Not only did the California Supreme Court overturn a ban on same sex unions, it did so by invoking "strict scrutiny" whic means that the law in question is suspected of infringing upon a fundamental right. Slate argues that this is what sets the California ruling apart form the Massachusetts ruling several years ago:
The legal difference between the two opinions lies in the so-called "rational basis" review used by the Massachusetts court and the "strict scrutiny" deployed by the California Court. In constitutional parlance, these terms describe how closely a court will examine state legislation: will it give the legislature the benefit of the doubt, or not? Rational basis review is so lenient that it almost always results in the validation of state policies (in this sense, the 2003 Massachusetts ruling was an aberration), while strict scrutiny is so stringent that it almost always results in the invalidation of such policies. In other words, the standards supposedly only express how closely the court will look at laws, but looks can kill.
Writing for the California high court, Chief Justice Ronald M. George first found that the exclusion of gays from marriage violated their fundamental right to marry, thereby drawing strict scrutiny from the court. This meant that the state would have to produce a compelling reason to bar gays from what the court deemed "the most socially productive and individually fulfilling relationship that one can enjoy in the course of a lifetime." In a crucial move, Chief Justice George rejected the state's argument that tradition was such a reason. Allowing tradition to thus entrench itself, he said, would have allowed for laws barring interracial couples. And, as he noted, the California Supreme Court struck down a ban on interracial marriage in 1948, almost two decades before the U.S. Supreme Court did in Loving v. Virginia.
Although he could have decided the case on this basis alone, the Chief Justice kept going. He explicitly found that discrimination against gays, on the basis of their sexual orientation, was equivalent under the California state constitution to discrimination against racial minorities. To my knowledge, California's is the only state high court to have come to this conclusion (the federal Supreme Court has not weighed in). For gays, this pronouncement is critical because it is portable—that is, gays can now challenge any California state policy that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation. As Marty Lederman points out elsewhere in Slate, this in its own right is a signal advance for gay people.
Opponents will now attempt to overturn the decision with an initive which will change the California Constitution to recognize only heterosexual unions, then there is always the Supreme Court itself. The Washington Post reports that Governor Schwarzenegger is opposign the initiative.
