No trend toward gay marriage foreseen

WASHINGTON — As the nation's most populous state, California often sets in motion social and political trends that sweep across the country. But legal experts on both sides of the fight over same-sex marriage say that the California Supreme Court's ruling giving gays and lesbians a right to marry is not likely to have a ripple effect. For more than a decade, conservative activists have erected a series of legal barriers to prevent one state's move toward recognizing gay marriages from setting in motion a national wave. In 1996 they won passage of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which said that same-sex marriages performed in states that allow them do not have to be honored by the federal government or other states. And they won laws in 42 states to limit marriage to a man and a woman. In 27 of them, these are constitutional amendments that cannot be overridden by judges or lawmakers.

"While the California ruling is very significant, a lot of states have already taken action on this," said Christine Nelson, an analyst who tracks the issue for the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver. She said these states have made it as difficult as possible for judges to give legal recognition to marriages between two men or two women.

For that reason, many experts foresee the move toward same-sex marriage in the United States as taking place over a generation -- if at all -- resulting not from quick and decisive legal victories but from slowly changing attitudes that eventually carry over to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Through most of its history, the Supreme Court has been cautious in interfering with marriage and family laws, usually ruling to strike down laws only after they came to be seen as archaic.

In 1967, the court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren threw out the laws against interracial marriage in the case of Loving vs. Virginia. (Mildred Jeter Loving, who had challenged Virginia's law along with her husband, Richard, died this month.)

A gradual process

But as USC law professor David Cruz points out, the Warren court waited for more than a decade to strike down these laws after it had declared racial segregation to be "inherently unequal" and a violation of the Constitution. "The court ducked the issue after Brown v. Board of Education," Cruz said. Shortly after that landmark 1954 civil rights ruling, it turned away appeals from Alabama and Virginia that challenged the laws against interracial marriage. At that time, 29 states had laws on the books against marriage between whites and blacks.