The ruling that would figure most prominently in the same-sex marriage decision did not involve gays. In 1948, the court became the first in the country to strike down a law that barred interracial marriage, ruling that people have a fundamental right to marry the person of their choice.
Legislative action on gay rights lagged far behind court decisions until the mid-1990s, when openly gay and lesbian officials began to win election to public office.
State Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), a Harvard Law School graduate who was the first openly gay lawmaker in the Capitol, recalled what it was like when she got to Sacramento in 1995 and introduced an unsuccessful bill to extend protections to gay students.
"It was a nightmare," she said. "The speeches that people would make. . . . No one held back at all, talking about the most outrageous things about gay people."
The second openly gay member of the Legislature, Sen. Carole Migden (D-San Francisco), who arrived two years after Kuehl, recalled an incident in which Sen. Peter Frusetta (R.-Tres Pinos) stood up in a hearing on Kuehl's student bill and talked about homosexuality in livestock.
"I've seen thousands and thousands of cattle," he said, "I've probably seen three . . . maybe four that had the hormone imbalance of being odd, unnatural. . . . [They would] shy away from bulls and take up with other heifers."
But the Legislature was changing, in part because it was becoming generally more liberal and in part because of the presence of more gays and lesbians.
Early on, the legislators made a decision to push for incremental changes rather than plunge straight into polarizing issues like same-sex marriage.
The first step came in 1999, when Kuehl finally got her education bill passed and signed by Gov. Gray Davis. During the same session, Migden won passage of the state's first domestic partner protection bill, which allowed gay partners to register but afforded them few additional rights.
The backlash began almost immediately. The next year, state Sen. Pete Knight championed Proposition 22, a state ballot initiative that defined marriage as only between a man and woman. (That law, which was approved by more than 60% of the voters, was invalidated this year by the California Supreme Court.)
But despite the passage of Proposition 22, proponents of gay rights were beginning to build momentum, both sides say.
