Perry v. Schwarzenegger/4:Proponents' Defense of Proposition 8

PROPONENTS' DEFENSE OF PROPOSITION 8

Proponents organized the official campaign to pass Proposition 8, known as ProtectMarriage.com—Yes on 8, a Project of California Renewal ("Protect Marriage"). Proponents formed and managed the Protect Marriage campaign and ensured its efforts to pass Proposition 8 complied with California election law. See FF 13-17 below. After orchestrating the successful Proposition 8 campaign, proponents intervened in this lawsuit and provided a vigorous defense of the constitutionality of Proposition 8.

The ballot argument submitted to the voters summarizes proponents' arguments in favor of Proposition 8 during the 2008 campaign. The argument states:

Proposition 8 is simple and straightforward.... Proposition 8 is about preserving marriage; it's not an attack on the gay lifestyle.... It protects our children from being taught in public schools that "same-sex marriage" is the same as traditional marriage.... While death, divorce, or other circumstances may prevent the ideal, the best situation for a child is to be raised by a married mother and father.

[p. 7]

...If the gay marriage ruling [of the California Supreme Court] is not overturned, TEACHERS COULD BE REQUIRED to teach young children there is no difference between gay marriage and traditional marriage.

We should not accept a court decision that may result in public schools teaching our own kids that gay marriage is ok.... [W]hile gays have the right to their private lives, they do not have the right to redefine marriage for everyone else.

PX0001^[1] California Voter Information Guide, California General Election, Tuesday, November 4, 2008 at PM 003365 (emphasis in original).

In addition to the ballot arguments, the Proposition 8 campaign presented to the voters of California a multitude of television, radio and internet-based advertisements and messages. The advertisements conveyed to voters that same-sex relationships are inferior to opposite-sex relationships and dangerous to children. See FF 79-80 below. The key premises on which Proposition 8 was presented thus appear to be the following:

1. Denial of marriage to same-sex couples preserves marriage;
2. Denial of marriage to same-sex couples allows gays and lesbians to live privately without requiring others, including (perhaps especially) children, to recognize or acknowledge the existence of same-sex couples;
3. Denial of marriage to same-sex couples protects children;
4. The ideal child-rearing environment requires one male parent and one female parent;
5. Marriage is different in nature depending on the sex of the spouses, and an opposite-sex couple's marriage is superior to a same-sex couple's marriage; and
6. Same-sex couples' marriages redefine opposite-sex couples' marriages.

[p. 8] A state's interest in an enactment must of course be secular in nature. The state does not have an interest in enforcing private moral or religious beliefs without an accompanying secular purpose. See Lawrence v Texas, 539 US 558, 571 (2003); see also Everson v Board of Education of Ewing Township, 330 US 1, 15 (1947).

Perhaps recognizing that Proposition 8 must advance a secular purpose to be constitutional, proponents abandoned previous arguments from the campaign that had asserted the moral superiority of opposite-sex couples. Instead, in this litigation, proponents asserted that Proposition 8:

1. Maintains California's definition of marriage as excluding same-sex couples;
2. Affirms the will of California citizens to exclude same-sex couples from marriage;
3. Promotes stability in relationships between a man and a woman because the naturally (and at times unintentionally) produced children; and
4. Promotes "statistically optimal" child-rearing households; that is, households in which children are raised by a man and a woman married to each other.

Doc #8 at 17-18.

While proponents vigorously defended the constitutionality of Proposition 8, they did so based on legal conclusions and cross-examinations of some of plaintiffs' witnesses, eschewing all but a rather limited factual presentation.

Proponents argued that Proposition 8 should be evaluated solely by considering its language and its consistency with the "central purpose of marriage, in California and everywhere else,...to promote naturally procreative sexual relationships and to channel them into stable, enduring unions for the sake of producing [p. 9] and raising the next generation." Doc #172-1 at 21. Proponents asserted that marriage for same-sex couples is not implicit in the concept of ordered liberty and thus its denial does not deprive persons seeking such unions of due process. See generally Doc #172-1. Nor, proponents continued, does the exclusion of same-sex couples in California from marriage deny them equal protection because, among other reasons, California affords such couples a separate parallel institution under its domestic partnership statutes. Doc #172-1 at 75 et seq.

At oral argument on proponents' motion for summary judgment, the court posed to proponents' counsel the assumption that "the state's interest in marriage is procreative" and inquired how permitting same-sex marriage impairs or adversely affects that interest. Doc #228 at 21. Counsel replied that the inquiry was "not the legally relevant question," id, but when pressed for an answer, counsel replied: "Your honor, my answer is: I don't know. I don't know." Id at 23.

Despite this response, proponents in their trial brief promised to "demonstrate that redefining marriage to encompass same-sex marriage" would effect some twenty-three specific harmful consequences. Doc #295 at 13-14. At trial, however, proponents presented only one witness, David Blankenhorn, to address the government interest in marriage. Blankenhorn's testimony is addressed at length hereafter; suffice it to say that he provided no credible evidence to support any of the claimed adverse effects proponents promised to demonstrate. During closing arguments, proponents again focused on the contention that "responsible procreation is really at the heart of society's [p. 10] interest in regulating marriage." Tr 3038:7-8. When asked to identify the evidence at trial that supported this contention, proponents' counsel replied, "you don't have to have evidence of this point." Tr 3037:25-3040:4.

Proponents' procreation argument, distilled to its essence, is as follows: the state has an interest in encouraging sexual activity between people of the opposite sex to occur in stable marriages because such sexual activity may lead to pregnancy and children, and the state has an interest in encouraging parents to raise children in stable households. Tr 3050:17-3051:10. The state therefore, the argument goes, has an interest in encouraging all opposite-sex sexual activity, whether responsible or irresponsible, procreative or otherwise, to occur with a stable marriage, as this encourages the development of a social norm that opposite-sex sexual activity should occur within marriage. Tr 3053:10-24. Entrenchment of this norm increases the probability that procreation will occur within a marital union. Because same-sex couples' sexual activity does not lead to procreation, according to proponents the state has no interest in encouraging their sexual activity to occur within a stable marriage. Thus, according to proponents, the state's only interest is in opposite-sex sexual activity.

Footnotes

1↑ . All cited evidence is available at http://ecf.cand.uscourts.gov/cand/09cv2292