The Supreme Court of California did not increase the value of domestic partnerships; instead, it devalued and dehumanized the notion of marriage, writing marriage, as most understand it, completely out of California law. The result is a massive, unconstitutional, increase in the scope of government. Members of the gay community should be as troubled as every other Californian about this radical increase in government. Surely, this is not what the gay community expected. Additionally, people who would otherwise have had no animus towards the gay community will begin to see it as partners in this court’s deception and tyranny. For instance, in “cheating a little” the court seems to have conferred, on certain Californians, the right to deceive others. 

Deceiving people is what the Court has, directly or indirectly, sanctioned by its discussion of “privacy rights” on page 105 below:

“Plaintiffs point out that one consequence of the coexistence of two parallel types of familial relationship (marriage and domestic partnerships) is that — in the numerous everyday social, employment, and governmental settings in which an individual is asked whether he or she “is married or single” — an individual who is a domestic partner and who accurately responds to the question by disclosing that status will (as a realistic matter) be disclosing his or her homosexual orientation, even if he or she would rather not do so under the circumstances and even if that information is totally irrelevant in the setting in question.”

The opinion of the majority in re Marriage Cases explains that disclosing one’s sexual orientation is protected under a right to privacy, but the Court’s resolution of the issue should not be to sanction intentional deception as a remedy. Under this court’s ruling same sex couples may mislead an employer, whether it is a government office or a private enterprise, by leading individuals to believe that their status is heterosexual. That is, they may rest assured that when they say they are “married,” their employer, insurance company, or fertility clinic will understand the ordinary sense of the word and assume they are heterosexual. Doesn't it seem that the court recognizes that the high goal of “equality” justifies deception as a means to achieving that end? Should we assume that the Court, with its own high view of equality, felt that, for itself too, deception as practically necessary is a dogma worthy of application? Even if we occasionally tell the white lie, Supreme Court Justices are under oath. If we conclude that they purposely employed deception in their ruling, no only should we vote “yes” on Proposition 8, but we should recall these judges.

The deceptions above, seemingly advocated by the Court, could well have potentially serious implications for insurance, credit, and medical institutions. Although the court rightly recognized that some of these requests for information are not relevant, the discretion on when to deceive seems to be entirely in the hands of a member of a same sex partnership.

Some may argue that the destruction of the word marriage would result in “marriage” would no longer implying heterosexuality. Hence, there would be no deception. However, until the process of reconstructing documents in which one’s sexual orientation is necessary information and, instance by instance, allowing courts to decide upon this necessity, many instances of deception on important matters will have been perpetrated and seemingly sanctioned by this Court.

Such deception is simply not a necessary instrument for achieving equality in the United States of America. No one can seriously imagine women seeking equal opportunity by bubbling in "man" on their employment applications. No, in order to equalize the playing field women proudly declared their gender and insisted on access. In fact, African Americans all the more proudly declared their ethnicity as they demanded the equal rights they were entitled to under the law.

Secrecy is no ally of civil rights, so why does the Court appear to confer the right to deceive on a special segment of California? There are other instances of seemingly innocuous kinds of misleading evidence or overly euphemistic uses of legal jargon (such as “family relationships” and “family units). However, the most dangerous element of re Marriage Cases is that it has so altered the meaning of marriage that when most citizens say marriage they mean something that is entirely different than what is meant by marriage in California’s law.