from the NYT's coverage of California's Supreme Court lifting the state's ban on gay marriage:

The Supreme Court was the first state high court to strike down a law barring interracial marriage, in a 1948 decision called Perez v. Sharp. The vote in Perez, like the one in Thursday’s decision, was 4-to-3. The United States Supreme Court did not follow suit until 1967.

At present, six of the seven justices on the California court, including all of the dissenters, were appointed by Republican governors.

Thursday’s decision was rooted in two rationales, and both drew on the Perez decision.

The first was that marriage is a fundamental constitutional right. “The right to marry,” Chief Justice George wrote, “represents the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with a person of one’s choice and, as such, is of fundamental significance both to society and to the individual.”

Chief Justice George conceded that “as an historical matter in this state marriage has always been restricted to a union between a man and a woman.” But “tradition alone,” the chief justice continued, does not justify the denial of a fundamental constitutional right. Bans on interracial marriage were, he wrote, sanctioned by the state for many years.

In a second rationale from the interracial marriage case, the court struck down the laws banning same-sex marriage on equal protection grounds, also adopting a new standard of review in the process.

When courts weigh whether distinctions among people or groups violate the right to equal protection, they general require only a rational basis for the distinction, a relatively easy standard to meet. But when the discrimination is based on race, sex or religion, the courts generally require a more substantial justification.

Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, the majority ruled Thursday, also requires that sort of more rigorous justification. The court acknowledged that it was the first state high court to adopt the standard, strict scrutiny, in sexual orientation cases.

Lawyers for the state identified two interests to justify reserving the term marriage for heterosexual unions: tradition and the will of the majority. Chief Justice George said neither was sufficient.

That sounds about right to me. Tradition and the will of the majority are not sufficient reasons to deny gay people the right to state-sanctioned marriages.

1948's Perez v. Sharp strikes me as a classically Californian case. First off, a recent study [h/t gawker] claims that the biggest cluster of Americans "open to experience" is in California, particularly SoCal, and I imagine this spirit of "down for whatever" was alive in Cali in '48 as well.

Also, the Perez in that case - Andrea Perez - was Mexican American, and her fiance, Sylvester Davis was black. The LA County clerk refused to give them a marriage license because Perez was considered white. I couldn't find a picture of Davis (of course!) but here is that so-called white woman:

This historical case of black/latino amity likely wouldn't move the black and Mexican kids who have been fighting in LA's high schools recently to chillax. But, by the same token, the fact that Mildred Loving (of Loving v. Virginia) was a proponent of gay marriage likely doesn't do much to convince black social conservatives that gay and civil rights are directionally aligned, if not perfectly overlapping, movements.

La luta continua, right?