By Pete Winn
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
May 19, 2008
(CNSNews.com) - The California Supreme Court's 4-3 decision last Thursday to create homosexual marriage was "a blockbuster" that sent a shockwave that will eventually reverberate in every state of the union, according to legal experts.
"One of the principal effects of the California decision will be to create large numbers of same-sex marriages that will not only reside in California, but will migrate across the country," said Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University Law School in Malibu, Calif.
Kmiec, one of the nation's foremost legal scholars, told Cybercast News Service that the California court "tossed out the window" the view of marriage that predates the founding of the United States, predates the U.S. Constitution, and that was assumed by those who drafted California's constitution, as well as those who created civil rights law itself.
"(The justices) decided that marriage as a fundamental right could not be limited to heterosexual couples," Kmiec said. "But they also decided, for the first time anywhere in the United States, that as a matter of state constitutional law, sexual orientation was what lawyers call 'a suspect classification' deserving of protection."
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