Liberty And Justice For All

A California judge has taken the first tentative steps towards equal marriage rights:

In a tentative ruling, the judge, Richard A. Kramer of San Francisco County Superior Court, said "the denial of marriage to same-sex couples appears impermissibly arbitrary," thus violating the equal protection clause of the state's Constitution. The ruling will not be made final until the judge meets with the various parties to the litigation on March 30.

There's still a long fight ahead. The bad news: this ruling (justly) overturns a 2000 direct popular referendum. Which means that the "judicial tyrants" nonsense is about to explode all over the media. Cf. Stanley Kurtz's first (abominably stupid) salvo:

I assume (although I haven’t checked this) that California has no law like the Massachusetts statute that bans marrying out-of-state couples if the marriage in question would be illegal in their home state. If true, this would turn California into the Las Vegas of same-sex marriage.

Kurtz then goes on to predict a new Civil War between "recognizing states" and "non-recognizing states." Whatever.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan provides some background on the judge and his reasoning:

Kramer is not a radical. He's a Catholic Republican appointed by a former Republican governor. But his intellectual honesty simply compels him to state that equality means equality. And when state constitutions insist upon it, you have to have a much stronger argument to keep a minority disenfranchised than the current anti-marriage forces have been able to marshall. Tradition? So was the ban on inter-racial marriage. Procreation? Non-procreative straight couples can get civil licenses. The potential collapse of civilization? Impossible to prove or even argue convincingly. Once you have accepted that there is no moral difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality, the arguments against same-sex marriage collapse.