 8 other than a desire to signal that people who identify as gay and lesbian are inferior to heterosexuals. This is deeply problematic on at least two levels.
First, none of the testimony in the trial showed (nor could it have shown) the voters’ subjective intent in approving the measure. . . .
The second, more fundamental problem stems from the reality that marriage has always been understood, with very few exceptions, as the union of a man and a woman. This is true across time, across cultures, across religious traditions, etc. Does it really seem likely that this remarkable consensus is nothing but a nasty desire of one group to flaunt its privileged position over a minority?