Virtually as soon as California’s Supreme Court announced it would legally recognize same-sex marriages starting June 17, wedding businesses started getting calls from thousands of gays and lesbians planning their nuptials. A vast array of businesses has begun wooing the couples ”” Macy’s, for example, recently took out a huge ad in several newspapers celebrating the ruling and promoting its wedding registry.
Rena Puebla and her business partner, Ellie Genuardi, were ahead of the curve. A few years ago, the pair formed Renellie, a company that offers the traditional figurines that top wedding cakes to a not-so traditional clientele. Renellie’s smiling hand-painted couples, like those they represent, are interracial or same sex. Or both.
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This elf is confused
NPR…consider the source. It is helpful to know the current market prices for losing your soul here in California. I am waiting for The Guvenator to legalize prostitution and drugs for additional tax revenue now that gambling and SSM is out of the way and cash flowing nicely.
Intercessor
NO mention of law firms salivating at dealing with the divorces and family law problems that well result from this mess?
Dave B. the l;aw firms are already dealing with it. Domestic partnerships were raised to the functional equivalent of marriage at the state level/ So, e.g., there is a divorce equivalent for domestic partnerships. That may surprise a few folks.
I think the folk who hope to make a fortune by providing services to same sex couples are likely to be disappointed. We also had a flurry of newspaper articles saying the same thing when civil unions were first allowed in New Zealand. The statistics actually say it all. In the two years since civil unions were permitted there have been 713 civil unions of which 80% were between same-sex couples. In the same time there were 43,100 marriages. Civil unions represented therefore 1.6% of the total if you include heterosexual couples, or 1.3% if you only count same sex couples.
My understanding is that this ratio is typical of same-sex unions in other parts of the world, and of course, it should be an historic high given that civil unions were not allowed before this and so there will be a historic backlog to perform.
So I don’t think anyone has become rich doing civil unions here!
It took a bit of looking (because while the birth and death numbers seem to be well publicized in California they don’t seem to want to publish their marriage ones) but in round terms it appears that there are about 230,000 marriages in California in any one year — so on the basis of c1.3% being same-sex I would expect about 3,000 same-sex unions. Now California is known to have a higher proportion of gay people in the community, and again there is a backlog issue, and I don’t know what the situation is about people from other states that don’t allow civil unions, but I would be extremely surprised if it gets to 5,000 especially after the first year.
So perhaps there are “thousands” calling — but if so it is a few thousand not tens of thousands let alone hundreds of thousands.