Hello Everybody: ;-)
This is the heart of a rather long article in the NYTimes about Judge Walker’s decision:
Of the many smart moves Judge Walker made in his 136-page opinion last week, the smartest was his unveiling of a central hiding-in-plain-sight fact: the change in society’s expectations about what partnership in a marriage entails. “Marriage between a man and a woman was traditionally organized based on presumptions of a division of labor along gender lines” until recently, he said. “Men were seen as suited for certain types of work and women for others. Women were seen as suited to raise children and men were seen as suited to provide for the family.”
Judge Walker cited the advent of no-fault divorce (which New York is about to become the 50th state to adopt) as a marker of how the legal system no long prescribes roles for marriage partners based on their sex. Evidence at the trial, he said, showed “the movement of marriage away from a gendered institution and toward an institution free from state-mandated gender roles.” As a result, the judge continued, “gender is not relevant to the state in determining spouses’ obligations to each other and to their dependents,” and “gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of equals.”
Judge Walker’s conclusion was that Proposition 8, the state constitutional amendment confining marriage to opposite-sex couples, “thus enshrines in the California Constitution a gender restriction that the evidence shows to be nothing more than an artifact of a foregone notion that men and women fulfill different roles in civil life.” Proposition 8 “mandates that men and women be treated differently based only on antiquated and discredited notions of gender.”
justin o'shea
Here is the whole article: Hiding in Plain Sight - http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/hiding-in-plain-sight/?ref=opinion
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