The Divorce Debate of Prop 8

While lawyers and civil rights advocates agree that Prop 8 will (most likely) be upheld when the State Supreme Court makes its decision, no one can say for sure if forced divorces will affect the 18,000+ couples who were legally married. In what could be the biggest debate in all of this is, well, "is." The wording of Prop 8 reads like this: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." Kenneth Starr claimed during this month's hearing that the phrase “is recognized,” even in the present tense, would also nullify existing same-sex marriages that happened in the past. But as Ashby Jones of the Wall Street Journal points out, "Advocates who favor allowing the gay marriages to stand point to a California legal tradition of protecting what are called 'vested rights.' The idea is that if somebody obeyed the law in exercising a right, any new law must be extremely clear in its intent to take away that right." That is to say, if you want a law to work retroactively, said law must be clear about it; the gay marriage ban was not. (Also for comprehensive coverage about civil marriage equality in California, check out Stop8.org.)