The tea leaf reading cannot be encouraging to those wanting to see the California Supreme Court overturn the voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage. Any such decision would almost certainly require the vote of Justice Joyce Kennard, one of the justices in the majority 4-3 ruling last year that legalized gay and lesbian marriages (that led to Proposition 8 being placed on the ballot last fall). But during this morning's hearing, Kennard sounded skeptical. At one point she said that opponents of the measure would have the court choose between "two rights ... the inalienable right to marry and the right of the people to change the constitution as they see fit. And what I'm picking up from the oral argument in this case is this court should willy-nilly disregard the will of the people." A ruling is expected within 90 days. Here's a story from the SF Chronicle and here's some background, also from the Chronicle.

Kennard, the court's senior justice in her 20th year of service and one of its strongest supporters of same-sex couples' rights, seemed to signal shortly after Prop. 8 passed that she was inclined to uphold it. When the court voted to take up the lawsuits challenging Prop. 8 two weeks after the election, Kennard cast the lone dissenting vote. She said the only issue that the court needed to review was whether the 18,000 same-sex marriages conducted before the election were valid.

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if history is any indication, those seeking to overturn the ballot measure are swimming upstream. Because Prop. 8 amended the state Constitution, opponents can no longer rely on that document's guarantees of equal treatment and personal liberty to grant gays and lesbians the right to marry. Instead, advocates of same-sex marriage argue that Prop. 8, by withdrawing fundamental rights the court had sought to protect, assaulted the state Constitution itself.