List of Organizations and Individuals Filing Friend-of-the-Court Briefs in Support of Marriage Equality in California
Woo v. California (Briefs)
Brief Filed On Behalf Of the California NAACP, Authored By Jon Eisenberg
The brief examines the 1948 decision of the California Supreme Court decision in Perez v. Sharp, in which the Court struck down the State’s ban on interracial marriage, the first high court to do so. This brief shows that the equality and individual freedom arguments made by the same-sex couples here are precisely the same ones that prevailed against the race-based marriage ban. Likewise, the State’s arguments today to stop marriage for same-sex couples mirror exactly the dissent that opposed permitting different-race couples to marry.
Brief Filed On Behalf Of Civil Rights Organizations, Authored By O’Melveny & Myers LLP
The brief examines the serious harms of rules that discriminate against lesbians and gay men as a class, including the law limiting marriage to heterosexual couples only. Based on the most important equal protection principles in law, it explains why such rules require the most demanding constitutional review.
Brief Filed On Behalf Of Women’s Rights Organizations, Authored By Irell & Manella LLP
The brief shows that allowing or forbidding marriage based on the respective sexes of the spouses is blatantly unconstitutional sex discrimination. The brief further shows that sex discrimination has no place in California’s law governing marriage and families, as this state long ago abandoned the notion that spousal rights and duties are set by gender stereotypes.
The brief examines the history of legalized discrimination based on race and national origin in California’s marriage laws. Pointing out the insidious social, political and economic purposes behind the laws designed to prevent API immigrant men from marrying and creating families, the brief shows that denying same-sex couples marriage involves a similar dehumanizing violation of persons — and entire communities — based on prejudice.
The brief addresses the growing number of other countries that permit same-sex couples equally to marry, and explains why marriage is recognized as a fundamental human right under the constitutions of numerous countries with which we share common legal traditions.
The brief examines how, throughout our history, proposals to amend marriage to enhance equality and respect for individual liberty have been met with dire — and unfounded — predictions of disaster. Instead, events in Massachusetts and California show that the general public readily supports fair treatment of same-sex couples and their families as they see that family equality has only positive effects.
The brief highlights the core American value — burnished over generations of civil rights struggle by subordinated communities — that “separate” can never be “equal” when its sole purpose is to enforce class distinction. Although California’s domestic partnership laws provide critical protections to lesbian and gay couples and their families, this system is constitutionally lacking.
The brief explains that the constitutional principle of religious freedom supports the right of same-sex couples to marry. Because there are no legitimate secular reasons for the State to deny gay couples the profound, state-sanctioned rituals of marriage, the State’s licensing of heterosexual unions offends the core mandate of religious neutrality.
