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The California Assembly, voting along party lines, narrowly passed a bill to legalize gay marriage by defining marriage as a union between 'two persons' rather than a man and a woman.
This contravenes the intentions of the people of California who voted overwhelmingly (61% of the vote) in 2000 that defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
What is especially notable here is that the passage of the bill was secured through a bit of skulduggery:
Assemblyman Leno, among six openly gay lawmakers in Sacramento, revived the bill through a controversial parliamentary maneuver known as "gut and amend" after the bill failed to pass the Assembly in June.
Mr. Leno essentially inserted the marriage bill's contents into another bill regarding marine fisheries that was pending in the Senate and stripped of its content. When the bill passed the Senate, Mr. Leno and his allies then persuaded three Democratic members of the Assembly who had abstained in June to vote for the new version.
Governor Schwarzenegger should veto this bill, outrageously named the "Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act" immediately.
[We pillory the New York Times here often but on this issue its coverage was significantly more balanced than the WaPo's which failed to mention the results of Proposition 22 as well as the 'gut and amend' procedure.]
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