4 - California
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 November 2009
Summary
The state of California has been a leader in the legal recognition of relationship rights. In 1948, the California Supreme Court was the first court of last resort to strike down a state prohibition on interracial marriage (Perez v. Sharp), nineteen years before the U.S. Supreme Court nullified all such bans in Loving v. Virginia (1967). In 1982, San Francisco's city council, called the Board of Supervisors, passed the nation's first domestic partnership ordinance, authored by gay supervisor Harry Britt and vetoed by then Mayor Diane Feinstein. A 1990 voter initiative, also prompted by Britt, amended San Francisco's Administrative Code to recognize domestic partnerships. In 1996, under the leadership of gay supervisors Tom Ammiano and Leslie Katz, San Francisco enacted the nation's first equal benefits ordinance, requiring all private companies that contract with the city or county to offer the same benefits to the same-sex partners of their employees that they offer to the spouses of their employees. Most consequentially for lesbian and gay Californians, by 2003, the state legislature, at the behest of two lesbian lawmakers, Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg and Senator Carole Migden, granted domestic partners all state-conferred rights of marriage but for two (filing as married couples on state income tax returns, and having earned income considered as couples' community property). Thus, California first created full civil union benefits for same-sex couples by legislative action not prompted by court intervention.
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- America's Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage , pp. 73 - 101Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006