Lawmakers tackle gay-marriage ban

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Forty-three Democratic legislators, including leaders of the California Senate and Assembly, filed a brief Monday urging that the state Supreme Court void Proposition 8.

Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata and incoming Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg signed the friend of the court brief. No Republican legislator signed the petition, although Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, denounced the anti-gay-marriage measure in a television appearance over the weekend.

With almost 11 million ballots tallied, Proposition 8 had 52.3 percent of the vote to 47.7 percent. Although many ballots remain to be counted, the 500,000-vote spread is viewed as insurmountable.

“The citizens of California rely on the Legislature and the courts to safeguard against unlawful discrimination by temporary, and often short-lived, majorities,” the legislators said in the document, written by attorneys at the firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

Attorney General Jerry Brown’s office would be obligated to defend the initiative. But Frank Schubert, manager of the Proposition 8 campaign, said that if the state Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, backers of the initiative would seek to intervene to defend it.

In their brief, lawmakers described the 500,000-vote margin as a “bare majority” and said it was “compromising the enduring constitutional promise of equal protection under the law.”

Schubert, the chief strategist for Proposition 8, said the best way to overturn the measure would be to place an initiative on the ballot that would repeal it.