But there are other concerns in Santa Cruz and California as a result of the election. Early in the year a ballot initiative was prepared for November with the aim of modifying the constitution. Right after the prohibition against slavery and the assertion of equal protection, and right before the prohibition of discrimination, it proposed that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid in California. The wording of the initiative was in place before the California supreme court ruled that same sex marriage could happen. The counties modified the marriage licenses to add boxes for "spouse" to go alongside "husband" and "wife". Many such marriages happened in California, as well as in other states, before proposition 8 passed in November.
Almost immediately the county of San Francisco filed suit to stop the law. Within two weeks the county of Santa Cruz joined that suit. There are all sorts of arguments about why a county would want to do this, and many have been given openly, but one remains rather less talked about by the county officials.
If it is incumbent on the county officials to uphold the constitution, then in order to verify that the couple applying for a marriage is a man and a woman, the county basically has to ask them to drop their pants. (Recall that California dropped the requirement for a pre-marital blood test in 1995.) The county workers really don't want to have to do this. The counties do not want to be mandated to have a medical professional on hand in order to comply with this change to the constitution.
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We have criminal laws that require proof beyond a reasonable doubt. So proving that someone is a robber requires an elaborate and expensive process. Does that mean we should repeal the laws against robbery?
When one doesn't like a legal or political development, it's easy to come up with practical objections to it. That's what lots of folks are doing in California. Analogously, I may not be happy with Obama's election, but I'm willing to accept it, and sour grapes objections aren't terribly productive.
Personally, I find the issue of gay marriage very complicated. I've read extensively about the issue and still can't make up my mind about it. But to me, that's a very different issue than deciding whether an edict of the electorate is legitimate. I don't know of anything indicating what California voters recently did was illegitimate, and I'd have lots of objections to the courts or legislature in California deciding to override the result. That would amount to tyranny.
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