Lambda Legal has posted the brief filed by the City of San Francisco defending its granting of marriage licenses to same-sex couples (right-wing groups are asking a state court to issue an injunction to stop these marriages and invalidate those performed to date). The city's defense of its actions begins:
For centuries, indeed millennia, homosexual persons have been subjected to extreme and humiliating forms of discrimination in all aspects of their lives. The opprobrium directed against gay men and lesbians is a hatred that is based specifically and directly on the identity and gender of the persons they love. At the root of discrimination against homosexuals has always been the distinction between their intimate and personal relationships and the relationships of heterosexuals, which have over the same millennia been celebrated, recognized and supported in thousands of different ways.
As of now, state court judges have turned down the request to halt these marriages, but will hear further arguments next month.
The more weddings that are solemnized in San Francisco and later
this year in Massachusetts, the more obvious it will become that
the religious right, in demanding that these unions be nullified,
is anything but "pro marriage."