California Court Ruling:

Lawrence blogger Mike Silverman (Red Letter Day) thinks the California court ruling ordering same-sex marriage was " a very poorly-planned and strategically stupid court case [which] may end up undoing decades of civil rights progress in the Golden State."

He writes

California has been a model for the expansion of equal rights for gay couples. Over the past decade, the state legislature has passed several domestic partnership laws, gradually expended the rights of domestic partners so that what was once a limited symbolic registry with few rights is now pretty much a system of civil unions, granting same-sex couples almost all the rights of marriage in California. These rights have come with little backlash, and since they have been passed by the state legislature, they enjoy a legitimacy absent from some court-ordered solutions.

The final step in the volution of equal rights is the passing of a law allowing same-sex marriage. A bill allowing this has been gaining support over the past few years and will likely pass the legislature sometime the next couple years.

The likely outcome

this decision will likely spur on anti-gay radicals to use California's ridiculously easy constituional initiative process to get an anti-gay measure on the 2006 ballot which will not only reverse the marriage ruling, but also repeal those hard-fought domestic partnership rights passed by the legislature.

It will also help to swell the vote in favor of the anti-civil constitutional amendment on April 5 in Kansas.