Herland Sister Resources

The California Assembly voted in early September to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry, making the state’s legislature the first in the nation to deliberately approve same-sex marriages and handing a political hot potato to an already beleaguered Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R). The governor followed through on his promise and promptly vetoed the bill.

After a vehement floor debate in which legislators quoted the Pledge of Allegiance and accused each other of abusing moral principles, the state Assembly passed the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act, which recasts the definition of marriage as between “two persons,” not between a man and a woman. The state Senate passed the bill last week.

Advocates of the bill, including Christine Chavez-Delgado, granddaughter of Cesar Chavez and an organizer of the United Farm Workers of America, and Willie L. Brown, former mayor of San Francisco, argued that the bill fit into California’s sense of itself as a trendsetter for the rest of the country. In 1948, California’s Supreme Court became the first state court to strike down a law prohibiting interracial marriage. And California in 1976 was among the first states to repeal sodomy statues.

Californians had passed a defense-of-marriage act defining marriage as between a man and a woman in 2000, and the state, which mixes freewheeling Marin County with culturally conservative Orange County, has emerged as a front line in the battle over the bedroom ever since.