California Supremes Equate Domestic Partnerships With Marriage

The concept of marriage took another blow in California yesterday:

A country club must offer spousal discounts to same-sex domestic partners, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday, saying that a San Diego golf course discriminated against lesbians when relatives of married members played for free.

Deciding a case brought against Bernardo Heights Country Club in San Diego, the court said that allowing the families of married members to golf free while charging the partners of gay members constitutes "impermissible marital status discrimination."

Let me interrupt here for a second. What "marital status" does the lesbian couple have? None. Under California law you're either married or not, and a lesbian partnership = not. This ruling would effectively eliminate any kind of differential pricing or policies as it relates to unmarried persons, regardless of their relationship.

Never mind the fact that this club is a private enterprise which should have the right of free association under the Constitution, and with that right the privilege of deciding who may or may not be members. The Supremes don't like the idea that people who fit the traditional definition of marriage might get a break here or there that other partnerships don't get.

While businesses might have once claimed a legitimate business interest for maintaining different policies for married couples and gay members who cannot legally wed, such distinctions are no longer justified under a sweeping domestic-partner law that took effect Jan. 1, the court said.

"The Legislature has made it abundantly clear that an important goal of the Domestic Partner Act is to create substantial legal equality between domestic partners and spouses," Associate Justice Carlos Moreno wrote for a five-judge majority. "We interpret this language to mean that there shall be no discrimination in the treatment of registered domestic partners and spouses."

I disagree that the Legislature "made it abundantly clear" that their goal in this law was to equate domestic partnership with marriage, because if they had made that clear, the law would never have been passed. Even the highly liberal California State Legislature wouldn't have been able to pull that off in a state where 62% of the voters agreed to define marriage as being between one man and one woman.

And here's where it's going to get ugly:

Jon Davidson, legal director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, predicted that Monday's ruling would affect not just country clubs, but also mortgage lenders, insurance companies and other businesses that have separate policies or fees for married and unmarried customers.

"What the court said was that if a business in California provides benefits to married couples, it has to provide them equally to couples who register as domestic partners," Davidson said.

In other words, any business which provides any kind of special pricing or benefits that apply to married couples only will be subject to lawsuits thanks to this new precedent. If you're a small business that gives health benefits to the families of married couples, you will also be required to extend those benefits to domestic partnerships. If you're an insurance company which provides a family discount to married couples, you'll have to extend those discounts as well.

For all intents and purposes, marriage as a special legal entity unto its own ceased to exist in California despite the wishes of the voters.

Once again the libs have been able to get their agenda foisted on the public by the judiciary, an agenda which they could not pass legislatively. This is why the battle over judges is so very, very important.