California voters and California judges have been doing this twisted dance for quite a while now, so I suppose this latest step for Perry v. Schwarzenegger on the road to Olympus was more or less inevitable:

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

In other words, this was a political decision, not a legal one.  Judge Vaughn Walker quite obviously favors sodomarriage and isn't too well-disposed toward Judeo-Christianity (hence the "irrational" crack), so he used legalese to substitute his personal views for those of the 52% of Californians who decided that marriage is what is has always been ever since God ordained it.

To understand the, yes, irrationality of Judge Walker's ruling, one can quite instructively use the metaphor of basic arithmetic.  By every rational standard of measure, two plus two equals four.  Or, put another way, 2+2=4.  Or, expressed equivalently, 2*2=4.  Or 4/2=2.  And so on and so on and so on.  No matter which way you approach it, no matter which way you analyze it, two plus two always equals four.

But there are always mathematical dissidents who lament how "unfair" it is that two plus two HAS to equal four.  Why can't two plus two equal five once in a while?  Or seven?  Or sixty-eight?  Why shouldn't all potential sums of two plus two be treated equally?  By insisting that two plus two can NEVER equal any sum EXCEPT four, every other number is being discriminated against.  And soon enough we can expect equal protection lawsuits to wind their way through the federal judiciary seeking to overturn the bigoted, narrow-minded exclusionary view that two plus two equals four.

Sound silly?  How is this sodomarriage foolishness any different?  As I have always said, this is NOT a case of the law "discriminating" against homosexuals in their behavior or choices; this is a case of homosexuals seeking SPECIAL group rights for themselves to which they are NOT ENTITLED by assaulting and undermining the very lynchpin of human society and civilization: the family.

Ace summarizes what has always been the state's interest in protecting marriage as God created it.  Notice the basis Judge Walker uses in declaring that interst "unconstitutional":

The argument offered by those seeking to keep Prop 8 in place was, actually, my preferred argument: The state does not have an interest in propagating love. It has an interest only in fostering stable families (meaning: with children). Straight marriage is directly implicated by this interest, since most married couples have children. Gay marriage is irrelevant to this interest, since few gay couples have children (and none, of course, naturally by the couple itself).

The Court claimed this was a post-hoc rationalization, and, in any case, "irrational."

Further, it claimed that those who had pushed Prop 8 relied upon unfair stereotypes of gays and other considerations, such as the strong desire of almost every parent on earth (liberal or conservative) to not have his kid told about gay sex and gay marriage in school. Since the thrust of these new laws is always "There is no difference, and it's illegal to treat things differently," the only way to prevent this is to enshrine the difference in law.

The judge, however, found this to be proof of "animus" towards gays and therefore the law must be unconstitutional.

Marriage is what it is.  It is the union of a man and a woman.  Not two men, not two women, not three men and a baby, not the cast of Madagascar, not two shirts, four underwear, and three pairs of sox.  One.  Man.  And.  One.  Woman.  Period.  To suggest that the burden of proof should be on the defendants in this case is just wrong, first because it is the plaintiffs who have to prove their case since they're the ones trying to overturn five thousand years of human social history, and, second, because demanding that the case for marriage be "proven" is like asking how high is up; it simply IS, and the little fact of those five thousand years of it being this way tends to suggest that it works just fine the way it is.

So why did the defendants not offer a more robust marriage defense?  Because they didn't want to fully explain "the difference" and incur the label "homophobe" any worse than they had already.

Now are there other benefits of marriage besides children a couple procreate together?  Sure.  They can adopt.  There's lifetime companionship.  And there are the material and legal benefits.  But for the latter homosexual "couples" already have domestic partnership statutes pretty much nationwide.  Individuals can adopt as well, whether or not they have a "significant same".  Homosexual "couples" can theoretically make lifetime commitments to each other, though in practice such pledges are far less likely to ever last than their marital counterparts (IOW, the "stereotypes" about homosexual relationships are NOT "unfair") and that means greater household instability, and that isn't good for children.

But the CORE "difference" is that homosexuals cannot procreate with each other.  Hence, they cannot truly marry by definition.  And any children illicitly shoehorned into such "relationships" will quite likely be raised with those same "orientational" values, which means, in the aggregate, falling birthrates, the very same demographical deathspiral that is afflicting the entire Western world (including Japan) and is only being held back in this country via the flood of illegal Mexican immigration and the still-robust procreativity of the, shall we say, more socially conservative sector of the American populace.

If you're looking for the true target of Judge Walker's wrath, look no further:

My first thought: the churches–any of them who wish to remain able to practice their faith in relative freedom–will have to seriously consider getting out of the business of acting as “duly recognized” agents of the state in legalizing marriages. The alternative will be inevitable lawsuits charging “discrimination” for disallowing church weddings, a diminution of our constitutional right to free worship, and a further emptying of church coffers as settlements and fines are levied.

Oh, it'll be taken a LOT farther than that.  The legal incentives will be set up to bully churches away from conducting weddings AT ALL, as that will be the only way for pastors to avoid getting sued for "discrimination".  You wanted to know how codifying sodomarriage would impact REAL marriage?  There you go.  One might even call it the de-Christianification of marriage as what's left of the now-perverted and twist "institution" will be entirely nationalized by pagan animals like Judge Walker.

Sounds an awful lot like....persecution to me.  Certainly it's the state infringing, rather blatantly, on the First Amendment right to "the free exercise [of religion] thereof," by means of "respecting the establishment" of homophilia.  Heck, I can see pastors who "obey God rather than men" being frog-marched out from behind their pulpits in handcuffs for refusing to bow to our judge-enforced Lavender Overlords.  My, that will be SUCH a sight to see on the six o'clock news.

The Rightospheric consensus seems to be that when this unjust and tyrannical ruling reaches Olympus, Justice Kennedy will join the lib quartet to rubber stamp it.  Some even think it won't be appealed at all.  But there are others, like J.E. Dyer, who hold out hope for "rationality":

It’s hard to remember a less legal-sounding and more partisan-political-sounding judicial ruling since Roe v. Wade.  The judgment rendered by federal judge Vaughn Walker on Proposition 8 yesterday is a pure mish-mash of buzzphrases.  It’s bad law, and I can’t believe it won’t be overturned on appeal....I have a feeling the Supreme Court is going to come through on this one for us.  From a legal standpoint, Walker’s decision is idiotic.

May all of Dyer's feelings come true.  But given Perry's particular path to Olympus - i.e. the Notorious Ninth Circus - it won't be overturned, if it is, at the appellate level.  That leaves Olympus, and Justice Weathervane, who authored two pro-homosexual special rights rulings in the not too distant past.

Ace gets the exit quote:

This feels to me like Waterloo. This is the judicial establishment gone utterly lawless.

I don't know if we're a democracy if this decision stands up.

What are votes worth? Nothing, apparently.

They may just decide to never leave:

Justice Kennedy, who turns 74 this month, has told relatives and friends he plans to stay on the high court for at least three more years – through the end of Obama’s first term, sources said.

That means Kennedy will be around to provide a fifth vote for the court’s conservative bloc through the 2012 presidential election. If Obama loses, Kennedy could retire and expect a Republican President to choose a conservative justice.

Kennedy, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, has been on the court 22 years. He has become a bit of a political nemesis at the White House for his increasing tendency to side with the court’s four rock-ribbed conservative justices.

In fact, as the New York Daily News implies, Kennedy may have made that decision after this year’s State of the Union address:

Without naming Kennedy, Obama was unusually critical of his majority opinion in the Citizens United case, handed down last January. That 5-4 decision struck down limits on contributions to political campaigns as an abridgement of free speech.

Obama called the ruling “a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power … in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”

He was so angry that he took the unusual step of blasting the decision in his January 27 State of the Union address, with Kennedy and five other justices looking on.

I'm actually more than a little baffled as to why SCOTUS Justices can't fire back at such political broadsides.  Not in the Joe Wilson sense - which Justice Alito didn't come close to imitating - but in subsequent speeches and interviews.

So are as I know, they can.  They just don't.  And THAT reason is a no brainer - because previous presidents never went out of their way to launch a sneering, in-your-face ideological attack on what is supposed to be the least political of the three branches during a SOTU show that said broadside turned into a hooting, jeering, boorish, banana republicanesque partisan lynching.  But then Red Barry did say he wasn't going to be like any of his predecessors; that's one promise he's definitely kept.

And that has a definitive bright side in that it revealed for all the world to see how political B.O. takes the SCOTUS to be (which explains why he's staffing it incompetent, neophyte radicals like he is the Executive Branch, of which he expects Olympus to be a wholly owned extension).

Well guess what, Barry?  Justice Kennedy was paying attention.  Thanks to your twin extended middle fingers at the author of the decision that was landmark in its restoration of First Amendment rights FOR EVERYBODY, not just the Obamunist Left, what was a 4-4-1 High Court split is apt to be more solidly 5-4 against you.  And you may not get any more opportunties to oligarchize Olympus into your back pocket.

Remember your Newton, Lucifer: If you scream "SCREW YOU!" at your enemy, he's apt to do his best to screw you right back.  In this case, by utilizing the lifetime appointment that, despite your best efforts, you'll never have.

Remember Henrietta Hippo's mendatious ACOG memo from yesterday that caused such an "academic" rucus on her way to liberal judicial Nirvana?  Amazingly, she proved extremely reluctant to own up to it:

The memo, reported yesterday by National Review, has caused a stir in conservative circles because it appeared that Kagan, then a White House policy aide, put words in the medical group’s mouth in order to soften its position on the controversial procedure. But when Republican Senator Orrin Hatch brought the subject up with Kagan, he had a hard time getting her to admit that she did, in fact, write the document in question.

“Did you write that memo?” Hatch asked.

“Senator, with respect,” Kagan began, “I don’t think that that’s what happened — ”

“Did you write that memo?”

“I’m sorry — the memo which is?”

“The memo that caused them to go back to the language of ‘medically necessary,’ which was the big issue to begin with — ”

“Yes, well, I’ve seen the document — ”

“But did you write it?”

“The document is certainly in my handwriting.”

"I went to a Supreme Court confirmation hearing and an exorcism broke out!"

I can envision exchanges like this in her school days:

“Did your dog eat that homework?”

“Teacher, with respect,” Kagan began, “I don’t think that that’s what happened — ”

“Did your dog eat that homework?”

“I’m sorry — the homework which is?”

“The homework whose chewed-up remains are festooned all over this dog turd that's sitting on my desk in front of me — ”

“Yes, well, I’ve seen the homework — ”

“But did Rover eat it?”

“The documents certainly smell like me.”

It's like Senator Hatch was almost beseeching her to just say, "Yes, I wrote the memo" so that he wouldn't have so overt and inescapable a reason to vote against her confirmation.  I mean, who is she afraid of offending with this?  Is admitting that she's a lying, infanticidal extremist going to reduce her haul of Democrat votes?  Or is contemptuous prevarication now an official right of judicial passage and even litmus test for hard left oligarchists?

Remaining ever-cognizant of the fact that nothing like the following can possibly be surprising in any creature Barack Obama would summon to sit at his clay feet on Mt. Olympus, it is nevertheless a fascinating study in pathologically mendacious audacity:

There is no better example of this distortion of science than the language the United States Supreme Court cited in striking down Nebraska’s ban on partial-birth abortion in 2000. This language purported to come from a “select panel” of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), a supposedly nonpartisan physicians’ group. ACOG declared that the partial-birth-abortion procedure “may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.” The Court relied on the ACOG statement as a key example of medical opinion supporting the abortion method.

Years later, when President Bush signed a federal partial-birth-abortion ban (something President Clinton had vetoed), the ACOG official policy statement was front and center in the attack on the legislation. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Kopf, one of the three federal judges that issued orders enjoining the federal ban (later overturned by the Supreme Court), devoted more than 15 pages of his lengthy opinion to ACOG’s policy statement and the integrity of the process that led to it.

Like the Supreme Court majority in the prior dispute over the Nebraska ban, Judge Kopf asserted that the ACOG policy statement was entitled to judicial deference because it was the result of an inscrutable collaborative process among expert medical professionals. “Before and during the task force meeting,” he concluded, “neither ACOG nor the task force members conversed with other individuals or organizations, including congressmen and doctors who provided congressional testimony, concerning the topics addressed” in the ACOG statement.

In other words, what medical science has pronounced, let no court dare question. The problem is that the critical language of the ACOG statement was not drafted by scientists and doctors. Rather, it was inserted into ACOG’s policy statement at the suggestion of then–Clinton White House policy adviser Elena Kagan.

The task force’s initial draft statement did not include the statement that the controversial abortion procedure “might be” the best method “in a particular circumstance.” Instead, it said that the select ACOG panel “could identify no circumstances under which this procedure . . . would be the only option to save the life or preserve the health of the woman.”

What the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' report actually said would have risked losing the battle to squash Nebraska's partial birth abortion ban, so Kagan "Clintonized" it, fed the SCOTUS a big, fat crap sandwich, and won the case.

Ensign Ed asks (rhetorically, I hope) if the Senate "should confirm the nomination of a potential justice to the Supreme Court when she was a party to this kind of manipulation and deception".  Yeah, WE wouldn't.  But that's precisely why Red Barry nominated the Chubster.  Honor and integrity are irrelevant to that breed; all that matters to them is forcing their malevolent (and in this case, heinously murderous) agenda on the country by any means necessary.  THAT, and not the legal and judicial background she utterly lacks, makes her, um, "supremely" qualified in The One's eyes.