Judge Refuses To Dismiss Prop 8 Lawsuit

10/14/09-by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
In a San Francisco Federal courtroom today, Judge Vaughn Walker refused to dismiss a case brought against Prop 8 in California. The case started by Chad Griffin a strategist who was part of the No on 8 campaign will move forward with opening arguments being heard on 11 January 2010. Griffin, as part of his group American Foundation for Equal Rights, hired Ted Olson and David Boies in order to argue the case. The case targets the constitutionality of Prop 8.

Prop 8 has been used in order to attack the LGBT Civil Rights Movement in order to try and force issues such as marriage rights into the public political arena in order to make them easier to defeat; however, that effort backfired in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Iowa. In Vermont and New Hampshire, the attempts to put marriage rights to the voters was rejected, and in Iowa, the efforts to push through politicians in order to get the recent Iowa Supreme Court ruling overturned in the Iowa Constitution. Even if they are able to put together enough politicians to get it through, the measure would not hit the ballots until 2014 at best.

In Maine, the battle has resulted in a swelling of the coffers to support the Maine law passed this year. Maine marriage equality groups have raised more than twice the amount of money that their opponents have, and the amount of money that has come from within the state appears to equal more than the amount of money the anti-marriage equality groups have raised in total. The ballot measure is a voter veto and it requires that those who support the law vote ‘no’ and those who want to veto it vote ‘yes.’