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Byrne and Chapman are right. The court acknowledged what it was up to. “The issue we must resolve,” said the majority, is “whether our state Constitution prohibits the state from establishing a statutory scheme in which both opposite-sex and same-sex couples are granted the right to enter into an officially recognized family relationship that affords all of the significant legal rights and obligations traditionally associated under state law with the institution of marriage, but under which the union of an opposite-sex couple is officially designed a ‘marriage’ whereas the union of a same-sex couple is officially designated a ‘domestic partnership.’”
Is this a distinction without a difference? No, said the court, because separate but equal cannot in the end be equal: “The retention of a distinction in nomenclature by which the term ‘marriage’ is withheld only from the family relationship of same-sex couples is all the more likely to cause the new parallel institution that has been established for same-sex couples to be considered a mark of second-class citizenship.”
Frightening thought, I guess. Byrne ends his column on a note of panic. He’s just applauded the petition drive in California to amend the constitution. “Now comes the scariest part,” he continues (though the drive didn’t scare him at all): “One of the many supporters (I didn’t get his name) of the court decision interviewed on television was asked what would happen if the people approved a constitutional amendment defining marriage as only between a man and a woman. Would the court go so far as to overturn a provision of the Constitution itself? ‘I don’t know. I hope so,’ he said.
