Legal Documents
A complete list of legal documents currently available on our website.
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.
This brief uses established judicial precedent that separate is never equal to argue against the parallel institutions that govern different-sex and same-sex relationships in California.
The brief examines the history of legalized discrimination based on race and national origin in California’s marriage laws.
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 only offends the core mandate of religious neutrality.
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.
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 addresses the growing number of other countries that have legalized marriage for same-sex couples, and explains why marriage is recognized as a fundamental human right under the constitutions of numerous countries with which we share common legal traditions.
This brief argues that the equality and individual freedom arguments made against same-sex marriage are precisely the same ones that prevailed in the race-based marriage ban instituted in California until 1948, when the state Supreme Court struck it down in Perez v. Sharp.