Election night 15 years ago — Nov. 4 2008 — LGBTQ+ voters in California experienced a kind of political whiplash – euphoria and despair in one night as the states’ voters overwhelmingly chose to elect Barack Obama president, while simultaneously taking away the right of same-sex couples to marry.
Proposition 8 — eliminating a right to marriage that had been granted to gay and lesbian couples by the California Supreme Court less than six months earlier — passed with 52% of the vote.
Two years later, on Jan. 11, 2010, two same-sex couples, Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, and Jeffrey Zarrillo and Paul Katami had their day in federal court when they sued to overturn Prop. 8 after they were denied marriage licenses.
That trial, which included expert witnesses testifying under oath about anti-gay tropes, theories and political arguments, resulted in the measure being struck down. The federal judge presiding over that two-week trial deemed the case for banning same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional, a violation of the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The U.S. Supreme Court essentially upheld the lower court ruling in a 5-4 decision, June 26, 2013, by declining to take up the appeal.
For more than a decade after it ended, videotapes of the trial were kept under seal, until KQED successfully fought a long legal battle that resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court allowing them to be unsealed.
After the videotapes were released, KQED invited the four Prop. 8 plaintiffs – Kris Perry and Sandy Stier along with Paul Katami and Jeffrey Zarrillo – to view them for the first time and talk about the trial, its aftermath, and its significance today.
Those videos can be viewed here and here. (Or watch…
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