Actually David is quite wrong about public reaction to the two cases he cited, incorrectly as usual. In Virginia v. Loving only a few states still had anti-miscegenation laws on the books and Virginia was one of the few that actually enforced this law, under a Democratic run governor and legislature I might add, and in this particular case both the NCC, the Catholic Bishop's Conference and the Presbetyrian Council had supplied briefs in support of Mrs. Loving. But its always easier to call your opponents racists and fools then being aware of or thinking the actual circumstances.

In Brown v. Board of Education only a few states, mostly in the old Confederacy, still had de jure segregation though many still had it de facto. Again support for Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP and the Lawyer's Guild was national in nature and showed that many were extremely sympathetic to overturning Plessy v. Ferguson as a racist relic of the ante bellum South. Of course generally the result of getting rid of neighborhood school zones has become one of those unintended consequences that most are extremely uncomfortable in talking about.

Getting this into court was simply a tactic to bypass the will of the people. It's especially egregious in that on at least five other occassions this and previous definitions of marriage had passed muster. So like Hawaii, and unlike Massachusetts, California has already gathered enough signatures to place an amendment before the public in the next election creating a situation that will again be nasty and idiotic in that the civil union laws in California offered exactly the same status to gay couples that the new decision will have. Except that now gays are also considered a protected class akin to a racial minority. Le bon temps roulet!

Nanne-That brings up another question, only slightly O/T, do the Dutch allow jury nullification in civil or criminal cases?

And as usual instead of responding to the actual facts you simply resort to passive/aggressive ad hominem attacks. Instead of response better left to five-year olds simply either contradict my argument or perhaps admit that as usual you made another wildly overblown statement that didn't even pass the laugh test.

As to a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriages I thought it was a stupid idea that missed the whole point of letting the people of each individual state pass or turn down. Plus there must be an awful lot of tolerance breaking out since not one sex marriage bill has been passed through intiative or referendum. The only state that did until a bare majority of the Supreme Court in California was Massachusetts which refused and resorted to legal and extralegal manuevers to keep the measure from those horrible people voting on it. So this ground swell of tolerance is based on a legislature that refused to allow a vote and a court that simply ignored the vote.

In other words be tolerant or else!

Drought, wild fires, earthquakes and bugs are bad enough. But we, in California, are on the wrong coast for tornadoes, not close enough to Oklahoma for cyclones and too far north of the Equator for hurricanes. Though we do have a lot of former Okies and lots of trailer parks but still know cyclones.