HRC Back Story

On Friday, Equality California, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, ACLU and Lambda Legal took legal action against the California ballot initiative to overturn marriage equality. Check out this joint press release:

Three California voters and four organizations dedicated to protecting the civil rights o f gay and lesbian people filed a lawsuit in the California Supreme Court today about an initiative that seeks to change the California Constitution to bar gay and lesbian couples from marriage. That initiative is currently slated to appear on the November ballot. The lawsuit argues that the rules for revising the California Constitution were not properly followed.

“We filed this lawsuit because the sponsors of the initiative haven’t followed the very Constitution they’re trying to change,” said Stephen V. Bomse of Heller Ehrman LLP, a lawyer in the suit. “For good reason, there’s a strict process for making revisions to our Constitution, and it’s more involved than simply collecting petition signatures. That process is in place to safeguard our basic form of government, especially the most basic principle of equal protection of the laws. Therefore we are filing this suit today to ask the California Supreme Court to enforce those rules and to require the proponents to follow the correct procedure if they wish to make this far reaching change to our state Constitution.”

The lawsuit was filed in the California Supreme Court on Friday, June 20, 2008. It is expected to be heard this summer.