SAN FRANCISCO — The strategy was methodical. For more than a dozen years, lawyers for gay and lesbian causes had carefully selected their battlefields, identifying key states for constitutional challenges aimed at broadening their rights.
California was not to be one of them -- at least not any time soon -- and marriage was not supposed to be the central legal issue, at least not yet.
But over the last two weeks, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom dramatically accelerated the legal strategy.
Gay marriage had been debated in the abstract, allowing opponents to depict it as dangerous, he argued. What the legal strategy needed was real couples to place before the courts. The plan should be to marry first and then fight the legal battle.
More than 3,000 same-sex marriages later, that decision has opened the door to what could be a crucial legal test.
"In a way it feels like the dam broke," said Jon W. Davidson, senior counsel at Lambda Legal, the nation's largest lesbian and gay legal advocacy group.
San Francisco's actions were deliberately planned with the courts in mind, according to lawyers who were involved in the discussions.
Five couples -- whose stories would present the gay rights argument in the most sympathetic manner -- would be chosen as test cases. Leading national gay rights lawyers would be recruited to assist the city. The first marriages would be performed on a day when courts were closed, to ensure that opponents would not be able to block the move before the weddings were solemnized.
To win, gay rights advocates must still persuade the California Supreme Court to invalidate the state's family law, which limits marriage to "a man and a woman." That remains a high hurdle, legal experts believe.
On Friday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger delivered a stern letter to state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, directing him to take "immediate action" to stop same-sex marriages in San Francisco. Hallye Jordan, Lockyer's spokeswoman, said the attorney general planned to seek a judgment in the court case.
Largely, the gay-marriage proponents' legal strategy has been carried out without a hitch. Foes have gone to court four times in the last nine days seeking to block San Francisco's actions. Each time they have lost, and the long line of couples seeking to wed has continued to move forward.
