A landmark federal trial that could lead to a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry ended Wednesday with competing views about the traditional role of marriage and whether the battle represented the latest frontier of the nation’s civil rights struggle.
Two stalwarts of Washington’s conservative legal community argued before Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker, but this time on opposite sides.
Walker is being asked to decide whether California voters violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of due process and equal protection when they passed a referendum in November 2008 to amend the state constitution, defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
Washington lawyer Charles J. Cooper, arguing on behalf of Proposition 8 backers, told Walker that it is “crucial to the public interest” to limit marriage to opposite-sex couples. It is “fundamental to the very existence and survival of the human race” that society promote marriage to ensure that procreative relations are in “enduring, stable unions,” with a goal that children be raised by both parents.