California leads the nation in gay rights

This has happened not just because of high-profile gestures like San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's decision to issue the nation's first same-sex marriage licenses in 2004 but also because of a carefully crafted campaign to enact laws in the state Legislature and push for court decisions to support and enhance the new rights.

The changes have delighted some Californians and alarmed others.

Gay rights have been expanded in "little bites that people found hard to argue with at the time," said Matt McReynolds, staff attorney of the conservative Pacific Justice Institute. "And all of a sudden, we are at a point where gay rights trump religious rights."

Among the protections guaranteed in the state:

* Schools must protect gay teenagers from being taunted about their sexual orientation.

* Churches that receive state funds for nonreligious services such as day care can't refuse to provide those services to gays and lesbians -- even if the church's doctrine opposes homosexuality.

* And doctors must extend the same kind of fertility treatments to lesbians hoping to conceive that they do to heterosexual women.

Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California, a pro-gay rights group, disputes the allegation that gay rights threaten religious liberties. But he doesn't disagree with McReynolds when it comes to what his group and others have accomplished.

"In work, at home, and in all aspects . . . we've had such great advancement," he said.

'Evolving policy'

The earliest protections gays and lesbians enjoyed in California stemmed from court decisions. In 1914, when Long Beach police arrested 31 men accused of being part of a gay sex ring, most went free thanks to a California Supreme Court ruling that oral sex was not "a crime against nature," Yale law professor William N. Eskridge Jr. wrote in a legal brief.

In 1951, California's high court became the first in the country to rule that police could not shut down bars simply because gays frequented them. In 1961, it invalidated police spying in men's bathroom stalls and held in 1969 that public schools could not fire teachers for being gay.