You can catch a lot more flies with honey than vinegar, the adage goes. But advocates of same-sex marriage have a deal for the citizens of California: all the vinegar they can drink.
Those citizens don't believe gays should be allowed to unite under the name of marriage. In 2000, more than 61 percent of voters supported a ballot measure barring such unions. That didn't mean the voters get their way. Last summer, the state Supreme Court struck the law down on the grounds that it violated the California Constitution by discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation.
But Californians were not content to let the court substitute its judgment for theirs. In November, they approved Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage, with a 52 percent majority. If the constitution required recognition of same-sex marriage, the people decided, the constitution needed correcting.
That should have been the end of the legal battle and the beginning of a political one, where gay rights have excellent prospects. After all, they have made steady progress on the issue, expanding their support from 39 percent of voters to 48 percent in just eight years. Given the trend, their chances of persuading a majority in the next few years look good -- if they were to focus on persuading the majority.
But this is a tedious and time-consuming task compared with trying to get the state Supreme Court to nullify the will of the people. So opponents of Proposition 8 chose the latter option after their defeat.
And for what end? Not so that gays can have the full package of rights and duties that go with the institution of matrimony. They already have those -- insofar as the state of California can provide them -- thanks to a domestic-partnership law that duplicates everything about marriage except the name. This is not a fight over fundamental equality. It's a fight over nomenclature.
On Thursday, the fight went back to the Supreme Court in San Francisco, where state Attorney General Jerry Brown insisted that the people of California, who created the constitution, don't have the power to change it as they tried to do this time. He argued that it protects preexisting inalienable rights, including the right to marry, and that an inalienable right "cannot be taken away by a popular vote."
But inalienable rights are empty concepts without legal protection -- which in this case they enjoy only because of a constitution approved by the people. If those people had wanted to deny themselves the power to repeal rights protected by the state constitution, they could have included a provision to do that. They didn't.
