California Proposition 8, Ban on Same-Sex Marriage, Declared Unconstitutional
U. S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker declared California Proposition 8 unconstitutional on this day. The Proposition eliminated the right of same-sex couples to marry in the State of California and provided that only marriage between a man and a woman was valid or recognized in the state. The voters of California had approved Proposition 8 by referendum on November 4, 2008.
On June 26, 2013 the Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling which held the Proposition 8 was unconstitutional. That same day, the Court declared a provision of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional in the case of Windsor v. United States, ruling that the federal government had to recognize legal same-sex marriages. In the year following the Windsor decision, a number of federal courts declared state prohibitions of same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional, and another major Supreme Court case on this issue seemed inevitable. Read the book by the lawyers who took the case to the Supreme Court, David Boies and Theodore Olson, below.
On June 26, 2015, in Obergefell v. Hudson, the Supreme Court declared that same-sex marriage was constitutional in the entire United States under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Read: David Boies and Theodore Olson, Redeeming the Dream: The Case for Marriage Equality (2014)
Learn more at a timeline on same-sex marriage: http://www.freedomtomarry.org/pages/history-and-timeline-of-marriage